Meditations

Passages included in this discussion are:

Deuteronomy 33

1 And this is the blessing, wherewith Moses the man of God blessed the children of Israel before his death.  -kjv

Deuteronomy 34

⁵ So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the Lord. ⁶ And he buried him in a valley in the land of Moab, over against Bethpeor: but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.  -kjv

Question from moody radio listener:

I am currently discussing in my bible study about the oldest book in the bible, some claim it’s Job, I can’t find any proof and a question comes up if Adam wrote the first few chapters of Genesis and Moses edited those? My question is do you find any evidence that support that?

Answer from Dr Michael Rydelnik:

No, what we know from scripture is that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, the Torah, Genesis through Deuteronomy as one book. Moses wrote it. There’s no evidence that Adam wrote anything. Too often, we think of the scriptures as sort of developing, sort of with different writers. Even famous biblical theologians and they will write books on biblical theology and they will talk about revelations in the days of Adam, revelations in the days of Abraham, revelations in the days of Joseph and  so forth. The truth of this is Moses wrote the whole thing. The Torah is revelation as God wanted it in the days of Moses. For us Moses wrote it, where did he get information about Adam and Eve, I don’t know. Maybe God told him. Maybe there were records. I don’t know. I know he did use some records. Maybe there were oral traditions that were passed down from his mom and dad but here’s the thing, the bible that we have, you know we are reading the Torah, whether it’s Genesis or Deuteronomy or anything in between, what we are looking at is the revelation as Moses understood it and wrote it and that’s the inspired text of scripture. Then I will even go further, before the Canon was closed, before the scriptures were completed, in the old testament, there seemed to be an editing by  someone like Ezra, because he added stuff like there’s a verse at the end of Deuteronomy 33. It says this is the blessing that Moses blesses with the children of Israel before he died. Obviously it was added after he died and then you have Deuteronomy 34 where it includes Moses death and no one remembers where he was buried. And so it does appear that there was a further editing with the additions of chapter 33 and 34 of Deuteronomy to the Pentateuch.  So a biblical writer like Ezra did that. Torah 2.0, that’s what he did.

Question from listener:

Is Job older than the Pentatech?

Answer from Dr Michael Rydelnik:

Don’t know. It does appear that Job was a character from the patriarch age, don’t know when it was written.

Question from the audience on open line progam on 9 September 2017?

How do we know that the books in the Protestant bible are the only books inspired by God?

Answer from Dr Michael Rydelnik?

Ah .. the question then would be about the books that we have in the bible versus the Catholic bible which has the Apocrypha as well. You know, the question of which books should be in the bible was not settled until the sixteenth century, kind of interesting. In a sense, it was settled right away. The books of the Hebrew bible were received and accepted and believed to be God’s word by Jewish leaders and not in the year ninetieth as some people say but almost immediately as they were received, they were recognized as scripture. And you can look at the literature that developed in between the close of the old testament and the beginning of the new, it’s called intertestamental literature, where Jewish people talk about wanting to have a prophet to rise again and give more scripture, but apparently prophecy had ceased and they didn’t  know but they anticipated this restoration and then we get the new testament and those books were received virtually immediately, not like certain movies and books like Da vinci code say that it was only in the fourth century that Constantin decided to include the New Testament books at the Council of Nicea. That is a completed fabrication and I always tell people, that’s fiction. The question of Canon didn’t even come up at the Council of Nicea but almost immediately, the books of the New Testament were recognized as scripture. And the apocrypha was not. When you come to the sixteenth century when you have the Protestant Reformation,  where we’re having the five hundred anniversary this year. In the Protestant Reformation, there was a movement to separate from certain traditions that have grown up in the Church. One of those would be Purgatory.  In 1546, the Catholic church held another council, the Council of Trent, and they wanted to counter information, they wanted an answer to the Reformation.  And the only place where they could find some of the doctrines taught in the church  was in the Apocrypha. Previous to this, the Apocrypha was thought of as good intertestamental religious literature but not of scripture. And so what happened was then they say, Ah, we’re going to call this a secondary level of scripture, a quasi-scripture, we’re going to include it in the bible and so the sixteenth century, they included it and it was sort of an after thought, not because it was ever accepted as scripture before that but just so they could defend some of the doctrine that were being taught. And so, most people except for this tradition, most Christians don’t accept the Apocrypha as scripture, just the Hebrew bible and the new testament as we have it.