In this engaging episode, Steve examines the authorship of the Book of Hebrews, discussing potential candidates including Paul and Barnabas, and the cultural significance of the text. Later, listeners are invited to consider whether the apostolic decision to choose Matthias to replace Judas was divinely ordained or human error. Join the conversation as Steve navigates these theological curiosities, offering insights and historical context that enrich our understanding of scripture.
SPEAKER 1 :
Thank you.
SPEAKER 02 :
Good afternoon and welcome to the Narrow Path Radio Broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg and we’re live for an hour each weekday afternoon so that we can have phone calls from you through the entire hour. You can call in with questions you have about the Bible or the Christian faith. Any questions, welcome. If you have difference of opinion from the host, and I’ll let you in on a little secret. Everybody does. Everybody has a difference of opinion with this host about something. Or at least they should. Because, you know, my definition of a cult is two people who agree about everything. And when you have two people who agree about everything, one of them is not thinking, and the other is thinking for them. And that’s not something that I think is healthy. That’s what cults are. Cults are made up of people who let somebody else think for them. Now, whoever it is that they let think for them might be their pastor, might be a cult leader, might be a broadcaster. And if there are people who let me think for you, you need to get over that. You need to think for yourself. Because I’ll tell you something. I’m not always right. How do I know that? Well, obviously, I don’t know what I’m not right about. But I do know that I have been wrong many times on things that I’ve had to change my mind about. And, you know, basically just calculating the odds, there’s got to be a number of things wrong. that I will probably see more clearly if I live long enough in the future and I’ll have to change maybe some of my own thoughts. You might say, well, what’s the point of listening to you then? Well, if you’ll only listen to people who don’t require you to think for yourself, then you probably shouldn’t listen to me. But if you are a thinker, I may be able to stir up your holy minds, as Peter says, you know, stir up your pure minds to think. about the Word of God differently than maybe you would naturally do. That doesn’t mean you have to agree with it. In fact, I would certainly argue absolutely you shouldn’t simply agree because you hear me or anybody else say something. You need to realize that you are responsible before God for your own beliefs, your own understanding of searching the Scriptures to see if these things are so. That’s, of course, modeled by the Bereans in the Scripture. And therefore, you know, you don’t have to agree to be part of this fellowship here. The fellowship of the narrow path may be narrow because it requires following Jesus faithfully and not turning from the right to the left. But it doesn’t mean it’s a narrow mind. There’s a difference between having a narrow path and a narrow mind because the path is what you walk on. That has to do with the way you live. The mind has to do with what you think, your opinions, what you believe is true. And I believe that the body of Christ has been served well by Christians of many different views on different things. I’m not a Calvinist, but I believe some of the great Christians of the past have been Calvinists. I’m not a dispensationist, but I think some of the great Christians of the past have been dispensationists. I’m not a cessationist, but I think some great Christians in the past have been. So, you know, it’s absurd to think that people have to have the same opinions in order to be following Christ. Even the 12 disciples following Christ didn’t all have the same opinions. They argued among themselves on the road. Some of them came from a, you know, one was a tax collector who supported the Roman oppressors. Another was a zealot who believed in violently overthrowing the Roman oppression. These guys weren’t all on the same page exactly, except about one thing. They had all taken Christ’s yoke upon them, and they were learning from him. And that’s what Jesus said we must do. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, he said. So other teachers and people like myself and people who are not very much like myself may all be used by God to suggest to you a way of looking at the Bible more responsibly. And if you hear such a thing, if you see something said that’s new to you, well, your responsibility is to search the Scripture, see if it is so. If what I say isn’t supported by Scripture, then by no means should you agree with me. And I know in this audience we have many people who don’t agree with me on many things, but who nonetheless call in and come to the meetings when I come because we realize that there’s a lot of room in the body of Christ for people with different opinions about many things. And some of those may be waiting on line right now. We’ve got one line open if you want to call. The other lines are full. The number to call is 844- That’s 844-484-5737. We’re going to talk first of all to John calling from Denver, Colorado. Hi, John. Welcome. Well, I thought we were going to talk to John from Denver. Are you there, John? I’m here. Oh, go ahead. Hello? Yes.
SPEAKER 06 :
Oh, yeah. Okay, my question is concerning the Dead Sea Scrolls. I’m thinking about the Gospel of Thomas. I understand that these were discovered in 1945. And I’ve heard you say that you don’t believe in it because… it was written approximately 400 years after the time of Christ.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, that’s not quite right, but it was probably at least a century or more after the time of Christ.
SPEAKER 06 :
Go ahead.
SPEAKER 02 :
Continue.
