From Christ to Scripture: A Coherent Framework

A few years ago, I published an essay critical of Michael J. Kruger’s book, Canon Revisited — Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books. I noted there that “while Kruger’s book has the superficial appearance of piety, which many readers will undoubtedly find appealing, it is an epistemological non-starter. Among the book’s many shortcomings…the book engages in blatant and unashamed circular reasoning – upon which the book’s central thesis is predicated.” This article ended up being quoted by Roman Catholic apologist Trent Horn in his debate with Protestant theologian Gavin Ortlund, in support of his contention that Protestants lack an epistemologically sound justification of canon. Since I did not at that time offer an alternative epistemological framework for justifying the Biblical canon, I have often been asked what is the alternative from a Protestant point-of-view. The best case that I have come across for the Biblical canon, from a Protestant and evidentialist perspective, is to be found in Christ and the Bible, by John Wenham, and I would refer interested readers to this book for a much more thorough treatment of this subject. Here, I will offer a summary of the basic framework. The following argument will assume as background (as I have argued at length elsewhere) that the gospels give a substantially accurate representation of Jesus’ teaching, that Jesus rose from the dead, that he is who he claimed to be, and that Paul was specially commissioned by Jesus himself to the office of apostle on the road to Damascus. If you do not already grant these background premises, then you will not find what follows convincing, and I would suggest instead beginning with some of my essays which lay out this case in some detail, such as the following:

• The Resurrection of Jesus: The Evidential Contribution of Luke-Acts
• The Evidential Value of John’s Gospel to the Case for Christianity
• Early Church Persecution, and its Evidential Value
• The Conversion of Saul of Tarsus, and its Evidential Value
• Liar, Lunatic, or Lord? Reviving C.S. Lewis’ Dilemma

I will also not be addressing the subject of authorship of the disputed New Testament books. Here, for the purposes of argument, I will be taking as given that the traditional authorship ascribed to the books of the New Testament is correct. See, for example, my essay on the authorship of the Pastoral epistles if you are interested in how I develop this case. For the record, I think a very strong case for traditional authorship can be offered in defense of the gospels & Acts, together with the thirteen letters of Paul, as well as 1 John (which is evidently written by the same author as the composer of the fourth gospel). For the other New Testament books, I think a sufficient case, of varying degrees of strength, can be made, largely from patristic attributions (though they lack the internal evidences present for the gospels, Acts, and Pauline epistles).

If you do grant these foundational premises, this article will seek to show how these background facts connect to the case for the canonicity, authority, and inerrancy of the Biblical books.

The Justification of the Old Testament

Jesus consistently treats the Old Testament stories as genuine history. He refers to Abel (Lk. 11:51), Noah (Mt. 24:37–39; Lk. 17:26–27), Abraham (Jn. 8:56), and the establishment of circumcision (Jn. 7:22; cf. Gn. 17:10–12; Lv. 12:3). He speaks of Sodom and Gomorrah (Mt. 10:15; 11:23–24; Lk. 10:12), Lot (Lk. 17:28–32), Isaac and Jacob (Mt. 8:11; Lk. 13:28), the manna in the wilderness (Jn. 6:31, 49, 58), and the bronze serpent (Jn. 3:14). He recalls David eating the consecrated bread (Mt. 12:3–4; Mk. 2:25–26; Lk. 6:3–4) and also credits him as the author of psalms (Mt. 22:43; Mk. 12:36; Lk. 20:42). Solomon is mentioned as well (Mt. 6:29; 12:42; Lk. 11:31; 12:27), along with Elijah (Lk. 4:25–26), Elisha (Lk. 4:27), Jonah (Mt. 12:39–41; Lk. 11:29–30, 32), and Zechariah (Lk. 11:51). That last reference shows his awareness of the whole flow of history, from “the foundation of the world” right up to his own generation.

Moses, as the lawgiver, is cited often (Mt. 8:4; 19:8; Mk. 1:44; 7:10; 10:5; 12:26; Lk. 5:14; 20:37; Jn. 5:46; 7:19). Jesus also frequently recalls how the prophets suffered (Mt. 5:12; 13:57; 21:34–36; 23:29–37; Mk. 6:4 [cf. Lk. 4:24; Jn. 4:44]; 12:2–5; Lk. 6:23; 11:47–51; 13:34; 20:10–12) and notes the popularity of false prophets (Lk. 6:26). He even gives his assent to the creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2 (Mt. 19:4–5; Mk. 10:6–8).

Although these references come from scattered parts of the Old Testament and some periods are touched more fully than others, the overall picture is clear — Jesus knew the Old Testament well and treated every part of it as history.

