Self-Attesting Scripture

Herman Ridderbos, Redemptive History and the New Testament Scriptures, trans. by H. De Jongste, rev. by Richard B. Gaffin, Jr. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing Co., 1988), 9. 

Has not Ridderbos succinctly and clearly defined the necessary historic, orthodox understanding of the nature of holy Scripture? Can you find any legitimate reason for rejecting Ridderbos’s assessment of the self-attesting Word? Is not “the divine character that eminates from it” (10) as true of Scripture today as it was in the 1st c.? The “which TR” question is answered with “the self-attesting words of Scripture kept pure in all ages.” Calvin’s response to questions about the canonicity of James is helpful here. He writes, “I accept it, however, gladly, without reservation, because I cannot find any legitament reason for rejecting it.” (79) Against the united testimony of the Church since the early 16th c. what are your legitament reasons (against the mountains of pre-critical comment and theology) for criticizing or attacking the King James Bible and its underlying Greek text. To be legitimate the issue must show that the readings in either the Greek or English are not rationally permissible. Trying to make the case that  readings of the TR or King James Bible are not rationally permissiable is to be engaged in what Gaussen says is “wonderfully insignificant,” as if the Word, Spirit, with and though the saint are not infinitely superior Witnesses to the authority of Scripture.

Blessings!

Seven Characteristics of 2nd Century Church Fathers Regarding the Canon of Scripture – Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and Irenaeus

L. Gaussen, The Canon of the Holy Scriptures Examined in the Light of History, translated from the French and abridged by Edward N. Kirk (Boston: American Tract Society, 1862), 160-162.

[Note: The canon is one book. The New Testament is the succession of the Old Testament “of the same origin and equal authority.” The canonical books are inspired and to reject this truth is to “abandon the Christian church.” There was no sensed need for apologetics or polemics because of the united confession of the Church regarding the inspiration of the canon. Scripture was complete and the final authority for the Church — self-authenticating. Scripture is self-interpreting.]

1.These fathers do not confine themselves simply to quotations of the twenty books[1] of our first canon; they speak very frequently of the collection itself of these books as forming one entire book, a New Testament, which the church of their day has fully accepted, which she has united to the sacred oracles of the old covenant, and which she calls the Scripture, or the Scriptures, the New Instrument, The New Testament, the Lord’s Scriptures, (tas kuriakaV grafaiV,

Dominicas Scripturas,) the Divine Scriptures, (taV qeoV grafaV,) the Gospel, and the Apostle. For these fathers hold equally all the epistles as forming one single book, which they call the Apostle; and the four evangelists also as forming one single tetramorphous Gospel, (a gospel in four forms,) to which they join the Acts of the Apostles.

2. Another feature of their testimony is that they habitually associate the Old and the New Testaments as a succession of books of the same origin and of equal authority.

3. They invariably declare their faith in the divine and complete inspiration of all these Scriptures; they rank them with those of the other prophets; they distinguish them from every uninspired book, and from all pretended tradition which is not conformed to them; they call them “the oracles of God,” “the pillar and ground of the faith,” “the rule of truth,” “the theopneustic Scriptures,” “the perfect Scriptures,” “the Scriptures pronounced by the word of God and by his Spirit; ” and they declare of the sacred writers, that “they were all pneumataphores, (bearers of the Holy Spirit,) and all speak by one and the same Spirit of God.”

4. Moreover, they profess this perfect faith in the divine inspiration of all these books, in connection with the entire church; they present it as the faith common to every Christian in the world; they declare that to raise one’s self against this ecumenical rule of the truth is, in the view of each of them, no longer to belong to the Christian church; it is to abandon it, (exeuntes,) because there can be found in no cotemporary church the least dissent from it.

5. So calm and sure is their persuasion in this matter, so universally peaceful is this conviction among the Christians of their time, that you will never find them occupied with defending it. Why should they? The point is everywhere firmly settled; it is in every conscience that professes the truth; it is nowhere contested in the church of the second century; and you can nowhere hear against one of the twenty books of the canon a single one of those objections which are started by the biblical critics of our day. They hold them as the universal and uncontested code; when they adduce a passage to establish some disputed truth, it is always as when one puts a lamp in a dark place to reveal something that had been hidden. One may dispute with you about the object, but no one thinks of questioning the light; that is the same for everyone. The Scriptures, — they are the light. This confidence, common to everyone in the second century, is always taken for granted; they never demonstrate it. If I am speaking of the Rhone in Geneva, do I stop to prove that it runs through this city, and that you will find water there? Why, then, should these three doctors demonstrate to the men of their day that the river of Scripture runs through the city of God, and that you may there find abundance of the living waters of grace? They never do it. In all their folios, they discuss the biblical meaning of such and such a word, never its divinity; they profess to be the interpreters of the New Testament, never its defenders. Why should they defend it? No one in the church had attacked it; and if you will meet despisers of the Word, you must go out and search for them in the Roman schools of Cerdo, Marcion, or Valentinus.[2]

6. Still, a sixth feature is, that in religious matters everything is decided for them, and should be for the whole church as soon as it is known that the Scripture has spoken on it. “The Scriptures,” they say, “are a perfect revelation of Christian truth;” “their instruction is abundant,” (scripturarum tractatio plenissima,) “admitting neither of addition nor retrenchment.” “I adore,” they say, “the fullness of the Scriptures.” “Let no one,” they add, “teach anything, unless he can say of it, “It is written.” Let no one allege any tradition; for them there is none which can stand against the declarations of the written Word.[3]

7. Finally, they say, “It is to the Scriptures that every appeal must be made for explaining the Scriptures, (ap autwn peri autwn,) if we would arrive at the truth in a convincing manner (apodeiktikwV).”

[1] Gaussen, Canon, 26, 29. “It was, then, during the sixteen or seventeen years between the production of these first two books (a. d. 48,) and the death of Paul, (a. d. 64 or 65,) that almost all the other writings of the New Testament were produced; at least the twenty books which compose what we shall presently denominate the first canon, that is, the four gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the first thirteen epistles of Paul, the first of Peter, and the first of John.”…”We shall call the first canon (or first rule) the collection of the twenty books above enumerated; because, the first distributed during the lifetime of the apostles and by their own direction, they were immediately received by all Christendom, eastern and western, without having, from the beginning, and for eighteen centuries, their divine authority ever called in question by the Christian churches. This first canon of the undisputed books forms by itself eight ninths of the New Testament, if we count by verses, having 7059 out of 7959.”

[2] Leaders of three heretical sects, bearing their respective names, taught in Rome during the second half of the second century.

[3] These various expressions we shall meet again and indicate their places.

Inspiration, Preservation, Self-Attestation, and the Church: The Historic Grounds for Scripture’s Canonicity

L. Gaussen, The Canon of the Holy Scriptures Examined in the Light of History, translated from the French and abridged by Edward N. Kirk (Boston: American Tract Society, 1862), 96-100.

[Note: Inspired Scripture evidences the marks of its Divinity. That Scripture came from God is through the Word and Spirit made historically conspicuous to the Church, the sheep that hear the voice of the Shepherd. Gaussen’s research makes a compelling case that inspired Scripture itself is its own guarantee of canonical authority in the Church and guided the method of early Church canonical collation. At the foundation of any historically accurate description of the collation of the canon of Scripture lies the self-attestation of the Word, the leading of the Holy Spirit and the recognition and reception of the inspired Word by the Church.]

Many, too, speak of the canon as if its definitive form had been fixed by the councils, — the act of the church pronouncing decrees. This, too, is a mistake; nothing indeed is more contrary to the real facts; and this we must show now, although we must resume this point when we come to treat of the veritable foundation of our faith in the canon of the scriptures.

No human authority interfered in this matter. It was the pure and simple product of the conscience, of research, of freedom. The churches of God, enlightened by the mutual testimony of their members, judged in this case only by their own wisdom, under the secret and powerful direction of that Providence which will always watch over the written word. The universal reception of the first canon preceded all the councils; and these when they came together were occupied with every other question but that o& the canon. “We shall yet show with more precision, that the general councils never passed a decree on this subject for fourteen centuries; as we have already shown that even the two provincial councils of Laodicea and Carthage, too often cited, can no more be regarded as authority on the question before us.

