Dr. Levi Baker | The New Testament Canon: A Story of Covenant, Not Controversy

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Before we start today's episode, I want to take a moment to tell you about usefultogod.com. From online courses to free downloadable study guides, I'm confident you'll find something to help you live faithfully in today's world. You can also check out some of my books, including Christian Resistance, Serpents and Doves, and my most recent contribution, the D.L. Moody Essentials Collection. Coming this fall, we're also running a German Reformation Tour. The tour runs from October 30th through November 9th, and we'll be visiting sites from Berlin to Munich. The booking deadline for the tour is May 31st, and spots are filling up fast. If you're interested in learning more about the Reformation, World War II, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, you can check out the tour at the link in today's show notes. As always, if you find this podcast valuable, take a second to like, share, and leave a positive review. It really does make a difference. And if you haven't yet, subscribe to our YouTube channel for even more content to equip and encourage you. Now, let's get into today's episode. Hey, everyone. Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm Dr. James Spencer, and I'm joined today by Dr. Levi Baker. He is Assistant Professor of New Testament at William Tennent. And as a seminary, we've had a couple of the other guys on before from William Tennent. It's a seminary. They do kind of a unique style of seminary education. And so I got introduced to them through a mutual friend, Russ Meek. And I've just been interested in the model. And so I reached out to—I was looking for folks to have on for various topics, reached out to the school, and Levi is one of the folks that they recommended that I have on. And so, Levi, it's great to have you here, man. And just love what you guys are doing there at William Tennent. So welcome to the episode. Yeah. Thank you. I'm glad to be here. I love having conversations about Scripture and about theology. And I love talking about William Tennent. So thank you for the opportunity to do both. Well, tell us a little bit about your position at William Tennent. Maybe give us just a real brief overview of the model and then talk about your specialty and kind of lead us into what we're going to be talking about today. Yeah. So William Tennent started—we had our first cohort right when COVID hit. So about February of 2020, the whole world was shutting down, and we were launching a seminary. So I came in a little bit after that. I'm not one of the OG folks. I actually found out about Tennent when I finished up my PhD at Southeastern. And you could probably empathize with this. The market is just kind of brutal for hires. And me and a fellow graduate, we were just kind of commiserating about the market. And he said, Hey, there's actually this school out in Colorado that reached out, and they were just asking some questions about professors. And it's this really awesome model. You get to go out with your family for two weeks in the mountains of Colorado. I can't go because I don't have a flexible job, but maybe you could go. And I reached out to Michael Morgan, the president at Tennent, and we just had some awesome conversations. Went out there, and from the first day, I was hooked. So we have a retreat and cohort model. So we rent out a retreat center in the mountains of Colorado, and students will come. And on a full-time cohort, they take four classes, and you're in class eight hours a day, and then you have eight hours outside of class each day to hike, to talk. But students will be taking four classes at the same time. The curriculum is meant for a lot of overlap. So while I'm teaching on Acts and Paul's letters and historical theology, they're taking a course on the Reformation and doctrinal soteriological clarity. So while I'm talking about Paul and justification, they're looking at the same topic from a historical perspective. Very cool. And while we're out there, students, I get to share about 35 meals in that two-week period with my students. I don't know about you and your doctoral program, how many meals do you think you shared even with your main professor? Not many. Yeah, not many. You're thankful. It's just awesome. I feel like, and I've taught in other contexts as well, like a traditional residential model. I feel like by about day four or five, I know students and their family better than some of the students I've had for two semesters in the traditional residential context. So it's just a really rich learning environment. My wife and my three boys come along and Russ Meek, you know, our mutual friend here. He has three boys, the same ages, so our kids are like a bunch of just wild men running through the mountains of Colorado to hike together. It's a real precious time and just deep relationships with students while we have really serious academic conversations. Very cool. Yeah, I remember when I talked to Michael about the model, I had gotten the opportunity to teach overseas. And so we'd spend, you know, two or three weeks at a hostel in a particular location. I did Ireland and then Germany. And so you're just kind of you're teaching, but you're also living with the students in very similar to what you've got there. And, you know, on the weekends, we'd kind of travel around where we happened to be. You know, we'd take little trips or whatever we do. And it was just a lot of fun. And you did get to know the students in a much different way than if you're just teaching on campus and, you know, kind of interact. You're in and out. You're driving home. You're commuting. You're doing, you know, you've got all these other responsibilities. But when you're kind of out there and you're just, you know, in that retreat type setting, you do get a lot more interesting interactions with the students. You can have a lot more fun with them. They get to know you outside the classroom. You get to know them outside the classroom. And so, yeah, I was immediately when he talked to me about the model, I'm like, oh, this sounds great. That's fantastic. So very cool to hear you explain it and awesome to hear the connections you're making with students. Yeah. And I don't know if your listeners know, read the website Mere Orthodoxy, Trevin Wax. I know of it. Yeah. Yeah. He's the Trevin Wax recently wrote an article calling, assessing the current state of theological education. And he proposed a model of, I think