While in theory one might argue that Jesus could have used Old Testament stories merely as illustrative parables without affirming their historicity, the way Jesus actually employs them renders this quite improbable. While some references could conceivably be read non-literally without altering their force, many of his sayings lose their meaning if the events did not truly occur. Wenham explains [1],

There are a dozen other passages where an Old Testament story might arguably be taken in a non-literal sense, but as the matter is pursued the impression gains in strength that our Lord understood the Bible stories in a natural way and that his teaching should be taken quite straightforwardly. The impression is strongly reinforced when we come to a further collection of passages where the historical truth of the saying seems to be essential to its validity.

 

To take but one example, Jesus says, “The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here,” (Mt 12:41). To deny the historicity of the events spoken of in the book of Jonah deprive this saying of its force. Moreover, in the very next verse, Jesus declares that “The queen of the South will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and behold, something greater than Solomon is here,” (Mt 12:42). The book of 1 Kings, from which this narrative derives, can hardly be considered allegorical.

Jesus consistently treated the Old Testament as the highest authority in all disputes, affirming its letter and spirit. Jesus acknowledged the diligence with which the scribes and Pharisees studied the Scriptures yet rebuked them for missing its deeper principles. For example, he says, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness,” (Mt 23:23). In other words, the scribes were so concerned about nit-picky matters of their interpretation of the law of Moses, leading them to measure out light-weight herbs with which to tithe, that they had missed the weightier matters of the law.

When Jesus is tempted in the wilderness, he thrice replied to the devil, saying, “It is written,” (Mt 4:4ff; Lk 4:4ff). Jesus, without question, understood “It is written” to be tantamount to “God has said.” The perfect tense (γέγραπται) stresses a completed action with ongoing effect — literally, “it has been written and remains in force,” or “It stands written.” Along similar lines, Jesus asks with a flair of sarcasm, “Have you not read…?” (Mt 12:3; 19:4; 21:16; 22:31; Mk 2:25; 12:10, 26; Lk 6:3). This is essentially equivalent to “Do you not know that God has said?” Moreover, in Luke 24:27, we read, “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” There are many other texts as well in which Jesus makes appeal to predictive prophecies of the Hebrew Bible. For example, consider the following texts:

• Luke 4:21 – “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
• Matthew 11:10 (cf. Luke 7:27; Mal. 3:1) – “Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way before you.”
• Mark 9:12–13 – “Elijah does come first to restore all things. And how is it written of the Son of Man that he should suffer many things and be treated with contempt? But I tell you that Elijah has come, and they did to him whatever they pleased, as it is written of him.”
• Luke 18:31–33 – “See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished. For he will be delivered over to the Gentiles and will be mocked and shamefully treated and spit upon. And after flogging him, they will kill him, and on the third day he will rise.”
• Luke 21:22 – “For these are days of vengeance, to fulfill all that is written.”
• Matthew 26:24 (cf. Mark 14:21) – “The Son of Man goes as it is written of him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been better for that man if he had not been born.”
• Luke 22:37 (cf. Isa. 53:12) – “For I tell you that this Scripture must be fulfilled in me: ‘And he was numbered with the transgressors.’ For what is written about me has its fulfillment.”
• Matthew 26:31 (cf. Mark 14:27; Zech. 13:7) – “You will all fall away because of me this night. For it is written, ‘I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered.’”
• Matthew 26:53–56 (cf. Mark 14:49) – “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that it must be so? … But all this has taken place that the Scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled.”
• Luke 24:25–27 – “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.
• Luke 24:44–47 – “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”
• John 5:39, 46–47 – “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me. … For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?”
• John 13:18 (cf. Ps. 41:9) – “I am not speaking of all of you; I know whom I have chosen. But the Scripture will be fulfilled, ‘He who ate my bread has lifted his heel against me.’”
• John 15:25 (cf. Ps. 35:19; 69:4) – “But the word that is written in their Law must be fulfilled: ‘They hated me without a cause.’”
• John 17:12 – “While I was with them, I kept them in your name, which you have given me. I have guarded them, and not one of them has been lost except the son of destruction, that the Scripture might be fulfilled.”

Clearly, then, Jesus considered the Hebrew Scriptures to carry divine authority. Wenham concludes [2],

A doctrine of verbal inspiration plainly needs careful statement, but that some sort of verbal inspiration is taught by Christ is clear, seeing that it is to the writings rather than to the writers that he ascribes authority. Writings are made up of words, therefore there must be some form of word-inspiration. Scripture is Scripture to Christ because it has (in a way which other writing has not) God as its primary author.