Lardner[1] has demonstrated, by long quotations from the fathers, that the canon of the New Testament has in no degree been formed by human authority. Basnage[2] has given three chapters of his church history to this point. John Le Clerc[3] has said, “There has been no need of a council of grammarians to declare magisterially which are the works of Cicero or of Virgil. So, too, the authenticity of the Gospels was established, and has continued without any decree of the rulers of the church. We may say’ the same of the apostolical epistles, which owe all their authority, not to the decision of any ecclesiastical assembly, but to the concordant testimony of all Christians, and to the very character of their contents.” Augustine, too, thirteen centuries before Le Clerc, said, “We know the writings of the apostles as we know those of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Varro, and others; and as we know the writings of different ecclesiastical authors, because they have the testimony of their contemporaries and of the men who lived immediately after them.”

Let us content ourselves with remarking here that the ancient fathers, in their judgments on the canon, appealed only to the free and uninterrupted testimony of the churches, at the same time making an attentive examination of the books proposed for their acceptance. When they give us a catalogue, it is never as the fruit of their discoveries, nor as the decisions of any authority whatever; they report to us only the thoughts of the preceding ages; the free testimony of the primitive churches; that which they have received from their predecessors, by a transmission continued from the days of the apostles.

When Origen, born 142 years before the council of Nice, gives us his catalogue of the canonical Scriptures (twn endiaqhkwn grafwn), he appeals to no decisions of any council, but merely to the ancient men of the church (oi apcaioi andreV) and to tradition (wV en paradosei maqwv). It is Eusebius who has preserved his words to us, and who adds, in reporting his testimony on the four Gospels: “Origen preserves tradition and the ecclesiastical canon;[4] and he attests that there are but four Gospels, alone received without any contradiction by all the church of God which is under the heavens.”

Also Eusebius himself, when giving his opinion on the collection of books in the New Testament and on the distinction between the books universally received and those which are contested, refers neither to any authority nor council, and declares that he receives the canon from ecclesiastical tradition (kata thn ekklhsiastikhn praradosin).[5]

Thus Athanasius, born in 296, in giving his canon completely conformed to ours, attributes it ” to the transmission to the fathers by those who were eye-witnesses and ministers of the Word from the beginning;”[6] but he refers to no council, and gives us only what he calls books recognized as authoritative, transmitted and received as divine.

None of the authors, even of the centuries which followed, to the fourth, fifth, or sixth, ever appeals on this point to the decisions of any council. Thus, when Cyril, patriarch of Jerusalem, born twenty years after Athanasius, gives. us his catalogue of the theopneustic books (ai qeopneustoi Grafai), he refers to no council, and appeals only “to the apostles and ancient bishops who presided over the churches, and who have transmitted them to us.”[7] Thus, when Augustine, at the end of the same” century, or rather at the beginning of the fifth, wrote his directions to certain persons who had consulted him “on the books really canonical,” he appealed only” to the testimony of the different churches of Christendom, and referred to no council.[8] Thus when Rufinus, priest in Aquileia toward the year A. D. 340, gives us in his turn a catalogue (also exactly conformed to ours), he attributes it “only to the tradition of the ancients, who had transmitted them to the churches of Christ as divinely inspired;” and he declares that he gives it as he found it in the monuments of the fathers.[9]

And when Cassiodorus, Roman consul in the sixth century, gives us three catalogues of the New Testament (one of Jerome, one of Augustine, and one of an ancient version), he likewise makes no reference to any decree or any council.[10] Let us then hear no more about councils fixing authoritatively the canon of the Scriptures. This canon is undoubtedly fixed; but not by any authority of councils. God determined that Christians and churches, enlightened by the testimony of Christian generations, should form their own convictions on this subject, in complete freedom of judgment, in order that the authenticity of the sacred books might thereby be made the more manifest.

We shall hereafter examine this important fact from another point of view; but it should suffice us here to learn from these testimonies how erroneous and contrary to facts is the pretension of seeking the origin or the determination of the canon in any ecclesiastical decree.

[1] Supplement, 50-52; 2d part, torn, i.; edit. 8, torn. vi. pp. 325,381; torn, ii. pp. 325, 496, 529, 576; torn. viii. pp. 102, 225, 268; torn. x. pp. 193, 207, 208.

[2] Lib. viii. chap. v. vi. vii.

[3] In the years 29 and 100 of his Hist. Eccl

[4] Hist. Eccl. vi. 25.

[5] Hist. Eccl. iii. 25.

[6] Festal Epistle, xxxix.

[7] Catech. iv. 33.

[8] De Doct. Christ Lib. ii. vol. iii. part i. p. 47. Paris, 1836. (He began this book in 397, and finished it in 407.) See also Lardner, tom. x. p. 207.

[9] In Symbol. Apost. p. 26. “Quae secundum majorum traditionem per ipsum Spiritum Sanctum inspirata creduntur et ecclesiis Christi tradita, competens videatur in hoc loco evidenti numéro sicut ex Patrum monumentis accepimus designare.”

[10] Lardner, tom. xi. p. 303; Cassiod. De Instit. Divin. Litterar. cap. xi.

THE NOTION OF A CANON OF THE NEW TESTAMENT TRACED TO THE DAYS OF THE APOSTLES

L. Gaussen, The Canon of the Holy Scriptures Examined in the Light of History, translated from the French and abridged by Edward N. Kirk (Boston: American Tract Society, 1862), 18-23.

[Note: The essential truth of canonical collation was the recognition and reception by the Church as the Word of God. The canon of Scripture was not the result of ecclesiastical mandate, designation, or imposition but rather the canon shaped the Church. What follows is a historical accounting of this recognition and reception. Again, the reader should come to grips with the providential sequence God when giving His Word to the Church: 1. That the Word is self-attesting and self-authenticating because it was inspired. Inspiration grounds the recognition and reception of the canon. 2. Once recognized and received, the Church utilized the canon, didactically, apologetically teaching the Church and defending the Church against the influences of non-canonical, non-inspired documents.]

Before even consulting the ecclesiastical historians on this subject, we may already comprehend, from the nature of things, that the idea of a divine collection of the writings of the New Testament, must have early sprung up in all the communities of those who believed in Christ. Is it not evident that it must have originated as soon as these churches saw the men, “apostles and prophets,”[1] who announced to them the gospel with the Holy Spirit sent down from heaven,[2] beginning to write to them apostolical letters, or transmit to them the history of the Savior’s life and teachings?

In fact, they were entirely prepared for it by having in their hands the Old Testament. This collection, already formed for so many ages, and of the divinity of which there was never but one opinion among the Jews, as Josephus informs us;[3] this collection, venerated by the people of God in every age, venerated by the Apostles, who called it the oracles of God;[4] venerated by the Son of God himself, who called it the Law, your Law, the Scripture, the Scriptures; venerated by the Christian churches, who read it in all their assemblies; this collection, we say, must necessarily have led all their company to the notion of an. analogous collection of the sacred books of the New Testament.

Was not the idea of a canon of the scriptures the characteristic trait of the people of God for fifteen hundred years? Had it not always appeared to them from the beginning of their national existence, the very reason of their existence, and the indispensable means of its continuance? Yet, at the same time, this notion born in the desert with the Israelitish church, and always maintained by that church, had never been that of a code completed by one hand, or in one generation, or received in its fullness once for all. On the contrary, it was that of a collection commencing with the five books of Moses, and destined to grow from age to age; continued by the addition of new books, during eleven centuries, as God raised up new prophets, and not ceasing to accumulate its treasures to the days of Malachi, when the spirit of prophecy became silent for four centuries. It was then very natural that the church, at the coming of the Messiah, should look for new additions, since the ancient spirit of prophecy had just been restored to her, and since new men of God, “apostles and prophets,” more miraculously endowed than the ancients, had just been raised up. We may go farther; it was even impossible that she should not expect it. Was not the epoch of Christ’s advent much more important and solemn than that of his annunciation; were not the revelations more striking; the objects more divine; the promises richer; the prophets more powerful; the signs more marvelous?

Nor should we forget that the church has already begun in the synagogue and, for the first fifteen years of Christianity, contains no other than Jewish members. All her preachers and her first converts are Jews. At the last voyage Paul made to meet the converts in Jerusalem, the members of that church, mother of all the others, contained already many thousands, (Acts xxi. 20, posai muriadeV.) In all the cities of the Gentiles the apostles began their labors among the children of Israel. And there they constantly held in their hands the canon of the scriptures, and always repeated the words of Jesus, “Search the Scriptures,” (John V. 39.) Always they “expounded and testified. the kingdom of God, persuading them concerning Jesus, both out of the law of Moses, and out of the prophets,” (Acts xxviii. 23.) “Saying none other things than those which the prophets and Moses did say should come,” (Acts xxvi. 22.) And even although they did not directly quote from the sacred books, when preaching to pagan audiences, yet they were very careful to do it as soon as these had been brought to believe. We may select, as an instance, the salutation of Paul in closing his epistle to the Romans: “Now to him that is of power to establish you according to my gospel, and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery which is now made manifest by the Scriptures of the Prophets, according to the commandment of the everlasting God, made known to all nations, for the obedience of faith. To God only wise, be glory through Jesus Christ, for ever. Amen.”