he called it like monastical cohorts where he's saying, you know, what if we had people go in a retreat model and draw from society for a little bit for two weeks, take a bunch of classes together, bring their families and all this stuff and go out. And that would be deeply relational. It would allow you to be have existing relationships with your ministries at church and not have to move. And I was like, oh yeah, that's our model. So it was really cool. Yeah. It was at least cool to hear some outsider confirmation, you know. Well, and I think a lot of people are probably starting to feel like, at least I know whenever I've consulted with seminaries, one of the major problems that seminaries are having right now is cost. And so, you know, it's and when I say cost, I don't just mean the price of tuition. Yeah. It's the overall cost. I remember my wife, she didn't do seminary, but she went back for an online MHA degree. And it was a two-year, I think, 18-month cohort. And it was a very difficult 18 months, not financially necessarily, but just time-wise. She had a lot of extra work to do on top of everything. And so that was just that, you know, that was an online program. She didn't have to travel. She didn't have to, you know, be anywhere specifically at any given time. But I think when seminaries are doing the residential education particularly, there's a cost involved in that. It's a, you know, you have to move your family. You've got to, you know, you've got to actually be there and attend a class. And so the model you all are running with the retreat seems to me to be a nice bridge between those things. And really making it intentional that this would be not only just a time to teach, but also a time to build those relationships across. You know, I've taught in modular programs where it's like an intensive week or something like that and you're on-site with the student and what have you. But I mean, most of it's just filled up with teaching. And so, you know, students wouldn't stay necessarily. We'd do it on campus. You bring them in for a week. They'd be there. They'd be gone. And so it didn't have the same feel, but I think that retreat aspect really does provide that different level of, and there's a cost involved, but it is only two weeks. You know, you can see the value you're getting out of it. And so I just think it's a great model. Yeah. And other thing, I think one of the things that I think seminaries across the board are starting to rethink is how do we make sure that we are resourcing the church and

Like 300 miles, I think. So how do you make sure that you are allowing people to serve their... allowing students to serve their people in areas of high need without asking them to uproot their lives and then maybe never move back? So seminaries, I think, are working through different ways to address that. Our model is one of them. And I love it. I've always found it interesting, because I agree, there's always the problem of moving away and not moving back. I think as I've looked at different models of seminary education over the years, you know, one of the challenges that non-denominational seminaries have, or seminaries that aren't specifically identified as the official seminary of, you know, you name it, the Southern Baptist or Presbyterian or what have you, like the Lutheran schools do. So Missouri Synod Lutheran churches, they have two seminaries that they draw from, one in Fort Wayne and one in St. Louis. And so they manage their enrollment so that anybody who's coming into those, what are very residential programs, you know, you uproot your family, you move there, you do seminary, but then you have a job after. They're placing you in within the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod to do various jobs, to pastor, to do these different things. And so it is a very different feel in the way they sort of, to just, I guess, close this out, and we can move on to what we're actually going to talk about, but seminary education is always kind of fun to talk about. But basically what they would say is, we're keeping you within the Missouri Synod Lutheran family, right? And so the location is less crucial than is the area of need within the denomination where you're going to be serving. So they had that interesting network effect. But I think that independent seminaries and those kind of things, they always have trouble sort of pulling that off. I mean, it's not easy for the Lutherans to do, and they're a pretty closed system for independent seminaries. That's always been a challenge. So again, I think that's a smart move. It definitely solves a problem, and it's a good way to think about the education. But anyway, talk to us a little bit about your specialty. So you're an assistant professor of New Testament. You mentioned teaching acts and letters of Paul and those kind of things. But when we've been corresponding prior to the episode, we talked about New Testament canon issues. And so talk about where your specialty lies within that conversation about New Testament canon. Yeah, so I teach a broad subject, and I'm interested in everything, right? That can be kind of a problem. I remember when I first started this sense that the Lord had given me this calling, I describe it as academic discipleship. So I wanted to teach people how to understand Scripture and how it relates to their life. So I remember realizing, oh, the way the model of academia is set up, I'm going to have to specialize between Old Testament and New Testament. And I was really frustrated. I remember asking a professor, hey, could I teach both? And he's like, no one does that. No one does that. I actually, in different contexts, teach both, and I love it. And I love in my New Testament classes helping people to see, what is Paul doing here? Actually, he's looking back to Exodus. Let's drop down to that context and see what he's actually doing. Or I'm teaching the Old Testament, say, okay, here in Exodus, in Exodus 16 through 18, the people are grumbling in response to their need of water and God provides manna. Well, in John 6, when Jesus presents himself as the word of life and that rare word grumbling, gagudzo, appears never again outside of John 6, John wants us to think about what is the parallel here. I love doing that kind of stuff. But, you know, when, as you can relate, when you're going through your PhD seminars and you have to pick that topic, I was like, got to pick one. Yeah, what do I even focus on? And I got two pieces of advice. One was write on something that interests