SPEAKER 06 :
What is your question? My question is isn’t it possible that whoever wrote this was just copying, that it’s a copy, and that whoever wrote it had an earlier copy of an actual transcript, something that Thomas said. Isn’t that possible that he copied it?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, it’s possible that C.S. Lewis was copying something that the Apostle James wrote. It’s not so. There’d be no reason to believe it. The Gospel of Thomas is not a Christian gospel. First of all, it doesn’t have the story of Jesus in it at all. It’s only sayings of Jesus. The Gospel of Thomas is said to be a collection of sayings of Jesus. In the Gospel of Thomas… around a third of the sayings of Jesus that are in it are the same as the ones that are found in our four Gospels. So they obviously were copied out of one of the real Gospels. But then there’s about a third of it that’s kind of made-up stuff that you couldn’t tell whether Jesus would have said them or not. And there’s also about a third that are Gnostic heresy. And the Gospel of Thomas is regarded as one of the Gnostic Gospels. Now, by the way, the Gnostic Gospels, including Thomas, were not found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. They were found in the Nag Hammadi texts. Both the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi texts were found in the 1940s, so it’s easy to get them confused. But the Dead Sea Scrolls were the library of the Essene Jews, and they weren’t Christian documents. They weren’t about Jesus. They were Old Testament copies and things like that. and stuff about the way the Essenes conducted their religious community who were not Christians. The Nag Hammadi texts are made up of later texts that do mention Jesus and that are allegedly about Jesus, but they are written by Gnostics. Now, by the way, in the second century, like around 170 A.D., Irenaeus, one of the great church fathers, himself a disciple of Polycarp, who was a disciple of John the Apostle, Irenaeus wrote a book against heresies, and he was familiar with these Gnostic Gospels, although modern readers were not until the 1940s, because modern archaeologists didn’t discover them until modern times. But back around the time they were written, lots of people knew about them. They just kind of disappeared and then were rediscovered in the 1900s. But Irenaeus and other Christians… knew about these Gnostic Gospels and mentioned that they were heretical. So there’s no reason to speculate that Thomas wrote this material and that somebody else recopied it. I mean, when we say that it comes from the second or third century, which is what scholars would say about these Nag Hammadi texts, it’s not saying that the copies that we have were written in that century. The copies we have are much more recent than that. And they are copies of copies of copies of an original. But the original was written in the second or third century. So, obviously, that’s when Gnosticism really emerged and began to attack the Christian faith as sort of a parasitical belief. And, you know, the church fathers and even, honestly, little aspects of it were beginning to come into the church today. at the end of the first century, which is why we see John’s epistles and maybe a few other writings of the New Testament anticipating Gnostic ideas and refuting them. But the Gnosticism blossomed in the second century as a parasitic belief that attached itself to Christianity and also to Judaism. So it was not really an independent organism itself. It was like a parasite that attached itself to other religions and corrupted them. And that the early church was not willing to let the Christianity be corrupted by it. So that’s why we don’t accept the Gnostic Gospels.
SPEAKER 08 :
Okay.
SPEAKER 02 :
All right. Thank you, John. Good talking to you. All right. Our next caller is Joshua from Phoenix, Arizona. Hi, Joshua. Welcome.
SPEAKER 03 :
Hello, Steve. Steve, I’m a Catholic, and I’ve been listening to you for like a day or so. I’ve just been listening a lot to your… I visited your website, and you have a lot of good stuff. I listened to some of your debates. My, I guess you can say, disagreement is with Scripture alone. This idea that we can come to interpret Scripture on our own, I don’t, first and foremost, I don’t even think people do that, they, to some extent, they are going to look at other people, uh, and take, but like within Catholicism, we’re looking at like church fathers. Um, right. Yeah. And then we’re kind of like gathering all of that together to come to this idea, like, or we already have presuppositions. Um, we already have like standards. And then my, my main scripture is this idea of do not lean on your own understanding.
SPEAKER 02 :
Uh-huh.