So then if, on the one hand, the notion of a canon of the Scriptures was, as it were, incarnated in the people of God, if it was with them inseparable from the notion of the church; on the other hand, the thought of incorporating the not less sacred books of the New Testament with those of the Old, as they were written successively, was with them equally inseparable from their notion of the scriptures.

The history of primitive Christianity strongly confirms this view of the notion of the sacred canon then prevalent in the church. So far from being introduced at a later period, as has been asserted by some, we find it constantly, from the beginning, both in the church and in its enemies.

The evidence of this we shall produce at length, contenting ourselves here with a few quotations. Peter, in closing his career, in his Second Epistle, speaking of “all the epistles of Paul,” calls them ” the scriptures,” comparing or classing them with “the other scriptures.”[5]

From the beginning, the writings of the apostles were successively gathered into one collection, which was respected by the primitive Christians equally with the Old Testament, which they read in their religious meetings, and which, after Peter’s example, they called the Scriptures ; or after the example of the Fathers the Book, (ta Biblia,) the New Testament[6] the Divine Instrument,[7] the Sacred Digest,[8] the Divine Oracles; or again, the Evangelists and the Apostles;[9] after the example of Jesus Christ, who had called the Old Testament “the Law and the Prophets” They then early adopted the custom of calling it the Canon, or the Rule, and whatever constituted a portion of this infallible code, Canonical Books.

Irenceus, born in Greece A. D. 120 or 140, and martyred in A. D. 202, speaking of the Scriptures as divine, calls them the Rule, or the Canon of Truth (kanona thV alhqeiaV)[10] Tertullian, in the same century, opposing Valentinus to Marcion, both deep in the Gnostic heresy, toward A. D. 138, says of the former, that he at least appears to make use of a Complete Instrument, meaning the collection of the books of the New Testament then accepted by the church.[11] Clement of Alexandria, in the same century, speaking of a quotation taken from an apocryphal book, is indignant that any one should follow anything but “the true evangelical canon;” and Origen, born A. D. 183, careful, as Eusebius[12] remarks, to follow the ecclesiastical canon, ecclesiastical canon, ton ekklhsiastikon fulattwn kanona, “declares that he knows only the four Gospels, which alone, he adds, are admitted without contradiction in the universal church spread abroad under the whole heavens.” The same Origen, when giving us his catalogue of canonical Scriptures, calls them ai endiaqhkai grafai, the intestamented Scriptures,[13] that is, the books inserted in the New Testament. Athanasius in his Festal Epistle,[14] speaks of three kinds of books: the canonical, (which are those of our present Protestant Bible); the ecclesiastical, which were permitted to be read in the Christian meetings; and the apocryphal. And when, at a later period, the Council of Laodicea, A. D. 364, decreed that no other book than “the canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments ” should be read in the churches, far from originating the distinction between canonical and uncanonical books, this decree was but a sanctioning of the distinction long before adopted by the universal church.

Jerome also frequently speaks of the canon of Scripture. He says, for instance, “Ecclesiasticus, Judith, Tobit, the Pastor,… are not in the canon. The church permits the books of Judith, Tobit, and the Maccabees to be read, but she does not receive them as a part of the canonical Scriptures. The books of Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus may be read for the edification of the people, but not as authority for establishing doctrine.”[15]

Such is the origin of the notion of the canon, and such is its meaning.

[1] Eph. ii. 20.

[2] 1 Pet i. 12.

[3] Reply to Apion, Book I. chap. 2.

[4] Rom. iii. 2; Heb. v. 12; 1 Pet. iv. 11.

[5] 2 Pet. iii. 16. This testimony, whatever objections any may have to the canonicity of this Epistle, shows indisputably the antiquity of the usage which ranks the books of the New Testament with the Scriptures; for we shall hereafter establish the antiquity of this Epistle, even independently of its canonicity.

[6] See Lardner, vol. viii. p. 197. See, also, vol. ii. p. 529. Paul having given the name of Old Testament to the Book of Moses and the Prophets, it was altogether natural that they should give to the book of the Evangelists and Apostles the name of New Testament, and that they should call intestamented, or endiaqhhkouV, (Euseb. H. E. vi. 25,) the books admitted into the canon.

[7] Tertullian adv. Marcion, Lib. v. cap. 13.

[8] Ibid. Lib. iv. cap. 13.

[9] Clement of Alexandria, Strom, vii. pp. 706, 757. Ignatius, Ep. to the Philad. chap. v. Epis, to Diognet, chap. xi. Justin Martyr, Great Apol. chap. 67. Tertullian, de Graec. Script, chap. 36. Apol. chap. 39. Hippolitus the Martyr, on Antichrist, chap. 58.

[10] Adv. Heresies, Book iii. chap. 11; Book iv. chaps. 35, 69.

[11] Tertullian De Praescript. Hœretic. chaps. 30-38.

[12] Ecc. Hist. Book vi. chap. 25.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Chap, xxxix. vol. ii. p. 961, Benedict, edit, ta kanonizomena kai paradoqenta te Qeia enai

Bilblia.

[15] See, also, Lardner, vol. x. pp. 41, 43, 52.

The Transformative Moment for the Modern Church

L. Gaussen, The Canon of the Holy Scriptures Examined in the Light of History, translated from the French and abridged by Edward N. Kirk (Boston: American Tract Society, 1862), iii-vii.

[Note: This translator’s preface lays out in simple terms the pre-critical, historic, orthodox methodology for academic Bible research by succinctly describing the quintessential sequence for such a study: 1. Scripture’s self-attestation, and the teaching of the Holy Spirit, and secondarily, 2. Historical research. Reversing this sequence has submitted the Word of God to fallen men, who by their natures rebel against the cause of Christ, the result of this enmity generating a spirit of unbelief in the Church. Please be mindful that this is written only 19 years before the pretending Greek text of 1881 that has spurred a rebellion of unbelief. Within one generation, a great divide split the Church. Some remained true to their historic, orthodox roots while others, forsaking orthodox exegesis and theology cast off faith in God instead placing their faith in rationalism. And this division remains until this day. Considering the history Gaussen lived through and this transformative moment for the Church, is it not fair to ask, “Who really is on the Lord’s side?”]

The question examined in this work is, “What books or documents have a right to be placed in the Sacred Scriptures?” In other words, “What constitutes our Bible?” It was intended by the learned author as a sequel to the “Theopneusty,” published more than twenty years since. In the original, the work consists of two volumes, octavo; but, for the purpose of bringing it within a more moderate price, and thus gaining for it a wider circulation among all classes of readers, we have preferred to make some abridgment of it and condense the two volumes into one.

The argument in support of the claims of our Scriptures is presented by the author in a twofold form, called by him, The Method of Science, and the Method of Faith. The former of these is the one most commonly employed in the works which discuss this subject, showing the authenticity of the several books of our Scriptures, and their right — and theirs only — to a place in the Sacred Canon. The other, which is addressed to those who already receive them as divine, appeals to God’s guardian care of his Word, since the formation of the Canon, and the power of his grace working through it upon the hearts of men, as his own recognition of its genuineness and confirmation of its claims upon our faith. We have judged it best, for the reasons above stated, to give in the present volume the former part only.

It should be remembered, however, that important as the historical evidence on this subject is, it is nevertheless not that upon which the vast majority of believers accept the sacred volume as the Word of God. The latter rests on what is termed the Internal Evidence, or the self-witnessing of the Scriptures. It is the response which they compel from the soul of the reader himself to their truths and precepts. They axe felt to be divine, — a vital force in him who receives them, “quick and powerful, sharper than a two-edged sword, piercing to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.”

Our eloquent author, in the preface to his second volume, exhibits the value of this internal evidence with great force and beauty, showing that even science itself will fail of properly moving the heart, if there be not added to it this self-witnessing of the Word under the teachings of the Holy Spirit. Our space will permit us to cite but a few paragraphs.

“Our faith requires a support altogether more sure than that based on mere historical evidence. This is attested by the experience of pious men in every age and earnestly expressed in the most accredited of our confessions of faith. They say, “We know these books to be canonical, and the very sure rule of our faith, not so much by the common agreement of the Church, as by the testimony of the Holy Spirit.” (Conf. des Eglises Franc., Art. IV.)