you because you're going to be writing on it for three years. And the other topic was, the other piece of advice was write on something that you think will benefit the church because you're going to be spending three years, so you might as well write on something that will serve the church. And I remember I was in the Master of Arts in Old Testament program and I was doing some work on Dead Sea Scrolls and I was like, man, these people are saying that, maybe your listeners aren't familiar with the Dead Sea Scrolls, but it was about 150 years before Jesus. There was these Jewish people that believed that the Jeremiah's promise of a new covenant had dawned and they withdrew out in the desert to wait for the fulfillment of Isaiah 43, the way of, to prepare the way of the Lord. They took a look, went out in the wilderness, prepared the way of the Lord. They thought new covenants come, Yahweh's going to come and he's going to set up his kingdom in Israel. And they started writing a lot of texts, their own writings, and they seemed to be treating them as scripture alongside the Old Testament. So in a lot of discussions, people would say, see, that just shows that the Old Testament wasn't set at that time. And I have a lot of problems with that interpretation. But then I was taking a New Testament canon seminar and some of the stuff, even amongst evangelical scholarship, I got the sense that what we were doing is we were kind of baptizing German critical scholarship. You know, German critical scholarship would say something like, yeah, the New Testament canon was formed over a long process of sifting and sorting, took, that concluded maybe in the fourth century. And then we just add, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, you know, and then we just say, we run with it, right? And some of the New Testament introductions that were written just kind of ran with this model. And they would almost say, and even some of our evangelical kind of standard bearers in that field were just writing some stuff that, as I was reading it, I was like, man, I love the Scriptures. They have been influential in my life, but I can see not only some problems with their model, looking at historical evidence, but I was also disturbed by what I saw as maybe some of the pastoral implications for a student just reading this with, who hadn't really thought about the historical processes related to the formation of the New Testament canon. They might just say, oh wow, this wasn't set until the fourth century, and it was set by a bunch of guys in backroom, you know, like, what in the world? You know, it could really, really harm their faith. Starts to sound like the Jesus seminar real quick, where we've got these different colored beads, and we're just putting them on. Yeah, it does, or like the Da Vinci Code. Yeah. Right. So I got, it was really out of, like, just some, I don't want to, anger is too strong of a word, just frustration with the current discussion. Yeah. So I was like, all right, I'm going to try to redirect the conversation. Cool. New Testament canon. So that's what I wrote my topic on. It was just brutal. You're just dealing with so much primary information, so much secondary information. So I don't claim to be someone that, like, if you ask me if I could write, you know, on one topic the rest of my life, New Testament canon is not it, but I just felt that the church needed better scholarship on the topic. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free Retirement Defense Guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. So let me try to infer just from what you've said, this is what I'm kind of hearing you lean toward, and you can kind of take this and tear it apart and say you're completely wrong. That's totally fine. But when you think about the Dead Sea Scrolls, the one thing that I've found interesting, even in like more contemporary authors who were talking about, you know, having a different relationship to the Old Testament, which is, I think, the nicest way I could say it. Something like Andy Stanley's Irresistible. You know, he talks about, we need to sort of jettison the Old Testament, and I'm paraphrasing this, so, you know, but let's not be Old Testament. Let's be New Covenant believers, right? So there's this interchange between Testament and Covenant. But then the interesting part is that in that book, he uses something like, you know, Ephesians 6, where it concludes maybe in the fourth century, and then we just add under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, you know, and then we just say, we run with it, right? And some of the New Testament introductions that were written just kind of ran with

talking about the relationship with parents and children and quotes the command for, you know, children honor your parents. And so, you know, I just kind of sit back and I scratch my head and I'm like, does he realize what he just did? Like, Paul is using and integrating the Old Testament commands into the New Testament Scriptures. And so when you when you mentioned about the Dead Sea Scrolls and scholars who talk about, well, see the Old Testament canon wasn't set, it's like, well, no, they're referencing those. They're pulling those through because these are the standard letters and documents that that they recognize as inspired. They saw these as the authoritative documents of the faith. Now, whether they would have had a formal canon, not sure. But it makes intuitive sense that what they're trying to do as the you know, the Dead Sea Scroll communities believing themselves to be the extension of faithful Israel, that now their writings would become as authoritative as the Old Testament. And so I think part of what I've always had, what I think confuses the conversation is canon. We don't we don't really have a good idea what that is unless you're like a comic book nerd and, you know, you have like the different canons of Spider-Man or something like that. But is that close to kind of what you're arguing that that they're extending this from the Old Testament and their writings are now authoritative for this new community of faith that they believe to be the community of faith? Yes, I think Andy Stanley says on we should unhitch ourselves from the Old Testament. Yes. As an Old Testament guy, I've written a lot on that. So like. Yeah. As a New Testament guy who's first love is the Old Testament, I have to. So I understand he is writing for missional impulse there. Yeah. And I don't think that the best approach in the church is to avoid a difficult