 

Moreover, Jesus’ mind was evidently saturated with the Scriptures, as they bleed out of many of his teachings and sayings. Consider the following sample:

• Mark 4:29 — “But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.” — echoes Joel 3:13.
• Mark 8:18 — “Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear? And do you not remember?” — echoes Jeremiah 5:21.
• Mark 9:48 — “ ‘where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.’ ” — from Isaiah 66:24.
• Matthew 5:5 — “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” — drawn from Psalm 37:11.
• Matthew 5:8 — “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” — drawn from Psalm 73:1.
• Matthew 7:23 — “And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’” — from Psalm 6:8 (cf. Luke 13:27).
• Matthew 10:21 (cf. Mt. 10:35; Mk. 13:12; Lk. 12:53) — “Brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death.” — echoes Micah 7:6
• Matthew 18:16 — “But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses.” — from Deuteronomy 19:15.
• Matthew 21:33 (cf. Mk. 12:1; Lk. 20:9) — “Hear another parable. There was a master of a house who planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a winepress in it and built a tower and leased it to tenants, and went into another country.” — recalls Isaiah 5.
• Luke 19:44 — “And tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.” — echoes Psalm 137.

Wenham observes [3],

The total impression that these and many other allusions in the Gospels give is that the mind of Christ is saturated with the Old Testament and that, as he speaks, there flows out perfectly naturally a complete range of uses varying from direct verbal quotation to an unconscious utilization of scraps of Old Testament phraseology. There is no trace of an artificial quotation of Scripture as a matter of pious habit, but his mind is so steeped in both the words and principles of Scripture that quotation and allusion spring to his lips naturally and appositely in all sorts of different circumstances.

 

But which books were included in the Old Testament canon to which Jesus gave his stamp of approval? After his resurrection, Jesus said to the disciples, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled,” (Lk 24:44). There is no reason to doubt that this refers to the books present in our current Old Testament. Jesus, moreover, quotes as authoritative not only the Law, Prophets, and Psalms, but also from the book of Proverbs, and Daniel. Job is also quoted multiple times, as is Chronicles on occasion. The only books for which no definite quotation can be identified are Ruth, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, and Lamentations. Nonetheless, the first century Jewish historian Josephus clearly possessed the same Hebrew canon that we read today (Against Apion 1.8) [4]:

(38) For we have not an innumerable multitude of books among us, disagreeing from and contradicting one another [as the Greeks have], but only twenty-two books, which contain the records of all the past times; which are justly believed to be divine; (39) and of them five belong to Moses, which contain his laws and the traditions of the origin of mankind till his death. This interval of time was little short of three thousand years; (40) but as to the time from the death of Moses till the reign of Artaxerxes, king of Persia, who reigned after Xerxes, the prophets, who were after Moses, wrote down what was done in their times in thirteen books. The remaining four books contain hymns to God, and precepts for the conduct of human life.

 

The twenty-two books in Josephus’ canon combined several multi-volume works — in particular, Judges and Ruth; 1 & 2 Samuel; 1 & 2 Kings; 1 & 2 Chronicles; Ezra & Nehemiah; Jeremiah and Lamentations; and the minor prophets, which were grouped into one scroll, called the Δωδεκαπροφήτων (“the Twelve prophets”).

Josephus goes on to say [5],

(41) It is true, our history hath been written since Artaxerxes very particularly, but hath not been esteemed of the like authority with the former by our forefathers, because there hath not been an exact succession of prophets since that time; (42) and how firmly we have given credit to those books of our own nation, is evident by what we do; for during so many ages as have already passed, no one has been so bold as either to add anything to them, to take anything from them, or to make any change in them; but it becomes natural to all Jews, immediately and from their very birth, to esteem those books to contain divine doctrines, and to persist in them, and, if occasion be, willingly to die for them.

 

Josephus clearly distinguishes between those books written before Artaxerxes, who reigned between 465 and 425 B.C. (i.e., the recognized canonical writings), and those written after Artaxerxes, which he asserts are accurate but not “of the like authority,” because the line of prophets had ceased. This indicates that Josephus accepted as Scripture only those books that were written prior to the mid-fifth century B.C. This would exclude the deuterocanonical writings found today in the Roman Catholic canon.

If we have adequate grounds for confidence (as I maintain we do) that Jesus is who he claimed to be — Israel’s Messiah and God incarnate, who demonstrated his divine identity and authority by returning from the dead — then his statements concerning the nature and status of the Old Testament (which was widely recognized by the Jews of Jesus’ day) carry significant clout. But can we justify the authority we vest in the New Testament, which had not yet been written during Jesus’ life? It is to this question that I now turn.