In speaking thus, they did not pretend that this testimony to the Scriptures, given by the Holy Spirit in the heart of every Christian truly converted by them, would apply directly and equally to every book, chapter, and sentence in them. They meant merely, that for every Christian truly converted, the Bible is seen by the soul to be a miraculous book, a living and efficacious word, penetrating even to the dividing asunder of the soul and the spirit, and revealing to man the very secrets of his own heart; softening, persuading, subduing him with incomparable power. Certainly, never book spake like this book! It hath told me all that ever I did. “Whence knowest thou me. Lord? Surely, thou art the Son of God, thou art the king of Israel! From that time the soul cannot be mistaken. For it, this book, in whole or in part, is certainly from above. The seals of God Almighty are upon it. Now this “witness of the Spirit,” of which our fathers spake, which has been more or less recognized by every Christian when he has read his Bible with a living heart, — this testimony can at first be heard by him nowhere but in a page of the Scriptures; and that page has sufficed to shed an incomparable glory over the whole book. And as to the divine authenticity of each of its parts, the Christian reader has legitimate reasons, for remaining convinced that the inspiration of those passages in which the Holy Spirit does speak to him, guarantees the remainder, and that he can, moreover, rest in this matter upon the common agreement of the churches and on the faithfulness of God; because a principle of his faith authorizes him to recognize, in this common agreement, a work of divine wisdom. He will then consider the whole book as inspired, long before each of its parts may have been able by itself to prove its divine origin to him. Is it not thus that the naturalist proceeds, when he examines with the solar microscope in a living fish, a spot of the size of a pin’s point, and there contemplates fourteen streams of blood flowing constantly night and day in two opposite directions, and accomplishing with astonishing beauty the double prodigy of circulation; is it not thus, we say, that it suffices him to have had this spectacle under his eyes, to conclude from it very legitimately that this powerful mystery of the blood and the life is equally accomplished in the whole body?

While the Scriptures thus address themselves to our faith by their self-evidencing power, we are no less assured of their divine character, as preserved by God’s unceasing care, uncorrupted and complete, from age to age. This, as we have already intimated, is forcibly presented in our author’s argument in the second form, a summary of which is thus given in his own glowing and eloquent language: — “Faith contemplates that continued and manifestly divine action which, for twenty-three centuries, has employed the almost ever-rebellious people of the Jews to preserve the Canon of the Old Testament free from all mixture. He who has kept it twenty-three hundred years, faith says, cannot fail to keep to the end, by Christian people, the Canon of the New Testament. He of whom it is said that, after his ascension to heaven, he was still with his disciples, aiding them and confirming their testimony by signs and wonders (Mark xvi. 20), is not dead! No, it is he who lives; — and has promised (Matt, xxviii. 20) to be with them to the end of the world; that is, not with their persons, but with their testimony, and especially their books. He has not failed to keep his promise, in defending his Church against the gates of hell. He will not permit these gates, then, to prevail against the sacred books, which gave it birth and preserve its life. Faith says to herself, How shall the elect he saved, if they do not believe? How shall they believe, if the truth be not preached? How shall the truth be preached, if the books which contain it are not given? How shall they be given, if they are not preserved? God, then, in promising that his Church shall never perish, promises, also, that his Word shall never fail. Heaven and earth shall sooner perish!

Such are the thoughts, and such the confidence of faith, concerning the Canon. The reader should be notified in advance, that several of the technical terms employed by the author are considered too serviceable to be relinquished, and they will need no other explanation than this:

Theopneusty means Inspiration.

Canonicity, the right to a place in the Bible.

Apostolicity, the fact that an apostle wrote the book.

Paulinity, the fact that Paul wrote it.

Anagnosis, the public reading of the Scriptures.

Homologomens, uncontested books.

Antilegomens, contested books.

The Forgotten Promise of Providential Preservation

L. Gaussen, The Canon of the Holy Scriptures Examined in the Light of History, translated from the French and abridged by Edward N. Kirk (Boston: American Tract Society, 1862), 460-463.

{Note: Gaussen’s work concludes with the following short testimony of his findings attributing the canonicity of Scripture to inspiration and providential or miraculous preservation. This assessment so eloquently described by Gaussen is that truth besmirched by the Church and Academy alike. May that truth which has since the penning of the immediately inspired Scripture anchored the faith and practice of the saints once again find good ground in the hearts of God’s people producing a renewed faith and trust in the Word of God.]

We have, then, shown that the canon of the Old and New Testaments as we now have them constitutes the Word of God, the revelation from heaven, the supreme rule of faith and practice.

It has also appeared manifest that the very preservation of them can be explained, not by natural causes, but alone by the secret and continual intervention of the divine power. This preservation we have shown to be truly a miracle; divine power working against the natural tendencies of the human heart; a fact as miraculous as the preservation of the Jewish race itself for so many centuries, having no country, no national or even ecclesiastical bonds of union. We regard, then, the inviolability of the canon, like inspiration, to be a doctrine of our faith.

What striking facts, what powerful proofs have now passed before our eyes, all strongly demonstrating this silent and sovereign employment of the churches by God for the sure maintaining of his two Testaments!

And surely, if the gates of hell cannot prevail against the church, they cannot prevail against that Word on which the church is founded. What, in fact, should we be, and what would the church be, if God had not guaranteed his sacred volume against all alteration.

Moreover, all the more modern history of the canon agrees exactly with the first ways of God in regard to his written Word it is a harmonious and uninterrupted continuation of the miracle of thirty-three centuries in the preservation of the Old Testament. Has he who entrusted the ancient oracles to one people for a hundred generations, for eighteen centuries committed the new oracles, much more important, and given for the whole human race, to the care of no one? By no means. And we may say that the miracle of the churches, guardians of the new canon, is so completely a continuation of the miracle of the Jewish guardianship of the Old Testament, that the prodigy even presents a growing progression of harmony and beauty. In seeing it accomplished by the constant fidelity of the Jews, a fidelity which began before the Trojan war, and which has not ceased to this day, we might well conclude that, if it pleased God to give long afterward another series of sacred oracles to the Gentiles, he would choose from the midst of them other depositaries evidently charged with preserving this treasure even to the great day of Jesus Christ. And how much should our faith be strengthened by the fact that this second prodigy is accomplished with even more magnificence than the first!

Press the Bible, then, to your hearts. Christians of every rank and every age, your whole Bible. You have it from God.

Receive all it contains with the same affection, the same submission; the twenty-seven books which the Christian church gives you, as the twenty-two which you get from the Jews.[1] You hold the former from the Christian churches, you hold the latter from the Jews; but you get them from God, by their inspiration, and by their preservation. Say this often to yourself; there is a blessing in it. They cannot be read with profit unless they are read with reverence; they cannot be read with reverence if they are not read with a full conviction of their authenticity and their inspiration. It is by this Word, thus heard as descended from above, that you will obtain from God repentance, peace, adoption, joy, holiness, life eternal.

But to that end, Christian brethren, you must know your privilege; you must not only make a bold profession of it, but also avail yourselves of it with God and before all men; you must, supported on the doctrine of the canon, employ your sacred books with the same confidence that Christ and his apostles exercised toward the Old Testament; you must say with Christ, ” It is written.”

The same canon is clearly demonstrated to you; the seals of the living God are attached to it. Never forget it.

It is, unquestionably, within the heart that God attests the Scriptures for his elect with the incomparable seals of his Spirit; but you have seen, likewise, very clearly that God even seals them externally with his own seal, by means of the marvelous testimony of all the generations of the Jewish people and of all the generations of Christians in the earth.

Remember, therefore, Christian brethren, the miracle of the Scriptures, and of their divine preservation; hold your eyes open to these signs of God and ever keep yourselves from that guilty want of understanding and that fatal inattention with which Jesus reproached his disciples when they had forgotten the miracle of the bread. “Do ye not yet understand, neither remember? Have ye the heart yet hardened? Having eyes, see ye not? “

And why did they forget this miracle of the loaves? Alas! for the same reason that makes us too often forget the miracle of the Scriptures, and which should, on the contrary, render it more striking. Because the sign, really so full of grandeur, was, like that of the Scriptures now for thirty-four centuries, noiseless, without display, and calm, by natural means, the people being seated on the grass, and the apostles carrying the baskets from group to group. But surely it was not accidental that those five barley-loaves and those two fishes nourished five thousand men! And surely, too, it is not an accident that the sacred volume has been kept for thirty-four centuries, and that all the depositaries have universally and constantly been rendering the same testimony in order to enlighten, with the same light, all the elect of God! Certainly, the same cause accounts for both!