conversations, I think, or to avoid problematic texts. Right. So I think that those uncomfortable like lament Psalms or those uncomfortable and precatory prayers in the Old Testament. Sure. When you actually understand those and discuss those, I think it actually better serves the church in avoiding those. So I would say that. I would say maybe even backing up why I'm even bringing up the Dead Sea Scrolls community. Yeah. In our current model or current scholarship on the New Testament canon, there's almost two different definitions of canon at play here. OK, the traditional definition, which has held sway from the beginning up until maybe like the 1960s was they wouldn't sharply distinction between Scripture and canon. So Scripture would be in a collection of authoritative books. Right. So you have all these different books. These are authoritative. This is what the church has received. Then about the 1960s, I think it was 68. There was a scholar, A.C. Sundberg, that said, well, we need to distinguish between Scripture and canon. Scripture is authoritative literature. These are the works that are useful for the life of the church. Canon is an authoritative list of Scriptures. So you can't have canon until you have lists and a list from which nothing can be added or taken away. So he called for a new history of the New Testament canon. So he said in the first century, we have the rise of Scripture. So maybe Paul wrote these books that were kind of practical that everyone liked. And around the end of the first century, people started to say, hey, you know, that Paul guy, yeah, he's really cool. Let's start to at well. Sorry, I'm not trying to be too dismissive, but he might say that there was this natural progression, whereas Paul's works had more authority. They were risen to the standard of Scripture, the level of Scripture. And then now you have these collections developing. And then it's not till the fourth century where you have something called canon because then you have lists. There's a lot of problems historically with that view. We can discuss that. But that distinction between Scripture and canon has kind of ruled the day in New Testament scholarship. And it's a definitional one. And to be fair to them, I think that they're trying to avoid historical anachronism. What they're trying to do is say it's not like in the second century, there was this complete collection that was universally agreed upon. Right. Right. I would also point out that the definition also introduces some problems as well, is also anachronistic. Because I almost imagine that, you know, you approach Irenaeus and you say, hey, Irenaeus, can you tell me what your Scriptures are? And he says, you know, these are what the church has received. Right. Like, OK. And you say, yeah, well, OK, well, is that your closed, is that your canon? He's like, what do you mean? Is that your closed list from which nothing can be added or taken away? And he's like, these are what the church has received. Right. On the 88th day, he's already saying this is what has been handed down. So even the notion of Scripture, like saying this thing is Scripture, this thing is not Scripture, that that includes some idea of limitation, which is inherent in canon. And there's another problem. They say that we don't have lists until the fourth century, but we actually have lists in the third century in the Muratorian fragment. It's this weird document. It's like a New Testament introduction almost around A.D. 171-80 that seems to be a list as well. So there's some historical problems, but because that definition has held sway and we do see a lot of lists, the majority of the list we see starting in the fourth century onward. The whole discussion has moved to say, well, canon is something that belongs to the fourth century. And then now the effect on people is to say, well, early Christians almost had to be convinced to receive new Scriptures, that there was nothing intrinsic that the 1985 Harry Gamble wrote a book called The New Testament Canon. And he begins and says there is nothing that would have necessitated a New Testament canon in early Christianity. So basically, there's nothing about Christianity that would require new texts. That's a bold statement and it's motivated to try to avoid anachronism to say this whole thing, this whole historical process that ended, he says, ended in the fourth century. It wasn't necessary when Jesus rose from the dead. I don't know whether Gamble would believe in the resurrection, but it's not necessary in 80-30. And this is why I bring up the Dead Sea Scrolls, because inherent in the belief of early Christianity was that Jesus had inaugurated a new covenant. Yes. Even in the words of institution, which predate, you know, at the Last Supper, which predate any other writings, Jesus said, this is the blood of the covenant. Luke adds of the new covenant. Yeah, yeah. So there was this belief that Jesus had inaugurated a new covenant. Well, the title for this collection around the fourth century was Hekina Diatheke. Around the third century, end of the third century, beginning of the second century, we see the universal title amongst all of amongst Christians in North Africa and in France and in like Greece. They're saying the new, they're calling this collection of Scripture the new covenant. So covenant is the title that's associated with this collection. And this is that kind of Diatheke, just to clarify, right? Yeah, yeah. Hekina Diatheke. Yes, sir, the new covenant. So covenant is associated with this collection, but scholarship, because they're so focused on the fourth century, they'll say things like early Christians were opposed to writing or the writings were some kind of an obstacle. Why would they need new Scripture? They already had everything they needed in the Old Testament. Yeah. And so then they see early Christians as almost needing to be convinced to receive new writings. But if you look at the writings of the Old Testament themselves, particularly the Mosaic covenant and all of its renewals, any time the Mosaic covenant is made or renewed, you see new writings. New writings. You see God giving commands. This is the covenant. Yeah. So, well, how do we live in the covenant? Good news. God is going to give us texts which outline that and those texts are immediately treated as Scripture. Yeah. We see that in Exodus 24 and Exodus 34. We see it again in Deuteronomy. We see it in Joshua 24. So early Christians that are reading the Old Testament that believed that the Messiah would come.

