Dr. John Bergsma

And Paul's letters became collected into scripture.

So you might say,

that the one deposit of the faith, which is a broadest sense of tradition, is passed down in two forms, written and unwritten.

So there are unwritten traditions, not a whole lot.

It's not like there's this huge body of knowledge that's only passed down by word of mouth and like bishops whispered each other's ears at their ordination or something like that, going back in a chain back to the apostles.

But a lot of basic things that we just take for granted were passed down in unwritten form.

One of the biggest ones is the list of biblical books.

That is not in scripture itself.

If you love the word of God, and I presume almost all of our Protestant brothers love the word of God, the written word of God, that's great.

Well, if you love the word of God, love the table of contents.

And the table of contents is not part of any biblical book.

that was actually passed down by tradition.

And it was only written down later, beginning in the late 300s, when after the faith was legalized in the Roman Empire,

it became possible to hold church councils to clean up some confusion.

And one of the things about which confusion had grown was what exactly are the biblical books?

There's a church over here in Ethiopia that's saying that Jubilees is biblical.

That's a Second Temple Jewish book that folks may not have heard of, but it shows up in some early books.

you know, Christian collections, you know, and over here, they're saying that, oh, we're not sure that the John's apocalypse, you know, the book of Revelation should be in, you know, so there's a little bit of mess around the edges of the list of biblical books.

So let's sit down

under the guidance of the Holy Spirit and compile the list and trust as it says in John 16, that the Spirit will lead you into all truth.