The Justification of the New Testament

What does Jesus teach about the office of apostle and its role in the great commission? In John 14:15-17, 25-26, Jesus says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you… These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you. But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.” In John 15:26-27, he further asserts, “But when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me. And you also will bear witness, because you have been with me from the beginning.” Finally, in John 16:12-14, Jesus declares, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” Thus, the function of an apostle was to serve as a witness to Jesus’ teachings (cf. Acts 1:21-22), which the Holy Spirit would bring to their remembrance. Moreover, the Holy Spirit would teach the apostles additional things beyond those truths communicated to them during Jesus’ earthly ministry, and would guide them into all truth. This truth they would go on to authoritatively proclaim and teach. In John 20:21, Jesus declares, “As the Father has sent me, even so I send you.” In Matthew 28:19, Jesus instructs the apostles to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.”

John’s gospel in particular actually claims that specific sayings of Jesus were brought to their remembrance after Jesus had been raised from the dead and the Holy Spirit given. For example, in John 2:22, the author says concerning Jesus’ cryptic prediction of his resurrection, “When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.” In John 12:16, we read concerning the events of the triumphal entry and the fulfilment of Zechariah’s prophecy, “His disciples did not understand these things at first, but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written about him and had been done to him.” John 7:39 makes an explicit association between Jesus’ glorification after his resurrection, and the giving of the Spirit: “Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.” 

Jesus also promised the apostles, “When they deliver you over, do not be anxious how you are to speak or what you are to say, for what you are to say will be given to you in that hour,” (cf. Mk 13:11). John Wenham notes [6], 

[These promises] do not of course refer specifically or exclusively to the inspiration of a New Testament Canon, but they provide in principle all that is required for the formation of such a Canon, should that be God’s purpose. If God-given words are promised for the emergencies of persecution, how much more might they be expected for her abiding Scripture. If remembrance of the Lord’s words was necessary for the proper instruction of the infant church when many eyewitnesses were still alive, how much more when they were dead. It would be most natural to believe that the promises of remembrance and of guidance into new truth found their most far-reaching fulfilment in a New Testament Canon.

 

The apostle Paul similarly states, “For this reason I, Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus on behalf of you Gentiles — assuming that you have heard of the stewardship of God’s grace that was given to me for you, how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I have written briefly. When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit.” (Eph 3:1-5). In their letter to the gentiles written at the Jerusalem council, the apostles considered their united judgment to be in alignment with that of the Holy Spirit (Acts 15:28). The special status of the apostles is further indicated by the fact that Christ prayed separately for the apostles and for those who would believe in him through their message (Jn 17:20).

The apostle Paul, who was commissioned to the office of apostle by Christ himself on the road to Damascus, considered his own teachings to carry special authority. For example, he writes, “Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, for the sake of the faith of God’s elect and their knowledge of the truth, which accords with godliness, in hope of eternal life, which God, who never lies, promised before the ages began and at the proper time manifested in his word through the preaching with which I have been entrusted by the command of God our Savior.” Moreover, “For even if I boast a little too much of our authority, which the Lord gave for building you up and not for destroying you, I will not be ashamed,” (2 Cor 10:8). Similarly, he writes later in the same epistle, “For this reason I write these things while I am away from you, that when I come I may not have to be severe in my use of the authority that the Lord has given me for building up and not for tearing down,” (2 Cor 13:10). Or consider Paul’s assumed authority in the following texts: 

• 1 Thessalonians 4:2,11: For you know what instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus…to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you.
• 1 Thessalonians 5:27: I put you under oath before the Lord to have this letter read to all the brothers.
• 2 Thessalonians 3:4-14: And we have confidence in the Lord about you, that you are doing and will do the things that we command…Now we command you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ…For even when we were with you, we would give you this command…Now such persons we command and encourage in the Lord Jesus Christ.
• 1 Corinthians 7:17: This is my rule in all the churches.

In addition to the sensible criterion elucidated above, we have grounds for thinking that the Holy Spirit guided the church to select the right canonical books in accordance with this criterion. As Wenham explains [8],

Our Lord had laid down the principle that his sheep would recognize his voice (Jn. 10:3–16). These writings were not at once consciously received as Scripture. But the New Covenant from the very first meant more to believers than the Old Covenant and in these books from the apostolic circle believers recognized the voice of the Good Shepherd. They were read in assembly alongside the Old Testament Scriptures, and in a very short time, with no authoritative imposition or theological deduction, they formed a de facto New Testament. It simply required the impact of heresy to evoke the explicit statement of what was implicit in the irrevocably established practice of the church. By this process the bulk of the New Testament found unquestioned recognition in the whole church. The remaining books had to run the gauntlet of severe critical scrutiny. Their apostolicity was tested by the strength of the historical tradition that supported them and by the evidence of their reception as Scripture by the people of God. By this process the church came to a remarkable, though not an absolutely complete, unanimity on the subject round about the fifth century, and that unanimity has remained sufficiently complete to the present day to make any revision of the Canon appear most improbable.