SPEAKER 03 :
This idea of, like, we can be misled. We can twist scripture to our own destruction. And so my position is more like I don’t want to trust so much in myself because I know I can be deceived. And so I need to look to people who are more educated and not just that more in love with God.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, well, we all have to do that from time to time. Fortunately, I mean, for one thing, I don’t know if you read Greek or Hebrew. I don’t. And therefore, for me, even to read the Bible in English, I’m depending on people who are more educated than me who could translate it from the Greek or the Hebrew into English. So, I mean, we’re all… Unless we learn those languages ourselves and only read the gospel and the Old Testament in their original languages, of course we’re all depending on people more educated than ourselves to access it. But that doesn’t mean that we have to follow the traditional ideas of people of the past, because the Bible doesn’t change. The words in the gospel that Jesus preached and the words of the epistles, these were not given to scholars. The apostles were not scholars. They didn’t write their letters to scholars. They wrote to ordinary people. Sometimes those people weren’t even literate, probably. A lot of them were certainly peasants. Some of them were slaves. I mean, the church was filled with people like that. And so, you know, they didn’t write in some kind of esoteric way. Now, I’m not sure which part of the Bible you think is hard to understand without a scholar, but if you have a good English translation, the sentences are pretty clear in most cases. I’m not sure how much you’ve read the Bible, but I mean, maybe you have a lot, but I’m not sure which part of the Bible you’ve read that you say, well, I certainly can’t understand this without a scholar or one of the church fathers telling me what it means. I haven’t really found it that obscure. Now, there are things in the In all parts of the Bible, there are things that are not real easy to understand, but they are incidentals. They are not the main message. The message is pretty clear. Like Paul said in 2 Corinthians 3, he said that Moses, when he spoke, he put a veil over his face. And he said that’s kind of symbolic of the fact that the Old Testament was written in a veiled kind of a way. And he said that even to this day, when the Jews read the Old Testament, there’s a veil over their hearts so they don’t understand it. But he said, we, meaning the apostles, we use great plainness of speech, not like Moses, who put a veil over us. We just speak very plainly and very boldly what we’re saying. In other words, he’s saying, I’m not writing, you know, in code here. I’m not writing deep mystical things that you need a special revelation to get an idea of what I’m talking about here. Moses may have done that. And that special revelation that helps us understand what Moses wrote is in the New Testament. The apostles, Jesus opened their understanding that they might understand the scriptures, it says in Luke chapter 24. So we know that they understood what maybe the Jews with the veil over their minds couldn’t. But the thing is, when the apostles wrote to the churches, and that’s essentially who was the recipient of these letters in the New Testament and the Gospels, they weren’t trying to conceal stuff from people. They were writing to people who were not scholars, people who were just, in many cases, new converts, and hoping that they would hear and understand what they said. And in most cases, that wouldn’t be difficult. But I will grant you that there are some things in Paul’s writings, Peter said this, in 2 Peter 3, he said some things that Paul wrote are a little hard to understand. And you kind of alluded to this when you said some people twist it or rest it to their own destruction. Yeah, that’s true. There are some things in Paul’s writings and Peter’s and John’s and, frankly, in the sayings of Jesus, too, that are a little hard to understand. But they are not things that obscure what the main message is. And even the things hard to understand, with the exception of very few, They are things that, you know, a person who’s competent to study can understand them. In other words, I don’t have to ask someone who lives 1,800 years ago what it means. I can actually do a little bit of study from the Greek or the Hebrew or in the context and so forth and say, oh, okay, I understand this now. And it’s not like it takes a special arrogance to think I can understand it. I just think God wasn’t trying to hide the truth when he gave the scriptures. I think he’s trying to reveal the truth. And I think that God’s capable of doing that. I don’t think he’s incompetent. So I think God is quite capable of making clear his message. And so this is why I would agree more with the soul of scripture. But some people don’t understand what soul of scripture means. Of course, soul of scripture, as you know, means the Bible alone or scripture alone. And what that just means is there’s nothing that stands on the level of Scripture as an authority in the life of the believer. If anyone tells us that something is true about Christianity or about doctrine or about ethics, we have the Scripture to confirm or to disconfirm that, and that the Scripture stands as the unchanging standard for judging all human opinions. what we call the traditions of the church, what the Roman Catholics call the traditions of the church, one thing that must be said about them is they are human opinions. We could say they are correct ones because these are the correct human opinions, but because we believe since the bishops got together with all these ecumenical councils and hammered out some of these doctrines and they took a vote and agreed on certain conclusions, we can say, well, I trust their opinions. Well, okay, if their opinions are right, by all means, trust them. But it’s not as if the scripture is unclear about things that are important. And frankly, with the exception of very few of the councils, most of the councils… We’re hammering out details of really obscure points, which Jesus never stated clearly. The apostles never stated clearly. I mean, this whole business of the hypostatic union of the natures of Christ, I often bring that up because it’s such a case. The Bible never really talks about the hypostatic union. It’s something that theologians got together to hammer out. And eventually, if you didn’t agree with them, you were a heretic. Why? If Jesus and the apostles didn’t explain it, why? Why should the opinions of some men be a test of fellowship? Well, as you know, the Roman Catholic Church says, well, these decisions of the councils, or what we call church traditions, they are on the same level as Scripture. Which usually means, don’t read the Scripture, just read what they said about it. And that means, of course, their opinions are above the scripture. Because, for example, if the Catholic Church decided that, let’s just say they decided that church leaders should be celibate, like priests and bishops. And then I read in the apostles’ writings in 1 Timothy 3 that the leaders of the church, the bishops, have to be the husbands of one wife and have children who are in order. Now, what Paul said is not unclear here. But it’s certainly different than the traditions of the church. So the Protestant is the one who says, okay, the apostle said this. It was not ambiguous. You don’t need special revelation to understand the words, the husband of one wife. It’s very clear. Now, if the church says no, they should not be the husband of one wife. I say, oh, now I’m in trouble. I have to decide whether to believe God and his apostles or this organization that says that God wasn’t right about that. So this is where Protestants run into trouble. That’s why there was a Reformation. Luther found quite a few things in the Bible, not unclear things, rather clear things, which, I mean, not everything Luther differed with the Catholic Church about was over clear issues. I have to say, I disagree with Luther on some things, but he found things that were clearly against what the Scripture said, and the church would not accommodate his correction. And so they kicked him out, and he ended up fellowshipping with people who agreed with him, and that’s how Protestantism started. It’s a shame it had to come to that. I think the church should have been more open to the Bible than they were, than to the traditions of men, but this is how… This is how human organizations go. As far as I’m concerned, the Catholic Church is a human organization because everyone in it is a human. And everyone who has opinions in it has human opinions. So, you know, I’m always in favor of the best opinions, but those are going to have to be the ones that agree with what the Bible says.