that he would inaugurate a new covenant, and they believed that Jesus would inaugurate a new covenant, they would have expected new writings. It would almost be logical. They wouldn't have to be convinced. And so that's where I go to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Because in the entirety of Second Temple Jews, that's Jews that lived from about 400 BC to 200 AD. Only two communities associated Jeremiah's promise of a new covenant as part of their own self-identity. Early Christians and the Dead Sea Scrolls. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, they say, God made a covenant with us, brought us into the wilderness, gave us new revelation, and then you see them writing these texts, and then these texts are being read and studied alongside foundational Scripture like Deuteronomy. So it does seem like there was something natural for the New Testament canon to naturally develop out of early Christianity. Do you think, I mean, it sounds to me like as we're looking at the scholarship and you hit the fourth century, there's some sort of process of formalization that happens there. In other words, there's a, hey, we're not going to let this go on much longer. We all need to be on the same page. And so for where we are right now, we need to sort of, yeah, I think formalize is the best word, right? We just need to formalize what this is. Here's what it is. The tradition is going to get squishy if we let it go on forever without defining it. So let's define it. Now this is it. But to confuse that formalization with the formation is probably the wrong way to think about it. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. And something we need to remember, Christianity did not stop being a persecuted religion until the fourth century. So part of the reason we have way more lists and way more documents in the fourth century is because that's when they stopped killing Christians and burning books. Take a guess. So this is Christoph Marchese, a German church historian. Out of all the documents that we know were written in the second century, how many do you think have survived? Oh, I have no idea. Yeah. Only 15%. Wow. So some canon scholars refer to peering back in the fourth century as the dark days of the second century. Peering back in the second century as the dark days of the second century. Interesting. Part of the reason we're obsessed with the fourth century is because that's when we have sources. Yeah. But when we look at some of our earlier sources, they're already saying in the second century, there is evidence of this. Yeah. So, for instance, a lot of scholars will say, you know, that whole canon from which nothing can be added or taken away, although there's no universal agreement. We have never had universal agreement about the New Testament canon. The Ethiopian church right now has an expanded New Testament canon. Yeah. The Syriac church. So why this focus on the fourth century? Well, there were councils in the fourth century. The Syriac church didn't accept the 27 books of the New Testament until they had a 22 book New Testament. I think they accepted in the sixth century. Again, so why this focus on the fourth century? Well, that's when Athanasius has his first official list in AD 367. Gotcha. And there's actually more evidence in the third century, and I'll outline that in a second here. But if you look at the church councils, actually in the list, and I would recommend this book here, 40 Questions About Text and Canon by Charles Quarles and L. Scott Calum. Dr. Calum was my major professor, and he's kind of like me. We just have to overturn every rock. So he went through and he actually went and read all the council lists. The councils, they're meeting to discuss other topics like the Trinity or proper church practice. And very few of them even mention a scriptural collection. And when they do, it seems to be almost, they're not arguing for a canon. They're arguing from a canon, right? So they're talking about church practice. They'll say like little almost like throwaway lines. You can't read an apocryphal psalm, only the canonical books of the Old and New Testament. They don't even list. They assume their audience knows it, right? So we go back even further in Eusebius around AD 325. He has that famous list of, you know, what are the universally accepted books, which is about 22 apostles, a 14 letter edition of Paul, and then 1st John and Revelation. And then he has some disputed books. And he mentions some dispute them. He doesn't say who. It's probably the Syrian church. So they have questions about five books, like 2nd John, 3rd John, Jude. Right. Yeah. He also says the rejected books, because you see, Eusebius hated Cilius, basically those that believed in a literal millennium. He didn't, he was not pro-left behind series. He hated it so much that he includes it in the universally accepted because almost everyone at that time accepted Revelation, but he hated it. So we also included in the rejected list, the spurious. But if you go back even further again, remember the second century, it's like we have only 15% of what we know was written. So we have just statistically. Right. Like Papias wrote a four, sorry, five volume commentary called The Expositions of the Sayings of Our Lord. And he was a disciple of John. Okay. Apostle John. So he see some of the teaching from John, wrote a five volume commentary on the gospels. And that, that did not survive, but we have really weird books like the Epistle of Barnabas, where it's like, man, I really wish we had some of that other stuff. Anyways. At the, around the beginning of, so it's around 8250. So origin, it's in the first half of the third century. We have a list from origin outlining the 27 books of the New Testament canon. And it's interesting the way he does it. He does it in a sermon. He's talking about Joshua 7, you know, the trumpets, the marching around Jericho and he goes, what are the trumpets? You know, they're the books of the Bible. And then he starts going through Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. He starts outlining all the scriptures. Well, if you're going to preach and give a sermon illustration, do you give a sermon illustration about