What Books Should Be in the Bible? (Apologetics Part 13)

How do we know what is a message from God and what isn’t? We know by miracles, which authenticate that something is really from God. There were three unique time periods when many miracles took place, and these were the times that major parts of the Bible were being written: the time of Moses, the time of the prophets, and the time of Jesus and the apostles. There is good historical evidence that the apostles did miracles to back up their claims, so the New Testament should include the books that the apostles said were from God. The early church did the historical research necessary to conclude that the 27 books in the New Testament were really messages from God and that books like the so-called "Gospel of Thomas" were not. Early church councils like the Council of Nicaea didn’t make the Bible; they merely verified which books were really affirmed by the apostles. An apostle’s affirmation of a book was more important than its authorship, because not all books (Mark, Luke, Hebrews) were written by an apostle. For the Old Testament, we can look at the development of the Hebrew canon and what Jesus and the apostles affirmed to determine what books should be in the Old Testament. There is disagreement among Christians about the “apocryphal” or “deuterocanonical” books. Catholic and Orthodox Christians accept some of them while Protestants reject all of them. Even though we disagree on this, if God exists and Jesus is God, then Christianity is true, even if we’ve made minor mistakes about which books should be included in the Bible.

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Contents:
0:00 Introduction: Which Books in the Bible?
2:35 Miracles Authenticate Messages from God
10:15 Arguing for Books to Be in the Bible
11:49 An Argument for the New Testament Books
22:25 Was the New Testament Made by Church Councils?
33:48 Why Were These 27 Books Chosen?
40:08 Pseudepigrapha: Fake Books Claiming to Be from God
52:32 What Books Belong in the Old Testament?
58:47 What Did Jesus and the Apostles Say about the Old Testament?
1:01:57 What about the Apocryphal Books?
1:04:11 Top Ten Reasons Protestants Reject the Apocryphal Books
1:19:38 What If We’re Wrong about Which Books Belong in the Bible?
1:25:52 Class Logistics