SPEAKER 03 :
I mean, that’s a lot. For one… Looking at church history, I see a lot of heresies springing up and I see a lot of people being led astray by one man. I’ve always found that to be interesting how one man… Happens a lot. Yeah, and then people follow on to them. Because we are sheep. We do need shepherds. The Lord prayed for more to come out because he seemed that there was not enough. And if we don’t have leaders we will turn to, uh, our stuff. We will look, we will speak ourselves. Um, I think that’s just natural because especially now with this idea of scripture being clear, like you’re saying, why should I, why should I need someone else to tell me what this is saying? Um, I think when it comes to the, uh, Peter and Paul speaking, um, to them, of course they had the Holy spirit and of course, they spoke their language, and there was no, like, barriers in that sense to the heart. Not just that what they said was clear, but the fact that it speaks to their heart. Because people have questions, and not everything was written in Scripture, and so they can actually address the heart more so. I believe that when they spoke, it was more for the individuals, and of course for us, but or what was cat worth for us, but I think they also said the same, too. But I think that when information is coming directly, then rather it’s, how do I say this? I see a barrier between me hearing it versus me reading it because people can hear it. I think hearing it is more effective than reading it. I think when people actually speak to you about something, they have more of an impact than when you actually read it. And the reason I say that is because I think more of us are more persuaded through body language and persuaded through human interaction.
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay, well, but that’s not really where we would differ. You’re talking about learning styles. Some people are auditory learners. Some are visual learners. But I like to hear and read. I mean, I can do both, and I get the same information if somebody reads the Bible out loud to me. Or if I read it for myself, I do both. I actually listen to the Bible, and I also read it. So, I mean, you’re right. I mean, some people get more out of auditory presentation. But the question here is not the method by which the words are conveyed, but what is the content of the words conveyed. And the difference possibly between you and me, I don’t know you very well, but this is possibly a difference, is that I want to make sure that what’s in the words is exactly faithful to what is found in the word of God. Now, I know that Roman Catholics think that the decisions of the bishops are basically the word of God, too. But the Bible doesn’t ever say that. The Bible doesn’t ever tell us. Jesus never said that the words of the bishops are going to be the word of God. In fact, he didn’t even tell us who the bishops would be. In other words, just because there’s some people who are called bishops doesn’t doesn’t mean that whatever they think is true, because if so, then every Protestant pastor would make the same thing for himself. Okay, if you believe what he says, you’re right. If you don’t, you don’t. Well, I don’t accept that. Even Paul, when he preached to the Bereans, and he was an apostle, it says they were more noble than the people of Thessalonica because… They heard Paul, and then they searched the scriptures diligently to see if these things were so that he was saying. And it says when they found that it was so, many of them believed. So they didn’t believe just because some preacher said it was true. Paul was a stranger to them when he came to their town. But, of course, we respect him as an apostle. Luke, who’s writing the book of Acts in Acts 17, does not say these people were belligerent, arrogant. They didn’t believe what Paul said until they could look it up in the scripture. No, he said they were more noble for that. That’s a noble approach because it means that you value God’s word. And you’re not just going to assume that some man who somehow got to possess an office. I mean, think of Pope Francis. You know, that guy doesn’t even agree with the previous popes and hopefully not with the next one. He’s on his deathbed right now, I believe. But the point is that, you know, just because a pope says it doesn’t mean it’s true. Just because a bishop says it, it’s if God or the apostles or Jesus said it that we know it’s true. And so that’s where the soul of Scripture comes from. Hey, I appreciate your call. I need to take a break. But thanks for joining us. You’re listening to The Narrow Path. We have a short break, and we have another half hour coming up to take more of your calls. Our website is thenarrowpath.com. I’ll be back in 30 seconds. Don’t go away.
SPEAKER 01 :
If truth did exist, would it matter to you? Whom would you consult as an authority on the subject? In a 16-lecture series entitled The Authority of Scriptures, Steve Gregg not only thoroughly presents the case for the Bible’s authority, but also explains how this truth is to be applied to a believer’s daily walk and outlook. The Authority of Scriptures can be downloaded in MP3 format without charge from our website, thenarrowpath.com.