something that is contentious or that your audience isn't convinced on? Yeah. You don't. So here again, at the third century, peering back into kind of the second century where we don't have very many sources, origin believes that his audience is so convinced about the 27 books of the New Testament canon that he said, yeah, he's like, oh yeah. You know, the trumpets, they're the 27 books of the Testament, right? So even some scholars that that hold to the fourth century canon model, like Lee Martin McDonald have begun to say there was debate. We only have origins homily through a translation from the fifth century author Rufinius. So people would say, oh, Rufinius made it up, made up his list. And now scholars have revisited that conversation and said, no, it's likely original. So even those that hold to, we don't have canon of the fourth century will now say, yes, origin is the exception, which is a big deal, but they don't revisit their model. Right. Interesting. Well, I find the connection between the Dead Sea Scroll community and the New Testament really fascinating. I mean, I like that framing. No, it makes perfect sense. I mean, I think one of the things that often comes up and is a misunderstanding about the Old Testament, particularly the Old Testament law, is that this assumption that it never changes. And so, yes, we have it as scripture in, you know, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, you know, where a lot of the Exodus, where a lot of those laws are written out. And so we have that as an enduring catalog of some of the laws that would have governed ancient Israel. And that's still useful for us. It's still important for us. It's still, we can still draw from that. We see Paul do it in 1st Corinthians, 1st Timothy, you know, the don't muzzle your oxen while you're treading grain, right? We see him doing interesting things with the law. He doesn't need an oxen for that to mean something to him and for that to have application to the community. But I think also within those laws, you know, you have legal innovation as these things go forward. Israel isn't the same group of people. It's not the same sort of nation when even Saul was made king. And so.

So there's a lot of these things that have to change and shift. And you're right, every time there's a covenant renewal, there's additional instruction given about what this means, where we are now, how this works. And while it all has sort of a, we could almost say a center from which it emanates from, it's all consistent then with who's, you know, the character of God, the mission of Israel, all those kind of things. But it's not just this static, like, chunk of wood that never changes. It's, you know, that they just carry with them all the way across. It has some progress to it. It has some shift and malleability to it because that's how the law had to function. You were going to be a different community depending on the time and place you were living in. And I think that's fascinating when you compare it to the Dead Sea Scrolls. My recollection, and I've read the Dead Sea Scrolls, I did some work on that in my master's degree as well. I mean, the striking parallels between things like, let's say I did a lot of work on 11Q Melchizedek and Hebrews 7. It's fascinating the way that those line up. But the other thing you see is that the letters of the New Testament are very occasional. Whereas, you know, you have things like the rule of the community in the Dead Sea Scrolls, right? Where because they're not exactly living in these little outposts all around the empire, they're a fairly cloistered community, and it's not like they had no contact with the outside world, but their concern is far less varied occasional like the New Testament letters would be. And it's far more, how do we govern this smaller community? How do we maintain purity? What does this all look like for us? You know, and so there are differences, but the point is they're both reconstructing what it means to be the covenant people of God in that context. Let me ask you a serious question. 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So in my dissertation, and it should be, it's being published by Brill, the Texts and Editions for New Testament study. It should be coming out. Your readers, your listeners will not want to buy it. It's one of those dissertations that, you know, wait until it comes out of the library and uh rent it. But anyway, you know, I talk about how with all this focus in the fourth century, it's almost like um like a search and rescue boat out on the water. They're shining the floodlight right here and they're saying, We know that Christians had to be convinced that there was nothing intrinsic to early Christianity expecting to be there. They focused here instead of the second century. But like when you look at uh 2 Peter chapter 3, right there in 80 60, he's saying, Hey, you know, I, I hear you've been reading the letters of Paul, which are confusing and understanding. And we would say, Amen, right? Which the wicked and unstable twist as they do the rest of Scripture. Right. And then in 1 Timothy, Paul cites uh Deuteronomy 25, don't muzzle an ox, right? And then he cites as graphe, whatever you say it is, graphe has to mean a written text. And it quotes verbatim Luke 10 7. Yep. So you see in the 60s, Christians are citing almost contemporaneously written documents as Scripture. And they, they don't justify it. They're arguing from Scripture rather than for Scripture. Yeah. And so I, I say, guys, what's up? Like, why? That's my research problem. So we are so focused on the development and we're not even discussing why in the world would this happen. And then once I started to talk, do more research around um just the connection between covenant and Scripture in the Old Testament in the second temple period. So I have probably assessed maybe a dozen second temple texts like um you know, 4th Ezra, 2nd Baruch, where there's this assumption, if you're going to claim to be writing Scripture, you have to connect it to Moses, have to connect it to the covenant in some way. And then in the Dead Sea Scrolls, you have a parallel of another community that believes a covenant's happened and they're writing new