by Joe Schafer
Last month, I attended a weekend forum sponsored by ACT 3, the ministry of my friend John Armstrong. The forum was led by Peter Enns, who spoke on topic Reading the Old Testament as Jesus Did.
Enns is the author of a popular but controversial book Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament (2005, Baker Academic). In this book he addresses the difficult question of what Christians mean when they claim that the Bible, a book whose words were written by men, is also the inspired word of God. Enns presents an incarnational model that upholds divine inspiration while acknowledging the contextual and cultural influences of the human writers.
Throughout the forum, Enns suggested that we approach the Old Testament as the writers of the New Testament did. How did Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul and Peter handle the OT? Not very well, if they are judged by standards of modern evangelical scholarship. Suppose one of these NT authors was enrolled in a modern seminary that holds to the inerrancy of Scripture. And suppose he applied verses from the OT to Jesus in the manner found throughout the NT. What kind of grade would he receive? He would fail.
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A new book by John H. Armstrong,
What is a Bible-believing Christian?
April 22, 2009 in Commentary by admin
Christians of different denominations read different Bibles. The collection of texts known as the Bible has changed over time. The earliest Christians had the Old Testament, some letters from the apostles and oral tradition. A list of 22 books of the New Testament appeared in the Muratorian Canon around AD 180. In AD 365, Athanasius of Alexandria listed 27 books. A Latin edition of the Bible called the Vulgate appeared in AD 383 and became the standard for the Western world. In addition to the 66 books found in the current Protestant Bible, the Vulgate also had the so-called deuterocanonical books and apocrypha. Some differences persist today. For instance, the Ethiopian “narrow” canon includes 81 books.
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Tags: Church History, Scripture