SPEAKER 02 :
Welcome back to the Narrow Path radio broadcast. My name is Steve Gregg and we’re live for another half hour taking your calls. Our lines are full right now, but if you want to try to call in a little while after one may have opened up, you may reach me at this number, 844-484-5737. As I’ve been saying for a week or more now, my first half of this year is getting pretty booked up with my traveling plans. I can still do the radio show from wherever I go. But the thing is that I’m traveling out of state numerous times, almost each time I’m a week away at a time. Like I’m teaching for a week in Tennessee, about a week in Arizona, about a week in Northern California, about a week in Texas, about a week in Washington State, and so forth. We’re also later in the year, in August – I’ve got speaking engagements in like Michigan and Illinois and probably Indiana. And that week, that’s a week between the first and the last of those is going to be a week. We’re still ready to take some more people who want to have a meeting in their home or in their church. I’ll come and speak there. I charge nothing. I’m free. I don’t even charge for travel. So if you just would like me to come. You should get in touch with us as soon as you can because we are going to fill in that week pretty soon. And then in October, I’m coming to Oregon. So I’m going to be all over the place. And any of these places where I’m speaking, we might be able to extend my trip there. If you have a place you want me to speak and you get in touch with us, we might be able to set something up. So whether it’s Tennessee or Arizona or whatever. Northern California, Midwest. If you want to set up a meeting, we’ll still be welcoming people who are contacting us about that. We’re hearing from people almost every day. So that’s coming up. And if you’re curious about where I am going to be and when, these meetings are all mentioned. at our website, thenarrowpath.com, under the tab that says Announcements. So that’s at thenarrowpath.com under the tab that says Announcements. All right, we’ve got a lot of people waiting to talk, so let’s not keep them waiting any longer. Patty from Carmichael, California, welcome.
SPEAKER 07 :
Yes, good afternoon, Steve. Thank you for your time. You’re welcome. In all my studies, in studying like Romans and Hebrews, I find a lot of similarities. But who, when, and why did they decide that Paul did not write Hebrews?
SPEAKER 02 :
You know, that was disputed in the early church for a long time. I was just listening to the audiobook recently, F.F. Bruce’s book, The Canon of Scripture, and You know, I’ve been through it before, but I was just reminded that the book of Hebrews was, it was accepted by many who did not think that Paul wrote it. But most of the people who accepted it did believe that Paul wrote it. No one knows who wrote it for sure. For example, as late as the early 3rd century, Origen famously said, as to who really wrote the book of Hebrews, God only knows. And that really is the opinion of virtually all scholars. Now, lots of people thought Paul wrote it. And the main objection to that was that it’s written in very, very cultured Greek. And Paul’s other letters… are not so cultured Greek. I mean, he could write in Greek, obviously, but he was not particularly smooth or a great writer in Greek. Now, whoever wrote Hebrews was very good in Greek. It’s one of the smoothest, most literary Greek documents of all the books in our New Testament. There’s very few other books in the New Testament that have quite the same quality of Greek, But two of them that do, two other ones that have good Greek, are the book of Luke and the book of Acts, which are both written by Paul’s companion, Luke. And so some scholars, like Clement of Alexandria, for example, he believed that Paul may have written it in Aramaic, since it’s written to Hebrew Christians, and that it was later translated into Greek by Luke, so that it would be Paul’s thoughts, but it would be the Greek… style that Luke writes in, and that would make plenty of sense with one exception, and that is that there’s at least one time in the book of Hebrews where the writer makes a play on words, where he uses the word for a covenant, which in Greek, the word covenant is the same as the word for a testament or for a will, a last will and testament. Now, in Hebrew… They don’t have the same word for that. They have two different words. A covenant is one word in Hebrew, and a will is something else. But the writer of Hebrews talks about the new covenant, and then he makes sort of a play on words of it, giving an illustration about a will, saying now a covenant or a testament does not come into force until the testator is dead, and therefore Jesus dying brought about the new covenant because he’s likening it to a will. And in Greek, that works because, again, in Greek, the word for will is the same as the word for testament. In Hebrew, it isn’t. So if it was originally written in Hebrew by Paul, and let’s say translated by Luke or somebody else. Paul would not have made that play, couldn’t in Hebrew, couldn’t make that play on words because they’re not the same word in Hebrew. So this was one of the obstacles to seeing it as a document written in Hebrew and then translated into Greek. There’s other theories about how it can be such good Greek. One theory is that, you know, Paul dictated it in Greek, but he had an amanuensis who smoothed it out. That’s also thought to be true of the book of John. the book of 1 Peter, and some others where the Greek style of these books is considered to be better than the