Scripture. Um then you even see some parallels in the Gospel of Matthew. The Gospel of Matthew begins and ends with a covenant, uh, an allusion to the new covenant. You have uh Matthew uh have the five teachings of Jesus, which mirror the five books of the Torah. You have Jesus ascend and descend a mountain, and he's alluding to uh Moses' ascent and descent from a mountain. You have Jesus delivering the law for a new contextual situation. Right. Now the new covenant has dawned. Now that a greater righteousness is possible because the Messiah has come, here's what it's like to, to walk um in the new covenant. So I argue that Matthew presents his document as a uh a new covenant Torah. Yeah. Uh of Jesus, of the new Moses. Well, it makes sense even when you compare the genealogies of Matthew and Luke, which arguably in in this structure, Luke is the oddity, not the norm. He takes it all the way back to Adam and it's in the third chapter. But in those first couple of chapters of Luke, if you're looking at, you know, how is this stuff connected back to covenant, he connects Jesus directly back through explicit prophecy, through the birth of John the Baptist, you know, like he pulls all that stuff together. Matthew does the same thing, except he's doing it in his initial genealogy. He just takes him back to Abraham, which roots him very clearly within the covenant community and, and the establishment of that initial covenant with Abraham. So you can see both gospel writers doing it. Um they're just doing it in very different ways. Man, I, I mean, I think it's a fascinating insight. And I mean, I can remember learning in seminary. It's like, yeah, here's where the New Testament refers to itself as Scripture and those kinds of things, right? But uh, I, I love the insight of this is a new covenant. It requires new writings. This is how now we're supposed to live in light of this new covenant that has come in Jesus Christ. And it just makes intuitive sense that the community would start building around itself a set of teachings that would help Jewish and Gentile Christians understand what it looked like to follow the way of Jesus. Yeah. Well, and what I'm saying, just to be clear, it's, it's not, it's um it's new in the sense of, it's a dissertation I surveyed, Dude, I, I assessed any connection between covenant and Scripture between the Old Testament through um the second century fathers. It was brutal. But you can find uh Christian scholars up until the 1800s arguing this. It's like the Old Testament had its documents clearly. And then we got off track, particularly because um around the 1900s, we started to view Christians as no longer Jewish in any sense. And so we're gonna, we're gonna talk about the discuss the concept of canon as like the Greeks with a, you know, the Greeks had their classical library. So truly, Christians, they had to start their own classical library. Right. Now with the return um to view uh early Christians as, as Jewish, it becomes a whole lot more plausible. And really, I mean, the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in uh uh 1947. Yeah, 1947. Yeah. But uh they weren't widely published until 1995. Right. So, and that's what allows us to see all this evidence and all these parallels and be like, oh yeah, guys, Jesus was a Jew. The apostles were Jewish, you know, to, to begin to see more of this natural connection. What we would uh what we would affirm theologically, you know, that these books of the old covenant and new covenant are related together from the same God. We now have way more historical evidence to back up what the church has always believed. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I, I will say that's what one of the things I really found fascinating when I studied the Dead Sea Scrolls, not only the connections, the way certain things, especially that uh 11Q13 or 11Q Melchizedek, um, you know, is it 4, 4Q Melchizedek, I can't remember. It's one of those numbers. Um, but there's a Melchizedek document in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the way it used Melchizedek in almost the exact same way as the New Testament used it for Christ, obviously in the Dead Sea Scroll community, they weren't referring to Jesus, but they're viewing Melchizedek as this sort of messianic figure. Will that suggest then that there is a at least some common

for interpreting some of these things, because you wouldn't have come up with, you know, Melchizedek is the king of righteousness and the king of peace. Right. If that weren't really in the air and it's just fascinating to think about that covenant connection across. And I love that that continuity that you can now draw, even from the perspective of the formation of a set of scriptures that are really the impetus for them is that new covenant. Yeah. Which pretty fantastic. Pretty cool. Yeah, and I would just say sometimes in scholarship, the emperor has no clothes, right? These things that we've said for forever, like, there was no need for that the Christians had an aversion to writing or something. It it it is repeated over and over and over again in scholarship. Well, for people that had an aversion to writing, they certainly wrote a lot. They wrote an awful lot. People love the book. Right. But I would, I would just say to anyone just exploring the New Testament canon or maybe just historical research on scriptures. If you just explore and view all sides so often, if you have an if you try to understand the New Testament documents in light of their time, it it will not harm your faith. It'll actually it'll actually help you to better understand the documents and confirm your faith. Just like a quick example, the Pauline letter collection, right? So we ask all the time, well, what happens if we find a lost letter, Paul, right? Scholars for years have said, well, they've thought that the way this Pauline letter collection has started is like maybe, you know, the church of Laodicea had a letter and they exchanged a letter with another church. And then this like a snowball theory is what Stan Porter refers to it as like that, that people went around and they started comparing letters and these documents, which were just practical now became this collection and were