Christians, forget not the miracle of the bread! Never forget that of the Scriptures! Ministers of our churches, pastors of our learned congregations, and you humble evangelists, you, too, missionaries in Africa and Asia, go boldly to the most learned as to the most humble of your hearers ; go with this book of God, fearing not that they will ask you for the history of its canon, and without being troubled that the Old Testament has none. You know as much of it as Daniel, the prophet, as much as Paul, the apostle of the Gentiles. You know even more, since you possess the experience of many centuries, during which God has not ceased to keep his oracles entirely pure by the hands of the Jews. Go, then, boldly, as the prophet went to the synagogues of Babylon, or the apostle to those of Lycaonia; for you have the same evidence to show to establish the inviolableness of the sacred volume; and all that they could say, you can still say. “Behold the oracles of God committed to his people, — oracles so preserved as that one fragment of a letter has never perished; the Jews never swerved from their fidelity; they never betrayed this sacred trust ; not a book has ever perished from the sacred volume; their testimony never varies, notwithstanding their misfortunes and their crimes; never have they been reproached for altering the Scriptures.”

‘” Now to him that is of power to establish you according to the revelation of the mystery, which was kept secret since the world began, but now is made manifest, and by the Scriptures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the everlasting God, made known to all nations for the obedience of faith: to God only wise, be glory through Jesus Christ for ever. Amen.”

[1] Divided, we repeat, by us into thirty-nine books.

GENERAL CONCLUSIONS ON THE TOPIC OF CANONICITY

L. Gaussen, The Canon of the Holy Scriptures Examined in the Light of History, translated from the French and abridged by Edward N. Kirk (Boston: American Tract Society, 1862), 449-451.

Whoever ranks himself as a disciple of Christ must receive his testimony on the canon, as on every other subject. But we go farther than this. Not only must we, as Christians, receive the Old Testament just as it was when our Lord approved of it, but we should also see with admiration the hand of God in the preservation of the ancient canon.

“Whence came this marvelous concert of an entire race, otherwise so constantly in rebellion against God, this unanimous agreement of this people for three thousand years, in receiving and maintaining, with undeviating firmness, one only and the same canon of Scriptures? Certainly, it comes from God alone. But, at the same time, under this action from above, there must also have been a common thought, an established principle among this people in regard to the canon, a principle furnishing security to all, small and great, learned and unlearned, to the great Sanhedrin solemnly reporting to its king the oracle of Micah,[1] and the humble synagogue, to the poor Jews of the dispersion in Macedonia, daily searching with care the Scriptures of their canon (to kaq hmera anakrinonteV taV grafaV), to see if Paul’s doctrine was conformed to their teaching;[2] to the pious Jewish mother, married to a Greek of Asia Minor, who early trained her little son[3] in the knowledge of the true God, teaching him daily from the Holy Book.

Now, what was this common source of assurance to all the people of every grade of intelligence? It was not science, but faith in a doctrine, faith in God, faith in the “Word itself.” No one can doubt that the faith of the Jewish race in their religion was as rational as the faith men now have in modern science. But it was not founded in a knowledge of the history of the canon, such as we have concerning our New Testament canon. The canon of the Old Testament had no history. The Hebrews, in the time of Christ, possessing no literary monuments besides the Scriptures itself, could no demonstrate the authenticity of their sacred books by documents outside of the book itself, as we can that of the New Testament Their holy books came from too remote an antiquity to present a contemporary literature, or even a literature of ages subsequent, of any real weight. The writings of the old Greeks quoted by Josephus were too recent to have any importance as testimony; while those of the Egyptians, Assyrians, and Persians had no religious relations with the sacred literature of the Hebrews. They had, then, as a test of the Old Testament, only the Old Testament itself. Now, who could say, in the days of Josephus and of the apostles, any more than we can, by what human means Moses provided for the preservation of his books after they were placed in the holy ark (Deut. xxxi. 26)? By the priests? Josephus seems to think it was;[4] but who can affirm it? What prophet wrote the closing scenes of the Pentateuch, describing the death of Moses, his burial, the long mourning that followed it, and making this declaration: “And there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses?”[5] Joshua, do you say? That might be; but who knows? Who wrote Job? In a word, no one knows which of the prophets put the last hand to the twenty-two books of the Old Testament to give them to the church for all future time. There are many conjectures; but who knows?

And if you do not know the authors of all these Scriptures, it is entirely sufficient to be able to say, with Jesua Christ, that they were prophets.

All the elements of science for the canon of the Old Testament, then, are wanting. Yet the faith of the Jewish church was more solidly founded than on the basis of science. It was founded on the declarations of God, his character and his acts. They knew that he had given them these Scriptures, and had preserved them, because he is faithful. ‘And if you had lived in the days of Jesus Christ, a faithful Israelite, you would have believed with all the Jews, and with Christ, in the canon of the Scriptures. And if you had doubted the canon, Jesus would have said to you as to the – Sadducees: “Do ye not therefore err, because ye know not the Scriptures of God?” (Mark xii. 24.)

Our faith in the Old Testament, as we have seen, is founded on the testimony of him who is above Moses and all the prophets, and on the testimony of his inspired apostles, in addition to all that sustained the faith of the ancient Jews in these sacred oracles. Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ, explains to us the mystery of the preservation of that canon. He tells that God gave it in trust to the Jews (episteuQhsan ta logia tou Qeou). And the whole of their miraculous history is but a suitable accompaniment of so sacred a charge, and was an indispensable means of securing to the world the preservation of these sacred documents.

[1] Matt. ii. 6.

[2] Acts xvii. 11.

[3] apo brefouV. 2 Tim. iii. 15.

[4] Against Apion, Lib. i. chap. 2.

[5] Deut. xxxiv. 10.

DEFINITION OF CANON: WHAT IS INSPIRED

L. Gaussen, The Canon of the Holy Scriptures Examined in the Light of History, translated from the French and abridged by Edward N. Kirk (Boston: American Tract Society, 1862), 17-18.

The term Canon, as employed in this sense, is traced back to a remote antiquity. In Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, the words קָנֶה (qaneh), kannh, kanna, kanwn, canna, having the same origin, signify literally a reed, a straight rod, a cane, a measure, a rule; and more especially, kanwn, in a metaphorical sense, signifies every straight and. perfect rule. In the proper sense of this word, the terms cane and cannon, in the Middle Ages, were applied to tubes intended to regulate, or render right or straight, the direction of projectiles thrown by the explosion of powder.[1] Paul thus says to the Galatians, (Gal. vi. 1 6,) “As many as walk according to this, rule, (kanwn) peace be on them.” And to the Philippians, (Phil. iii. 16,) “Let us walk by the same rule,” (kanwn.)

Even in the times of the apostles, the old grammarians of Alexandria made use of the same term to designate model authors, making rules in literature; so that the ecclesiastical writers early employed it to mean sometimes Christian doctrine, the rule of our life; sometimes, the divine book, the only rule of our faith; sometimes, in fine, the catalogue of the sacred books composing this rule. This became at length its almost exclusive religious meaning.[2]

[1] The application of this word to an instrument of war commenced in Italy. It was there called cannone, or grande canna.

[2] It should, however, be remarked, to avoid all mistake in examining the writings of the Fathers, that while they had a distinct and definite catalogue of books, which they regarded as inspired, and as distinguished from the apocryphal or uninspired, but which were allowed to be read in churches, yet they did not at first agree in their use of the term canon. From a varied application of it to lists of clergymen, and even of church furniture, it came in the fourth century to be applied, as now, to the catalogue of Scriptures. But then it will be found that some time elapsed before Jerome’s use of the term canonical, as being coextensive with inspired was generally adopted. — Tr.

THE TESTIMONY OF JESUS CHRIST TO THE CANON OF HOLY SCRIPTURE

L. Gaussen, The Canon of the Holy Scriptures Examined in the Light of History, translated from the French and abridged by Edward N. Kirk (Boston: American Tract Society, 1862), 445-447.

[It is important to note that in every instance Christ, by citing the extant copies of the Old Testament (apographa), Divinely authenticates the current 1st c Hebrew text. The same is also true of the New Testament penmen when referring to the Old Testament. There is no time in which either the Lord or the New Testament penman possessed the Old Testament autographs. The providential preservation of Scripture must be embraced as a necessary and component part of the ministry of Jesus Christ.]