Greek style of other books that are allegedly written by the same authors. Many of these books were written by dictation. The author would dictate, and they had a professional scribe called an amanuensis who would write it down and smooth out the grammar and things like that. So, Paul may have written Hebrews, but if he dictated it, it may be that the superior Greek style of it is attributed to whoever was his amanuensis. And that could have been Luke, I suppose. But some have other ideas. Luke was a Gentile, and the author of Hebrews was very fascinated with the priesthood, the Levites, the temple, the tabernacle, the rituals, really into those things. And some think, that Barnabas might be a better candidate for that because Barnabas was a Levite. And he traveled with Paul on the first missionary journey and had no doubt the same theology as Paul on these issues. And we don’t know how well Barnabas wrote because we don’t have any other writings from him. But if he was a very good writer in Greek, he may have written it. But no one really knows. I mean, there’s arguments can be made for different people. I will say this. I don’t know if Paul’s the one who dictated it, if he’s the author of it. But whether he did or not, it was clearly written by somebody who was in Paul’s circle. Now, not all Christians were in Paul’s circle. Paul traveled among the Gentiles with his own team. And, you know, the apostles in Jerusalem didn’t travel with him and they had their own circle, their own emphases. But it’s clear that whoever wrote Hebrews was one of Paul’s circle because at the end of the book, the author says, you know, know that our brother Timothy is at liberty with whom if he comes, I will come with him and see you. Now, the author, whoever it is, is saying that if Timothy comes, he, the author, and Timothy will travel together to see the audience together. Now, that could be Paul, of course, but it could also be somebody else in Paul’s company, because Timothy traveled not only with Paul, but with other people who traveled with Paul. So it could even be Luke. You know, who knows? We don’t really know who it is. The interesting thing is that the readers, the original readers, were expected to know who wrote it, because obviously it says, I’ll come and see you, you know, but But for some reason or another, he remained anonymous. So there’s been much discussion as to whether Paul or somebody else wrote the book of Hebrews. But no matter who wrote it, it definitely has much of Paul’s thinking is repeated in it. That’s found, for example, in First Corinthians and other places and Romans and such. So I accept it. canonical, even though some early Christians were not sure about it. But I’m not sure if I accept Paul’s authorship. I don’t think I need to, because just like Luke wrote a quarter of the New Testament, just his two books, Luke and Acts, that makes up a quarter of the New Testament pages. And he wasn’t one of the apostles, but he was authoritative because he was Paul’s companion. And whoever wrote Hebrews apparently was almost certainly a companion of Paul’s, if not Paul himself.
SPEAKER 07 :
Okay, well, I have a lot of Bibles from the 1800s that say Paul wrote it. And then all of a sudden it was gone, and I just wondered, and I thank you for your time in explaining it to me. I appreciate it.
SPEAKER 02 :
It still remains a question of whether Paul wrote it or not. There are still people who hold to the Pauline authorship. Others don’t. Thank you, Patty. Thank you.
SPEAKER 07 :
Well, thank you so much, Steve. I appreciate your time.
SPEAKER 02 :
All right. God bless you. Bye now. Okay. Our next caller is Glenn Ann from Centennial, Colorado. Hi, Glenn Ann. Welcome.
SPEAKER 08 :
Hi, Steve. I called you last week about the question of eternal security, and you referred me to the talk that was in the content of the gospel, the piece on eternal security. And I did listen to it. But at the end, you say you were running out of time, and you said you wanted to give the specific arguments for Calvinism and antinomian in addition to what had already been given in the talk you gave there. And so I wondered, where do I go for those? Right.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, unfortunately, because I ran out of time for that lecture, and I was teaching in a place that I could only teach in once a month. I didn’t finish that lecture. But the notes for it, this will be useful to everyone listening. If you go to Matthew713.com, that’s a website, www.Matthew713.com. You’ll find a lot of resources there that are not on my website, and one of them is my notes, my lecture notes. You can read them, download them, whatever. Now, I haven’t been there to see if my notes on that series are there, but I think they are. I think you’ll find my notes on the content of the gospel and, therefore, on that lecture. And my notes will contain everything that I intended to talk about. Okay. Okay. Unfortunately, though, it will give the scriptures I wanted to talk about, but it won’t give what I wanted to say because I was intending to speak off the top of my head as I normally do. So, I mean, I know what I was going to say about them, but all you’ll probably find on the notes would be the scriptures that I intended to talk about that I didn’t get to.
SPEAKER 08 :
And there’s none other on your website?
SPEAKER 02 :
I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I should probably teach that again, if necessary, a series so that I don’t leave anything out.
SPEAKER 08 :
Yeah, that would be good. Okay, well, then can you tell me, what is antinomianism?