scripture. So since they assumed this took a long time when they go to like 2 Peter, which which claims to be written by Peter. And again, I affirm Petrine authorship. He talks about I hear you've been reading the letters of Paul. Well, how can we have a Pauline letter collection so early? Well, now that we've done some actual research in ancient letter collections, we have about four within a hundred years of the time of Christ. The Cicero's letter collection, Seneca's. And then you have Ignatius of Antioch writing around 80, 180. And then there's one more that I'm blanking on right now. I wrote it, I wrote it down. Another classical scholar, it'll come to me. But anyways, all of them, they even talk about how they formed their letter collection. They'll say things like. You know, I had my secretary write down this letter and retained a copy. And every single one of these letter collections was started on the basis of the author's retained copies and formed either by the author themselves or by a close associate. So when we drop into, say, 2 Timothy 4.13, Paul, he says everyone has abandoned him except Luke. And then he's writing to Timothy and he says, Hey, bring the cloak that I left with Troas. And then he says, and also bring the books, which Biblia, which would be scriptural scrolls. Right. And then bring the parchments, the membrana, which is a Latin loan word for a codex. Well, we know that ancient letter collections were formed by the parchment codex. So basically what it was letters together. It was this form that was not viewed as sophisticated enough for literary works. So you wouldn't find like the works of Homer, what they would write on a scroll. So it was this like lesser volume, right? Lesser medium. But it seems like Paul is asking for the retained copies of his letters. So how did the Pauline letter collection get formed? Well, we have no reason to believe that Paul acted differently than Cicero or Seneca or Ignatius. Yeah. So we we have good grounds to believe that the Pauline letter collection was formed either by Paul himself or by Luke or Timothy shortly after his death. So when we read about the epistle to Laodiceans, we know that existed. Why don't we have it? Paul didn't want us to have it. Why don't we have he in Second Corinthians, he talks about the sorrowful letter. Basically, Paul had to take the Corinthians to the woodshed. Right. And demonstrate. Why don't we have that sorrowful letter? Yeah. Well, Paul, Paul didn't want us to have it. So that it's not just historical. Our canon isn't based off historical happenstance, but it's more because of apostolic selection by Paul himself. That's fascinating. And also, we know that early Christians preferred the codex. If you look at the texts from the second, first, sorry, from the second and third century, about two thirds of Christian documents were written on the codex form. And the connection between codex and scripture is so tight that if we find a Christian document written on a scroll, there's a good case for saying they did not believe that that was a scriptural text. Right. At the time when the broader Greco-Roman literary conventions didn't like the codex. Why? My theory is, and supported by others, even Benjamin Laird wrote a book. It's right here. The Pauline Corpus in early Christianity. How did this happen? Well, early Christians received their scripture in the codex form when Paul says, here you go, publish the Pauline letter collection. It's just there is there are, is some historical stuff that rather than causing us to question our faith, really shows, man, the canon was underway way earlier than normally allowed. Well, bro, there's a lot there. And unfortunately, we're coming up to the end of the episode. So I, it's all fascinating stuff. These are areas that I haven't really dug into and I'm so thankful that you have. I think it's fascinating stuff. Um, and it does really shed light on our faith in a different way than I think, uh, you know, traditional apologetics might or something like that. Right. These historical exercises really give a sense of solidity and continuity within Christianity. And so I just encourage people to, I know you said, you know, the book is coming out and, you know, listeners may not want to get it, but I would just say this stuff is actually really worthy of wading through. It's hefty stuff, right? Like I get that, but man, how cool is it to think that Paul is saving these letters back to make sure that we get them? Uh, I just think that kind of thing is fantastic. So Levi, thanks so much for being here, man. And is there any, is there anywhere other than like the William Tennent webpage that you would like to send people to find out a little bit more about you and your work? Uh, not really. I am, uh, intentionally not on social media. Good plan. Good plan. They could, they could shoot me an email. Um, my email should be on William Tennent site. Okay. I'll link into the faculty page just so they can kind of keep up with some of your writings and that kind of stuff. But, um, really appreciate you being here, man. You're a wealth of information and I like, I just really enjoyed hearing all of that. It's, it's definitely different than what I learned in seminary. So very much appreciate your work and the depth of research you've done in that area. Awesome. I appreciate what you're doing. All right, brother. Well, we will catch you, uh, next time. Thanks for being here, Levi. Thanks everybody for listening. And we'll catch you on the next episode of thinking Christian. Take care, everybody. Just want to take a second to thank the team at life audio for their partnership with us on the thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more. I'm bestselling author, John Seidl, and I'm the Christian who became an alcoholic, not the other way around. Through the power of Jesus, I got sober, and now I'm sharing both my story and the stories of others, just like me, along with helpful interviews from trauma, faith, and addiction recovery experts. If you're a fan of messy sanctification and powerful stories, join me on the confessions of a Christian alcoholic podcast on life audio or wherever you listen to your favorite podcast. Let's get radically vulnerable.