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Should God’s
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Fideism vs WCG.htm
What Books Should Be In the Bible?
Should Christians Eat Unclean Meat?
What is the canon of Scripture? Are there any books missing from the Bible as we have it today? On another subject, should Christians eat biblically unclean meat, such as from pigs? Should Christians still obey the Old Testament commands on this subject? Let’s examine both of these issues below.
The
canon of Scripture concerns what books are included and excluded from
Scripture. Many centuries ago, both Jews and Christians (of whatever
kind) had to make decisions about what religious books they thought were
inspired by God, and which ones weren't. What criteria did they use for
making their decisions?
The
basic principle at work here appears in Deut. 18:20-22 and Deut.
13:1-5. In these passages, a prophet who said to worship other gods, or
whose predictions didn't come to pass, should be ignored, even even
executed. So we should only believe a (purported) revelation from God if
it agrees with prior revelations and (if applicable) successfully predicts the
future. So then, is this true for the apocrypha and other so-called
"missing books"?
The
Catholic Church accepted certain apocryphal books as Scripture or
"deuterocanonical." They didn't fully formally accept them as
binding in authority until the Council of Trent in the 16th century, which was
basically a gathering that responded against the Protestant Reformation's
arguments and charges against Catholicism. By contrast, the Protestant
canon for the Old Testament is the same as the Jews'. There are
many, many other apocryphal books which never made it into the canon, however,
by any (major) church's definition.
In
Catholic history, the translator of much or all the Latin Vulgate Bible,
Jerome, opposed the apocrypha's inclusion in Scripture, but Augustine, the
great theologian and author of such famous works as "Confessions" and
"City of God," wanted them included. The ancient Council
of Carthage in 397 A.D. accepted them as it followed the latter's lead.
True, the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, had
had many copies that included them. But there isn't a case in the New
Testament of any author citing them at all, let alone quoting them as
having authority, such as by using a formula like, "It is written."
One
way that exposes the problems with the apocrypha is their absurd stories and/or
historical errors and contradictions. The literary quality simply isn't
very good, and they fail what (say) Josh McDowell might call the "internal
evidence" test. (You may find it worth tracking down his book
"Evidence That Demands a Verdict" for further research in
the area of Christian apologetics, or his "More Than a
Carpenter.") For example, Tobit, which Catholics do
accept, describes a story in which a Jewish father, blinded by bird's dung
falling into his eyes, sends out his son to collect a debt. He gets a
heart, liver, and gall of a fish on his journey. He runs into a widow who have
married seven times, but had never consummated any of these marriages with her
husbands because an evil spirit had killed each husband on their respective
wedding nights. Tobias (the son) marries this widow, and by burning
two of the the fish parts, drives off the evil spirit called
Asmodeus. He then uses the gall from that fish to cure his father's
blindness. If one is familiar with the canonical Old Testament books, one
should then see how absurd this story's setting and miracles are by
comparison. They lack what C.S. Lewis might call "fitness," or
overall appropriateness. It's more superstitious than Godly.
There
is also a historical error in Tobit concerning the age of the father, who would
have to be well over 200 years old to have experienced personally the
deportation of Israel to Nineveh by the Assyrians, but he's only 102 years
old when he dies.
The
book of Judith, which Catholics also accept, contains so many absurdities that
even a Catholic Bible, the Jerusalem Bible, admitted: "The book of
Judith in particular shows a bland indifference to history and geography."
The
traditional Christian scholar Bruce Metzger, in "The Canon of the New
Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance," give three
basic guidelines that the early Christians used for determining their own
canon: (1) agreement with the "rule of faith," or general
traditional Christian teaching, (2) general, long-standing usage among many
congregations, and (3) apostolic authorship, which inevitably led to the
exclusion of post-100 A.D writings. Because the Catholic Church wasn't
tightly controlled from the top down in its early centuries, before the time of
Constantine especially, it wasn't as if (say) a given Pope or even church council
just decreed what the canon was. There was a weight of tradition and
usage that flowed also from the bottom-up as well. These are the
reasons why the exclusion of (say) "The Gospel of Thomas," "The
Gospel of Peter," "The Shepherd of Hermas," etc. wasn't some
arbitrary or random process.
J.N.D.
Anderson noted the difference in "feel" between the canonical gospels
and the later apocryphal ones, a difference that only becomes obvious upon
becoming familiar with both by personal reading of them: "Who can
read these stories [about the resurrection in the canonical Gospels] and really
think they're legend? They are far too dignified and restrained; they are
far too true to life and psychology. The difference between them and the
sort of stories you find in the apocryphal gospels of but two or three
centuries later is difference between heaven and earth."
The
Christian scholar F.F. Bruce commented about the ancient Gnostic
movement's writings' general inferiority by comparison with the canonical
ones: "The gnostic schools lost because they deserved to lose.
A comparison of the New Testament writings with the contents of The Nag
Hammadi Library [a collection of ancient Gnostic handwritten books
discovered in 1945 in Egypt] should be instructive, once the novelty of the
latter is not allowed to weight in its favour against the familiarity of the
former." Similarly, we find M.R. James saying about their potential
canonicity: "There is no question of any one's having excluded them
from the New Testament: They have done that for themselves."