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay, first of all, let me just say this for your benefit. My wife just reminded me that I do talk about the Calvinist part of what’s missing from that lecture in my series on Calvinism. That series is called God’s Sovereignty and Man’s Salvation. Okay. God’s Sovereignty and Man’s Salvation. And that’s a long series with 12 lectures, but the lectures on the perseverance of the saints, which would be at the end of that series, they would cover probably all the verses and my explanation of them. Oh, great. My rebuttal of them, yeah. But as far as the antinomian part, I don’t know if I have another lecture about that. Antinomianism comes from the words anti, which is not really a word, a Greek particle. It means against. Some people think it means against or instead of, but usually it means against. And then namas… is the Greek word for law. So antinomous, against law, antinomianism is simply a way of saying a position that says they’re against all law. Now, this was a Gnostic position that kind of came up in the 2nd and 3rd century that taught that the body is evil. Only the spirit is good. And the body is incorrigibly evil because it is material, and all material things are evil, so it can’t be changed. So some Gnostics taught that you can’t really be better. You can’t get your body to behave because it’s bad. And therefore… God doesn’t expect you to. God just expects you to know truths. And the knowing of truths, which is what Gnosticism speaks of. Gnostic is from the word gnosko, which means knowledge. But gnosis means knowledge. Gnostic means knowing, knowing ones. Gnostics believe that you had to know certain mysterious spiritual truths. And if you did, it didn’t really matter how you behaved. Not that behavior is neither good nor bad, but simply that God doesn’t expect us to behave because we can’t anyway. So the way out of that is just to know the right stuff. Now, there are forms of that in some branches of evangelical Christianity where they say all you have to do is believe and then it doesn’t really matter how you act. Now, they often won’t say it that way. Sometimes they will. But if they don’t say it that way, they sometimes still believe that. They say, well, you know, don’t worry if you’re still fornicating. Don’t worry if you’re still getting drunk all the time. You’re saved by faith, not by works. And therefore, you know, if you’re living in sin, that doesn’t hurt anything. Except maybe it might hurt your earthly, you know, circumstances or somebody else’s. But it won’t hurt your salvation, they say, because you’re saved just by faith. really knowing or believing the right things. Now, that’s Gnosticism. That’s anti-Gnomian Gnosticism, which means that they’re against any kind of law. Now, this is the view, at least this is what I understood to be the view in the evangelical church I was raised in, and that is called once saved, always saved. The idea is if you say a sinner’s prayer, you kind of jump through that hoop, You now have salvation. If you don’t live for Christ at all, it makes no difference, really, except maybe in what kind of rewards you’ll have in the next life. You won’t have as many rewards if you do bad things. But really, your moral life does not have anything to do with whether you’re saved or not, according to them. This is a view that’s cherished by the parents of backsliders. You know, because they’ll say, well, my son is, you know, he’s living, he’s a Satan worshiper now, and he’s a drug dealer, and he’s murdered a few people, and he’s in prison. And yet he accepted Jesus when he was seven years old, so I’m glad he’s secure. No, I mean, that kind of belief is nonsense. But it’s an antinomian belief. Okay, okay.
SPEAKER 08 :
Okay. Well, thank you so much.
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay, Glenn Ann. Thanks. I’m sorry that lecture isn’t complete. I’ll have to give a complete lecture sometime on Saturday.
SPEAKER 08 :
Yeah. You have to put the word out when you do.
SPEAKER 02 :
All right. Okay, thanks.
SPEAKER 08 :
Bye-bye. Bye now.
SPEAKER 02 :
All right. Let’s see. It’s going to be Kevin from Sutter Creek, California. Welcome to The Narrow Path, Kevin.
SPEAKER 05 :
Good afternoon, Steve. I don’t have a question. I just have a comment, and I’ll try to be brief to save time for the next person. Your introduction today was fabulous. It was enlightening, eye-opening, and I just appreciated it so much for myself and for so many other listeners. And as you summed it up, I said, I love that guy. Well, I’m very lovable. And at that very moment, you said, we have one line open. And I thought, I’m going to call him and tell him what I just said. Because you often say if you have a disagreement with the host, feel free to express that. But today you went much deeper than that. And I was, you know, you just, there are how many, we don’t know how many tens of thousands of people out there that appreciate what you do every day. And when that thought crossed my mind, I spoke it out loud. Sitting in a Walgreens parking lot, I said, I just love that guy. And I knew there was an open line. I said, I’m going to call and tell him that. So thank you, Steve, for all this.
SPEAKER 02 :
Thank you. That makes two people who love me, my mother. Oh, three, my wife, my mother.
SPEAKER 05 :
Wait, your wife, yeah.
SPEAKER 02 :
And me. And you. And so we’re good. There’s three of us now. That’s a big fan club.
SPEAKER 05 :
And we are not the Holy Trinity, right? No, we’re not, no. Yeah, thank you, Steve, for your openness this morning. Well, thanks for waiting so long. Thanks for waiting so long online to say it. I wondered if I’d remember what I was going to say. And I’m in the parking lot, and I thought, darn, if I was home, I’d have three or four questions written down somewhere. I’m sure I would. But here I am, and I don’t have a question. So I’ll leave the line and let you get to your next caller.
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay, Kevin, thank you so much for calling. Thank you. God bless you. All right. Let’s talk to Mark from Antioch, California. Another California caller. Hi, Mark.
SPEAKER 04 :
Hey, Steve. How are you doing? Good. I’ll try to keep this brief. I know we’re running out of time, and I’ll take your thoughts off the air. So, anyway, I want to get your thoughts on, in the book of Acts, Chapter 1, when the apostles cast lots, which is an Old Testament practice, to choose people. matthias as the 12th apostle to replace judas right yeah um and then so my thought is you know paul mentions in galatians that he was an apostle chosen by jesus not by man kind of implying uh towards matthias’s apostleship right and then and then jesus actually earlier in acts chapter one he told the apostles to wait for the holy spirit and and throughout the new testament we don’t see anyone casting lots again, it’s just by the leading of the Holy Spirit, most of the decisions are made. So, the reason I’m asking, and I’m having a conversation with somebody, and they’re kind of like, you know, there’s an absolute reason they chose Matthias. Apostles can’t do anything wrong. And I think one of the great things about the Bible is that it does show man’s failures. It does show man’s mistakes. And And so does our humanity. And in Revelations, it says that the 12 apostles’ names were on the 12 foundation stones, not 13 stones. So I just wanted to get your thoughts on that, and why do you think they would record that choosing of Matthias in the book of Acts and not really… addressing if that was a mistake or if there was a reason for it.
