Basics 34 Canonicity:

OT Period, NT Period, Apostolic Authority, Antiquity, Orthodoxy, Disputed Books, Catholicity, Traditional Use, Inspiration, Practical Issues

I hope this email finds you doing well.

This lesson in the Basics is about Canonicity. It's the result of a question asked much earlier in the series. The question basically was,

"How were the books of the Bible selected/compiled?"

Because this is such a common question among believers and challenge from unbelievers, even to the point of being misconstrued in Dan Brown's The Davinci Code, it is a question that should be answered intelligibly.

I didn't say it would be easy. It's complicated talking about something that happened in the early centuries of the church. It's more complicated than one might think because they weren't thinking about setting up criteria to evaluate canonicity like we are. They lived so close to these things it was not a question.

At the same time, the question is fairly easily answered since the main criteria are apparent by looking back through their lens. I hope to give you some real information and not stuff you might hear on PBS or the History Channel, which is the typical nonsense.

See attached outline.

Grace to you,
Jeremy

Attached outline:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oe3XiJHZomUw7ckeKjrEIYkf3NUMjncy/view?usp=share_link