 

Moreover [9],

God intended this Spirit-taught church to have a function transcending that of its individual members. As ‘the pillar and bulwark of the truth’ (1 Tim. 3:15) its collective witness and judgment is stronger and more dependable than that of its constituent members. From this apostolic church emerged, as a further gift of God, another collection of divine oracles, and to this the church has borne a virtually consistent witness down the centuries. It is surely right to see both the collection of these books and the consistency of this testimony as the providential ordering of the exalted Head of the church. This was not a collection of books blown together by chance; nor was it a collection that ‘forced itself upon the church. In the gentlest way it quietly and unhurriedly established itself in the church’s life. There was no crisis of official decision. There was no noticeable change of attitude before and after the Festal letter of Athanasius, no flourish of trumpets at Hippo or Carthage. They were not infallible pronouncements; they were weighty confirmations of views already held with more or less firmness throughout the church at large. Neither the decree of Carthage nor that of Trent, nor the Thirty-nine Articles, nor the Westminster Confession is infallible, but in the case of the New Testament Canon they unite in testifying to the collective witness given by the Spirit to the church, thereby giving an immense presumption in favour of the New Testament Canon as we have it. We have not here a proof of mathematical precision, but we have evidence of weight and authority, more than sufficient to justify us in humbly taking up the books that God has put into our hands and receiving their teaching as his truth.

 

Thus, the authorship of the New Testament books, ascribed by the early church, may be epistemically routed through the case for the truth of Christianity. This does not necessarily mean that every book of the New Testament may be independently established as authentic with equal ease. Indeed, the reason I do not typically use, say, the epistles of Peter in the context of advancing a case for Christianity is because these epistles cannot be independently authenticated to the same level as the thirteen epistles ascribed to the apostle Paul. I believe I am rationally justified in believing Peter wrote these letters on the basis of the early church attributions and my confidence in the Holy Spirit guiding the early church to select the right books. But this cannot be appealed to when making the case for Christianity on pain of circularity.

The Inerrancy of Scripture

On the basis of the view of Scripture espoused by Jesus and the apostles, together with the role they perceived of the Holy Spirit in their content, it is easy to see how the idea of the absolute authority and inerrancy of Scripture, on all matters of theology, history and practice flows quite naturally from this. While I do not think that this question bears significantly on the truth of Christianity, I believe that the concept of divine inspiration of the Scriptures (which is clearly assumed by Jesus and the apostles) pulls one in the direction of affirming that the Scriptures are, in fact, without error. While a small handful of difficult discrepancies remain in the gospels, the rejection of them being in fact errors may be epistemically routed through the case that Christianity is, in fact, true. When developing the case for Christianity, therefore, it may be conceded, for purpose of argument, that no satisfactory solution can be offered to bring resolution to a small handful of apparent discrepancies (though the vast majority of discrepancies that have been alleged between the gospels or between Acts and the epistles may be very plausibly harmonized). Having established the truth of Christianity, however, this should give us cause to rethink whether these instances really are, in fact, errors. Even if harmonization efforts should seem inadequate, it is perfectly rational for the Christian to hold to inerrancy, on the basis of what Scripture is (as justified by the case for the truth of the gospel), without feeling the need to adequately answer all objections that may be levelled against it.

From Christ to Canon

In sum, the justification for the Scriptural canon does not depend on circular reasoning nor on some arbitrary ecclesiastical decree. Rather, it rests on the person of Christ himself (once his divine identity and resurrection from the dead have been established), and his commissioning of the apostles as Spirit-guided witnesses of his teaching. The Hebrew Scriptures bear Jesus’ stamp of approval, and the books of the New Testament naturally flow from his promises to the apostolic circle and from the spirit-guided reception of the books by the church. This framework provides a coherent epistemic justification of the canon that is consistent with the Protestant affirmation of sola scriptura.

Notes

1. John Wenham, Christ and the Bible, Third Edition (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2009), 19.

2. Ibid., 33–34.

3. Ibid., 36.

4. Flavius Josephus and William Whiston, The Works of Josephus: Complete and Unabridged (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1987), 776.

5. Ibid., 776.

6. John Wenham, Christ and the Bible, Third Edition (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2009), 117.

7. Ibid., 160.

8. Ibid., 163-164.

9. Ibid., 167-168.