“We here invoke the testimony of the “Amen, the faithful and true Witness.” “What did the Immanuel, “the God of the holy prophets ” (Rev. xxii. 6), think of the Old Testament, and how did he treat it?

Never did he put its integrity or legitimacy in doubt; never did he manifest the least hesitation in regard to the divine authenticity of any of the twenty-two books of which it is composed; he has quoted from all or almost all of them with his own lips. Who then can discern the spirit of the prophets, if not he whose eternal Spirit quickened them all? (1 Pet. i. 11.) Who shall better tell us if such or such a book is from God or from man? “Chief, shepherd of the sheep by the blood of the everlasting covenant,” he has come to dwell among men; but who shall discern more correctly than he the voice of his own messengers from that of strangers and robbers? (John x. 5, 8.)

Now, we have heard him preaching these Scriptures himself; we have seen him take from the hand of the Jews in their synagogues the sacred scroll or volume as they extended it to him, opening it, and exclaiming before them all, “In the volume of the Book it is written of me!” We have heard him exclaim at their festival: “Search the Scriptures, for in them ye think ye have eternal life.” (John v. 39.) We have, indeed, seen him go from one end to the other, explaining it: “beginning at Moses and all the prophets, expounding in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself;” (Luke xxiv. 27, 44.) Did he ever reproach the Jews or having altered the Scriptures? Never. He reproached them for constantly resisting the Scriptures, never for altering them. They were left to commit every crime but that. They rejected God, committed abominations with their infamous gods, and made their children pass through the fire; but never were they guilty of the crime so easily committed, of changing the Scriptures and introducing into them false books.’

All the course of Christ as Son of man attests thus that no human teacher ever thought more respectfully of the sacred volume than he. Whichever of its twenty-two books he quotes, it is always for him God who speaks. This book is the rule of his life; it is to this entire book that he conforms his holy humanity, and would have us conform ours, to be saved. The least word of this book possesses in his view an authority more permanent than the heavens and the earth. When he seeks to convince the Sadducees and Pharisees, now he proves the resurrection to them by one single word from Exodus;[1] now the true doctrine of marriage, by a single word from Genesis;[2] now his own divinity, by a single word from the Psalm cx., or another from the eighty-second; and again, before uttering it, he interrupts himself to exclaim: “And the Scriptures can not be broken!”[3] When he begins his ministry he already knows the Scriptures without having studied them.[4] When he contends with Satan, he three times strikes him with “the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.” He says to Satan three times: “It is written.” Finishing his ministry on the cross, he again repeats the twenty-second Psalm; and when he resumes it after the resurrection, for some days, he still is engaged in explaining the Scriptures,[5] “beginning at Moses and all the prophets and the Psalms.” In a word, he quotes, as from God, Genesis,[6] Exodus,[7] Leviticus,[8] Numbers,[9] Deuteronomy,[10] Samuel,[11] Kings,[12] Jonah,[13] Daniel,[14] Isaiah,[15] Hosea,[16] Jeremiah,[17] Psalms viii., xxii., xxxv., xxxi., xli., lxix., lxxxiii, xci., cx., cxviii.,[18] and he quoted them, saying: “Have you not read the words of David, speaking by the Holy Spirit? Have you not read what God spake by the mouth of David?”

We see, then, how our Lord regarded the canon of the Old Testament. This was his science on this point, his sacred criticism: to receive all the Holy Scriptures of the Jews; to call them all in their detail, as in a body, the Law;[19] and to declare, “It is easier for heaven and earth to pass, than one tittle of the law to fail.”[20]

[1] Ex. iii. 6; 2. Matt. xxii.

[2] Matt. xix.4; Gen. i. 27.

[3] Matt. xxii. 43; John x. 27, 35.

[4] John vii. 15.

[5] Luke xxiv. 27.

[6] Matt. xix. 4.

[7] Matt.xxii.32, 37

[8] Matt, v. 22, 43.

[9] Matt. v. 33.

[10] Mark xii. 29; Luke x. 7, 27; John viii. 5, 7.

[11] Matt. xii. 3; Mark ii. 25; Luke vi. 24.

[12] Matt. xii. 42; Luke xi. 31.

[13] Matt. xii. 40.

[14] Matt. xxiv. 15; Mark xiii. 14.

[15] Matt. viii. 14; xv. 7, 8; xxi. 5.

[16] Matt. ix. 13.

[17] Matt. xxi. 13; Luke xix. 46.

[18] Matt. xxi. 16; John xix. 24; xv. 25; Luke xxiii. 46; John xiii. 18; John xv. 25; x. 34; Matt. iv. 6; Matt. xxii. 44; xxi. 42.

[19] John x. 34; xii. 34; Rom. ii. 14.

[20] Luke xvi. 17; Matt. v. 18.

L. Gaussen’s Preface to “The Canon of Holy Scripture” (1863)

PREFACE

In publishing this work, I am actuated by the threefold consideration— of the real importance of the subject, of its being accessible to every class of readers, and of the very luminous aspect it presents when closely studied. It is only obscure at a distance; and if to some persons it seems beset with difficulty and uncertainty, it is only owing to their imperfect knowledge, or bad method of studying it. I was not aware that it was so intelligible till I had examined it with great attention.

For this reason I thought it my duty, in consequence of the very numerous and severe attacks made on the certainty of the canon, to treat it at large for the use of our theological students; and since that I have felt it desirable to introduce it to the knowledge of our churches.

With this view I have endeavored to write a book that will be sufficiently intelligible to every serious reader; and it has been my desire, that all unlettered Christians who may have been disturbed by these attacks of modem infidelity, may feel themselves, on reading it, confirmed in their faith.

It is impossible to treat such a subject usefully, — at least from an historical point of view, — without adducing numerous testimonies from the fathers, with quotations from their writings, both Greek and Latin. But I have made it a rule always to translate those passages, and never to appeal to any of the ancient doctors, either of the West or East, without giving some brief notice of his character, his principal writings, and his place in history.

I publish these volumes as a complement of that which I brought out, almost twenty years ago, on the inspiration of the Scriptures. That work would have been incomplete unless accompanied by a treatise on the canon; for its readers, even those who were most thoroughly convinced, might always object, after having heard me prove by all Scripture that all Scripture was divinely inspired, that it still remained to be proved whether Daniel, or Esther, or Canticles, or any other book of the Old Testament, belonged to this inspired Scripture — whether the Epistle of Jude, or that of James, or the Second Epistle of Peter, or the Second and Third of John, or any other book commonly included in the New Testament, legitimately formed a part of it — or whether there was sufficient certainty that all the apocryphal books ought to be absolutely excluded.

As long as these questions are not clearly solved, our privilege of possessing an inspired Bible remains illusory, or is at least compromised; we have a feeling of insecurity in its use; we cannot clearly discern all its pages; a depressing cloud of uncertainty floats over our heads between heaven and earth; and though carrying in our hands a volume denominated the Scriptures, we proceed with tottering steps.

But, blessed be God! my Christian brethren, this is not your position; the God of the holy prophets has prepared better things for His believing people.

Your proofs are abundant, and, as we are about to shew, you have also divine guarantees. If your confidence in those Scriptures, which constitute the rule and joy of your faith, rests, on one side, on the most solid human reasons, on the other, it is invited to support itself by the strongest divine reasons. On the one hand, there are facts, documents, monuments, historical testimonies — testimonies clear, numerous, certain, and sufficient — such as no human composition under heaven ever possessed. On the other hand, you have something still more simple and absolute; your confidence has for its foundation the firmest principles of faith — an infallible guarantee, — the constant judgment of saints and prophets, the invariable procedure of God in all His revelations during fourteen centuries, and the example of Jesus Christ Himself — in a word, the wisdom of God — the harmony, the constancy, and the faithfulness of His ways.

I propose, then, to demonstrate, by arguments purely historical, in the First Part, to all unbelievers, the authenticity of all the scriptures of the New Testament, as might be done, if the question concerned only purely a human work.

Besides this, I propose, with the Lord’s assistance, to establish in the Second Part, and to believers only, the canonicity of all the scriptures of both Testaments, as may be done most satisfactorily for every man who is already convinced that inspired books exist, and that God, having revealed Himself from heaven by the prophets at sundry times, and in divers manners, for 1400 years, has in these last days spoken to us, in the person of His Son, by His apostles and evangelists.