K. Aland similarly proclaimed: "It cannot be said of a single
writing preserved to us from the early period of the church outside the New
Testament that it could be properly added today to the Canon." After
all, as he notes, the canon was largely 5/6ths complete in describing
its contents by around 200 A.D. Only places for a while and only in
certain general or particular parts of the church were (say) Hebrews, II
Peter, and Revelation doubted before being accepted.
So
the canon is a broad subject, for it includes a discussion of books that (say)
Catholics accept but Protestants and Jews reject, as well as many, many other
apocryphal writings that orthodox Christians and Jews all reject as having
binding authority.
Now,
let’s turn to the issue of whether Christians should avoid eating unclean
meat. The Bible, in Leviticus 11 and
Deuteronomy 14, describes the basic rules that specify which foods are clean
and unclean. The most important principle is mentioned in Leviticus
11:3: "Whatever divides a hoof, thus making split hoofs, and chews
the cud, among the animals, that you may eat." Based on this
principle, a person may eat beef, lamb, mutton, and meat from goats, but may
not eat pork or rabbit meat. As for for sea food, the basic guiding
principle is in verse 9: "These you may eat, whatever is in the
water: all that have fins and scales, those in the water, in the seas or
in the rivers, you may eat." Hence, shell fish, sharks, and cat fish
are prohibited, but salmon, mackerel, and carp are allowed. As for birds,
the prohibited species are mainly birds of prey (verses 13-19). Since
doves and pigeons could be sacrificed to God (Leviticus 1:14) and God fed
Israel with quails in the wilderness (Numbers 11:31-32), we know in principle
(based on their physical anatomy and/or habits of behavior) that turkeys,
chickens, and ducks can be eaten. We shouldn't think that these rules
were only for the Jews since when Jesus returns, those who are eating mice and
pigs will be punished (Isaiah 66:16-17):
“For the Lord will execute
judgment by fire and by His sword on all flesh, and those slain by the Lord
will be many. Those who sanctify and
purify themselves to go to the gardens, following one in the center, who eat
swine's flesh, detestable things, and mice, shall come to an end altogether,'
declares the Lord.” Above all, we know
from elsewhere in the New Testament that not all the animals are now clean (Rev.
18:2): "And she [Babylon] has become
a . . . prison of every unclean and hateful bird." Therefore, good reasons exist to believe the
law against eating clean and unclean meat is still binding today on Christians.
Now, are the Old Testament
laws concerning clean and unclean meat still binding on Christians? It is said that all meat was made clean by
Peter's vision in Acts 10, since one can't say the gentiles are literally clean
without the animals in the vision having been made clean as well. However, this conclusion was not what Peter
drew from his vision--all he mentioned when interpreting it for us was it
concerned the gentiles being clean (v. 10):
"You yourselves know how unlawful it is for a man who is a Jew to
associate with a foreigner or to visit him; and yet God has shown me that I
should not call any man unholy [literally, 'common'] or unclean." Why should we read more into it? After all, God may have ordered Peter to
"Arise . . . kill and eat!," but it is hazardous to take
literally anything associated with a vision itself. (Furthermore, God ordered Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, but that
was a command He did not actually wish to be fully obeyed).
Now, it will be objected that didn't
Christ say that (Mark 7:18-19) "whatever goes into the man from outside
cannot defile him; because it does not go into his heart, but into his stomach,
and is eliminated"? Here, the
context is crucial, and by looking at the parallel account in Matt. 15,
we can know more clearly what is going on.
First of all, the challenge to Jesus concerned eating food with unwashed
hands, an aspect of the oral law that was out of the traditions of men. It was not a dispute over the matter of
clean and unclean food, which is made clear in Matt. 15:20: "These [spiritual sins] are the things
which defile the man; but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile the
man." One has to read into the
discussion that Christ was nullifying the laws concerning clean and unclean
meat. Evidently Peter himself, who
listened and even participated in this discussion, did not interpret it in this
manner, because even long after the crucifixion he had never eaten unclean or
common meat (Acts 10: 14). True, in the
Westcott-Hort/critical text that underlies most modern Bible translations we
get (by changing a single letter of a single word in the Greek) the editorial
comment "(Thus He declared all foods clean)" in Mark 7:19. However, this text type is defective, and
the Received Text that underlies the KJV and NKJV is superior--but proving that
point is way beyond the purpose of this email.
Suffice it to say, it's unwise to base a significant doctrine on whether
one Greek word contains an omicron or an omega in it. Furthermore, let's not take Christ's use of the word "whatever"
too broadly--it may have meant out of all the things the Jews, and in
particular the Pharisees normally ate, not out of all possible animals that can
be eaten by anybody. So, by comparing
Mark 7 with the parallel account in Matt. 15, and by avoiding reading more into
it than is already there, Christ did not mean to say the laws against clean and
unclean meat were abolished, but that the Pharisees' complaint about Christ's
disciples not washing their hands before eating was invalid.
Eric
Snow
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