SPEAKER 02 :
All right, yeah. Lots of people have wondered, should Peter have just held his peace until after Pentecost and then just Then the Holy Spirit could lead them, you know, about who could replace Judas. We don’t really know that they did the wrong thing because although Jesus told them to tarry in Jerusalem until they received power from on high, he didn’t say don’t do anything. And so some people say that Jesus didn’t want them to do anything until the Spirit came. Maybe that’s correct. But Jesus didn’t say they couldn’t do anything. Here’s the thing, though. many people think that Paul was intended to be the replacement for Judas as far as God was concerned, and that the choice of Matthias in that role was a mistake on the part of the other apostles. Now, I agree with you. The Bible does indicate that the apostles can make mistakes, and it doesn’t always tell us when what they did was a mistake. For example, there are people who think that Paul made a mistake in making his last journey to Jerusalem, because certain men told him through the Holy Spirit not to do it, but he thought he should do it, and therefore there was a difference of opinion, and he went, and it’s hard to know. The Bible doesn’t say that he did or did not make a mistake. Apostles do sometimes make mistakes. So did Peter make a mistake? Well, I’ll say this. If he did, Luke didn’t seem to see any reason to mention it. And I don’t know that Luke believed that they did make him sick. Luke is, of course, the one who wrote the book of Acts. And he was also a great fan of Paul. Luke traveled with Paul for years and was his physician, a great supporter of Paul. In fact, in writing the book of Acts, he focuses more chapters on Paul than any other apostle. So we know that Luke, who wrote Acts, if he felt that they made a mistake, might have been expected to say so, especially if he thought that Paul was supposed to be the 12th apostle and that they just jumped the gun. But it’s interesting in Acts chapter 1, when it talks about the choice of Matthias, the very last verse in verse 26, they cast lots and the lot fell on Matthias. And it says, and he was numbered with the 11 apostles. And he doesn’t say that that’s, you know, that that was something that was to change or that that was a mistake. And what’s interesting, too, people sometimes say, well, but the book of Acts doesn’t mention Matthias anymore after this. So Luke probably didn’t agree that he was an apostle. I have to disagree with that statement because many of the apostles are not mentioned by name after chapter one. Only a few apostles actually are named after chapter 1, and yet there’s several things in the first few chapters that mention the apostles, plural. For example, in chapter 2, verse 43, Fear came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were done through the apostles. And also in chapter 5, for example, it says, now the multitude, blah, blah, blah, it says, In verse 35, the people who sold their goods brought them to the apostles’ feet to distribute. Now, it just talks about the apostles and their activities as apostles. And he’s already told us that Matthias was regarded to be one of the apostles. So without saying otherwise, it sounds like Luke is saying, you know, Matthias is included in this generic statement. Now, I think that in Galatians chapter 2, Paul insinuates that his team and his calling were of a different sort than that of the twelve. Jesus told the twelve that they would sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. Obviously, the number twelve was intended to correspond with the number of tribes in Israel. They had a ministry to the Jewish people. Paul had a ministry, and his companions did. to the Gentiles, and I think they saw themselves as having separate spheres, because in Galatians 2, Paul said, he’s talking about Peter, James, and John, who I believe represent the twelve in Jerusalem. He says in verse 6, but of those who seem to be something, whatever they were, it makes no difference to me. God shows no personal favoritism to no man, etc., He says, on the contrary, when they saw that the gospel for the uncircumcised, that means for the Gentiles, had been committed to me as the gospel for the circumcised, that is to the Jews, was to Peter. And then he says, for he who worked effectively in Peter for the apostleship to the circumcised also worked effectively in me toward the Gentiles. He said, when James, Peter, and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace that had been given to me, they gave me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship that we should go to the Gentiles and they should go to the circumcised, to the Jews. So I think the 12 saw their role was to the 12 tribes of Israel and that they recognized Paul and Barnabas both as apostles. And there were others called apostles in the book of Acts 2 besides the 12 and besides Paul and Barnabas. But Barnabas and Paul are both called apostles. They saw them as part of a different team with a different mission to the Gentiles. So, in other words, I don’t think Paul was supposed to be the twelfth of the twelve. He was certainly an apostle on the same level, but with a different mission. And I don’t think he was ever seen as part of the twelve. Hey, I’m out of time. I wish I wasn’t. You’ve been listening to The Narrow Path. We are listener supported. You can go to our website, thenarrowpath.com, if you want to help us out. Let’s talk again tomorrow.