These two classes of proof have each their distinct place and function ; and while I think that we are under great obligations to all those defenders of the canon who have treated the subject with a view to unbelievers, for the historic proofs they have collected in such abundance, I am still deeply convinced that, in confining themselves to this office, they have ignored their privileges, and proceeded in part on a wrong track, losing sight of the example of the Redeemer, forgetting the lessons taught by past ages, and thus neglecting the most important and interesting part of their vocation.

To give a clearer idea of the character and design of this work, I would beg leave to state the reason that induced me to publish it.

I had first of all written, in 1851 and 1852, for the use of our evangelical School of Theology, the second part of this work, and it was not till a later period, in 1853 and 1854, that I conceived the design of adding what is now the first. When we founded in Geneva, twenty-nine years ago, a School of Theology, for the purpose of elevating the long-depressed banner of the Savior’s divinity, and the great doctrines connected with it, in the Church of our fathers, I charged myself with the doctrinal instruction. But, in performing my task, I felt no need for many years of discussing to any extent either the canonicity or divine inspiration of the Scriptures.

We attended to what was most urgent, and those truths had not then been publicly called in question by any person in our immediate vicinity. As to myself, in my early years, and during my studies, though very anxious to settle my faith on a satisfactory basis, I never experienced any wavering on these two points. Since Jesus Christ, my Lord and my God, “created all things in heaven and earth, and by him all things subsist,” (Col. i. 16), I said to myself, how could I doubt that He has taken care of His own revelations, whether in giving them at first, or in their subsequent preservation and transmission? Our only business was to study them for the purpose of regulating each one’s faith, and conscience, and life. Besides, we invited to our school none but young men who had already owned the authority of the Scriptures, and who were esteemed truly pious, as having experienced in their souls something of “the good word of God and the powers of the world to come.”

We directed our attention in the first place, as I have said, to what was most urgent; we were eager to reach those vital truths, on the reception of which the stability of a church depends, and without which it falls.

Mere logical arrangement would have led us to give every question its exact place in a course of theology ; but it was evident that the greatest attention should be given to those doctrines which had been long disregarded, and too often assailed, which convince men of sin, lead to the feet of Jesus, and keep them there, — I mean, the divinity of the Son of man and His everlasting priesthood, the fall of humanity and its entire ruin, the election of believers from all eternity, their redemption by the expiation of the cross, their regeneration by the Spirit of God, their complete justification by faith alone, and, lastly, their resurrection from the dust to a life of glory and immortality.

But if these evangelical doctrines belong to all times alike, and their exposition is always in season, if the Church of God cannot dispense with them even for a day, the case is different with refutations and apologies.

These latter are not necessary, nor even beneficial, excepting at a time when the want of them is felt. Till that moment arrives, they may do our minds more harm than good, like remedies for bodily disorders administered before the malady exists. They suggest doubts that would never have been suspected they raise unknown difficulties and objections of foreign origin, which, but for them, would never have entered our thoughts. For a hunting party to beat about a district for wild boars would be of no use unless it was ravaged by them  it would be injurious if there were none in the country; and it would be foolish and criminal if, for the sake of the sport, the animals were imported from a foreign land. Who can estimate, for example, all the mischief that has been often done in our churches by the young translators of those German works which have exhibited systems of skepticism, negation, and heresy, to which previously we had been total strangers, and which we have often seen propagated here long after they had ceased to be spoken of in the country of their birth.

It has been justly remarked of apologetics, that it must be remodeled every thirty years, because its wants change from one generation to another; the apologetics of today is no longer that which our fathers required, nor is it that which will meet the wants of our children.

In reference to the canonicity and divine inspiration of the Scriptures, I have arrived at the conclusion that it is highly important to discuss these subjects henceforward with greater fulness. The number of our opponents, the perfectly novel tactics of their infidelity, and the spirit of their attacks on the written Word, make this a duty on our part, almost a necessity. In former times this need was not felt among us, as may be easily inferred from the very small space allotted to these questions by our best theological writers — Calvin, Francis Turretine, Pictet, and Stapfer, in their largest and most accredited treatises. But in the present day a great change has come over us, and we are condemned to see a totally novel warfare, no longer carried on from without against the Scriptures, but from within, and by men who profess to be, like ourselves, representatives of Christianity.

This kind of warfare is very pernicious; our fathers were not acquainted with it, or, at least, it never assailed them, excepting by short skirmishes, or by isolated attacks on one or other of our sacred books. In the present day, the enemy is drawn up in battle-array against the whole of the Scriptures. Since the first third of the nineteenth century, we have seen almost all the opponents of the living truth vie with each other in efforts, not only, as heretofore, against this or the other vital doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures, but against the depository of them all. For a time they leave undisturbed the distinctive teachings of the written Word as beneath their notice, in order to attack the volume in which God has given them to us. It is no longer the contents that are put upon their trial; of these our opponents think they can easily get rid, if they succeed in accomplishing the task of discrediting and demolishing the Scriptures. Their aim is directed against the depository, the entire volume, of revelation. Nothing is neglected which may render it suspected, uncertain, contradictory, mean, and tainted with error; — in a word, contemptible as a whole and in all its parts. They will deny its authority, its inspiration, its integrity; they will deny the canonicity of each book; — in short, they will deny its authenticity, its veracity, its good sense, and even its morality!

But the most novel feature of this warfare, the most ill-omened, the most threatening in its immediate effect on our churches, and one which never appeared but in the second and third centuries.is that this crusade against the Scriptures is carried on in the name of a certain kind of Christianity.

During thirty-three centuries, was a man of God ever seen decrying the Scriptures of God, a pious Israelite decrying the Old Testament, or a Christian decrying the books of the men (the apostles and prophets) who wrote the New Testament? No, this was never seen!

“The righteous man,” in all ages, has always distinguished himself from the rest of mankind by his reverence for the Sacred Volume; and a true Christian, from the moment of his new birth, has always thirsted for it, as an infant for its mother’s milk, to sustain and strengthen him. It is an apostolic injunction, “As new-born babes, desire the sincere milk of the Word, that ye may grow thereby,” (1 Pet. ii. 2.)

“The righteous man,” David said twenty-nine centuries ago, ” takes his delight in this holy law, and he meditates in it day and night,” (Ps. i. 2.) By this sign he is recognized in the present day; by this sign he has been recognized in all ages of the world. “O how I love Thy law! it is my meditation all the day;” “it is sweeter than honey to my mouth.” “I love Thy commandments above gold;” “the entrance of Thy word giveth light; it maketh wise the simple.” “God has magnified his word above all his name.”[1]

But in the present day, by whom is this warfare against the Scriptures carried on? ” Behold, heaven and earth, and be astonished!”

In former ages, and for 1600 years, such attacks proceeded only from the most inveterate enemies of the Christian name. The present times remind us of the disastrous days of those ancient Gnostics who caused such grief to the faithful ministers of the second century. In our day, these attacks come from persons whom men of the world might suppose to belong to our own ranks, — persons who call themselves members of a Protestant church, and are in many instances ministers of the Word. They profess to speak in the name of science, and to attack our Scriptures only to defend the interests of a Christ whom they have made, and of divine truth shaped in accordance with their own conceptions.

And yet, what do we know in religion unless by means of the Bible, and what do they themselves know? Let one of our opponents point out a truth, — yes! only a single truth relating to God the Father, or to His only Son, to the eternal Spirit, to the resurrection of the dead, to the future world, to the last judgment, to heaven or hell or immortality, — yes I say a single truth which their philosophy has gained, or which has been discovered in their school independently of the oracles of God. But men of this stamp pervert all the principles of religion, as Calvin remarks, “by quitting the Scriptures to go in chase of their own fancies.”[2]

“God hath made foolish the wisdom of this world,” says St Paul; “for after that, in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe,” (1 Cor. 1:21.)

It is this book of “the preaching “which alone has changed the face of the world. It alone causes a soul to pass from death into life. It alone, in these latter days, has brought more than one tribe of cannibals out of darkness into light. Let them shew us any other volume — from the times of Confucius, Plato, or Aristotle to those of Mohammed, (apart from his sword,) Voltaire, Bayle, Bonssean, Hegel or Cousan — which has ever, in any country, reclaimed, by its science, its morals, or its philosophy, a village, only a single village, from idolatry to the service of God.

Is it not written, ”Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? (Pou sofoV; tou grannateuV;)” Where are they, and what have they done. This is the interrogation of the apostle.[3]

The warfare carried on in our days against the Scriptures is as strange as it is pernicious, and the friends of God ought to be roused to exert themselves to the utmost to counteract its pernicious effects.

Pernicious! Alas! it has already been too much so for those who have engaged in it. None can be arrested on this dangerous path, unless by the extraordinary grace of Grod; for the Holy Word, when thus despised, cannot transmit a ray of light to their souls; on the contrary, the contempt they entertain for it gives birth to fresh contempt, and the night preferred to the light becomes more intensely dark

“O Timothy,” says St Paul, “keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called: which some professing, have erred concerning the faith,” (1 Tim. vi 20, 21.) “These profane and vain babblings,” says he again, “will increase unto more ungodliness,” (2 Tim. ii 16.) Here is the danger, the awful danger of this warfare for those who engage in it! “Their word will eat, as doth a canker.” “They wax worse and worse,” Paul adds, “(prokyousiv epi to ceiron),” “misleading and misled” — misleading souls out of the path of immortality, after having been first misled themselves; for such is the twofold woe that attends the fatal declivity of their course, ”misleading and misled, (“plavwnteV kai planwmenoi!)”

But if it is a just cause for sorrow to see misled men avow themselves unhesitatingly the detractors of that Bible on which alone the whole Church is founded, and by which alone Christianity subsists, there is in this warfare something still more distressing— namely, the mischief it effects among our people in general, and which may be effected in our churches, even among our most pious communities.

As to our people in general, numberless facts speak too loudly. We are reminded by them of Paul’s words respecting the Israelites in the wilderness, who ” could not enter into God’s rest because of their unbelief.” And whence this unbelief? Because, as he says, “the word preached to them did not profit.” And why did it not profit? Because “it was not mixed with faith in them that heard it.” But how, I ask — how can the word preached to our Protestant populations be mixed with faith in minds to whom it will appear suspicious and contemptible, in consequence of the disparaging terms applied to the oracles of God, and the flat contradictions given to their contents? What! (it will be said to them,) do you believe that this collection of scriptures which is offered you is indeed from God? Do you not know that the books of which it consists are of an uncertain number? — that some are apocryphal, some are doubtful, some are absolute forgeries? And again, of those which may be authentic, do you imagine that every part is inspired? Contradictions are palpable in them, errors abound, and the prejudices of the age may be detected page after page!

How, I ask, can the word be “mixed with faith “among the persons who are, unhappily, exposed to these suggestions of the tempter, and filled by him with prejudices and feelings of contempt against the Scriptures? No! these “profane and vain babblings, “as the apostle says, “overthrow the faith” of many; or, rather, they prevent its birth; they render it impossible!

Will it be said that the Scripture cannot be destitute of power? Is it not powerful, by its divine energy, “to cast down in the human heart every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God?” Is it not “a hammer breaking the rock in pieces?” Is it not “a two-edged sword, piercing to the dividing asunder the joints and marrow?” Yes, it is all this, but only for those who hear it, and who expect to gain something from it. And how can it be all this for those who despise it, and do not believe that it comes from God? Without reverence, there can be no attention; and without attention, no means of being touched; and without all this, there can be no faith, no communion possible with God, no efficacy in the blood of the cross, no salvation, no life.

And yet, as I have said, this is not all. The mischief will not be confined to those men of the world whom we have desired to conduct to Jesus Christ, but whose prejudices keep them at a distance from Him. It will be felt in our churches, and among the most pious of our members.

It may be thought, perhaps, that these attacks will entail little danger on believers, who, nourished by the Scriptures, know by experience what they are, and what they can do. But we must not hope that it will be always so. Even for such persons, this warfare is not without its perils. Oftentimes it will lower the standard of piety and faith, by lowering in their minds the majesty of the Scriptures; for it can never be without some deteriorating effect for even those who are most confirmed in the faith to hear repeated depreciating suggestions against one and another of our sacred books, if these suggestions are not combated as often as they are brought forward. However ill-founded they may be, if repeated without being put down, they exert an enervating influence on the mind, even when, without accepting them, and yet, without having learnt how to refute them, the unfortunate habit has been acquired of letting them pass without decided opposition. Hence persons are led to believe that, while rejecting them themselves, other Christians may admit them without damaging their Christianity. These charges and obscurities respecting the canon of the Scriptures often circulated in the neighborhood of our churches without being noticed by our sentinels, at last settle over them in the atmosphere like a pestilential miasma, which even the healthiest frames cannot pass through and inhale without some injury. Perhaps, at last, tired of resistance, and with defective information, they will come to regard these injurious reports as the distant and mysterious echoes of an unknown and superior science, which it would be rash to think of combating, or of attempting to refute.

And hence what baneful consequences! The weakening of faith ; diminished taste for the study of the Scriptures ; less thirst for their use ; less humble submission to regulate the life by them ; less labour to fathom them, and to explore their depths ; less jealousy for purity of doctrine; for, as Calvin has said, “We cannot have firm faith in a doctrine till we are persuaded, without any mixture of doubt, that God is its author.”

It was in the beginning of the year 1850 that a sudden opposition against the authority and authenticity of the Scriptures first broke out at Geneva, in our own theological school, among half a score of Belgian, French, and Canadian students.

The cause of it was for us as painful as it was unexpected, and the subsequent disturbance occasioned by it in the churches was also very serious. But the school had passed through such storms more than once; it had combated them by the divine Word; and experience not less than faith had taught us to confide during the tempest in the faithfulness of the Most High, who made it serve in the final issue for the confirmation of the truth. When the calm was restored, we were able to acknowledge with gratitude that the Lord had permitted these days of trouble only to purify an institution consecrated to His service, to lead us to study more closely the foundations of our faith, and to confirm on some essential points the students and the professors, the pastor.! and their flocks.

The declarations of these young men were of such a nature that we should have felt it our duty on any other occasion to have dismissed them immediately from our institution. We had admitted them only to prepare them for preaching the Word of life, and if henceforth they rejected that Word — its inspiration, its authenticity, its authority — what was there in common between them and ourselves?

But we took a different view. We believed that we owed them some reparation, because the evil done to themselves had taken place when under our care, and we conceived that, under these circumstances, we ought not to send any of them away till we had taken pains by fresh efforts to bring them back, if possible, to own the authority of the Scriptures.

We took our part in this important task, and from this moment, I mean, from the beginning of the year 1850, I made it my study to point out to them the true path of faith in relation to the canon, in a series of propositions.

These propositions established the doctrine of the canon by God’s method of proceeding during all the ages of the Old Testament, by the example of Jesus Christ, and by the Divine declarations; then they confirmed the meaning of these declarations by a twofold collection of numerous, indisputable facts, extending through many ages. This performance was, moreover, accompanied by a history of the canon, and more particularly of the controverted books. The second part of this work contains the series of these first propositions, expanded in some parts, and in others compressed.

After finishing my first course, and on the point of resuming the series of my propositions for the use of a fresh class of young theologians, particularly those that demonstrate the dogma of the canon a posteriori, I was struck with the evidence of the facts which constitute this proof — historical facts, exceptional, astonishing, and inexplicable, apart from a Divine intervention, — facts, moreover, very rarely appealed to or known. I believed their publication would be useful.

I have since learned, from the language of our opponents, that, before presenting to the world our arguments of faith, it would be indispensable, in order to render the reader attentive and docile, to make a succinct statement of the facts and testimonies relating to the history of the canon, to place before him the objections of opponents, in order to consider them more closely, and to place him in a position for consulting by himself the most important remains of patristic literature. I also conceived that it would be desirable to make it evident that, judging of the canon only by the ordinary rules which in the republic of letters decide the authenticity of a book, the unanimity of the Churches throughout the world has given to our Sacred Volume, as far as regards its twenty-two homologoumena, a certainty unparalleled in the field of ancient literature.

To gain the reader’s attention to our reasons of faith, I have thought it necessary that, in hearing them, it should never enter his thoughts that we proposed them, because we dared not to look in the face the facts of history and the objections of science. On the contrary, we have gathered from these facts new reasons for belief, — reasons clear, manifold, and invincible.

This work would probably have appeared much sooner, had not the hand of God laid me on a bed of suffering for two years in succession by two very serious accidents, which rendered me for a long time almost incapable of continuous application.

I commend to the blessing of God, through Jesus Christ, a task out of the usual course of my studies, but undertaken for the sole object of serving Him.

May 5, 1862

L. Gaussen, D.D., The Canon of Holy Scripture from the Double Point of View of Science and of Faith, 3rd ed. (London: James Nisbet and Co., 21 Berners Street, 1863), Preface, v-xviii.

[1] Psalms. cxix. 97, 103, 127, 130, cxxxviii. 2.

[2] Institution Chretieene, tom. L, p. 3, Paris, 1859.

[3] 1 Cor. 1:19, 20.