My Encounter With Jehovah's Witnesses, Part 4: Why Do You Trust The Bible?

This is the last and final part of the series, “My Encounter With Jehovah’s Witnesses”. We began talking about celibacy, Jesus not being God, and how we interpret the Bible. This led us to an important and fundamental question.

If you’re just tuning in, this series begins with: “My Encounter With Jehovah's Witnesses, Part 1: Priestly Celibacy”.

After pointing out their failed prophesies, retractions and doctrinal changes over the years, they responded with, “If it’s not in the Bible we don’t do it. Like Christmas. Jesus’ birthday isn’t actually December 25th…”

I said, "You have brought up a very important point, that I’d like to talk about". I’m pretty sure this cute old lady was rolling her eyes in her mind, because she thought she was going to one-up me with some Bible-alone mumbo jumbo.

I said to this lovely couple, “Why do you have the impression that Jesus’ actually day of birth was December 25th. That’s simply a day the Catholic Church selected to remember the day that God was born to man. However, you said if something isn’t in the Bible that you don’t follow it, correct?" They quickly replied affirming my statement, “Yes of course, if it’s not in the Bible we don’t do it!”.

What they didn’t realize is that this was a setup… I asked them if they could show the passage which tells me which books and verses make up the canon of Scripture. Again, they paused with a puzzled look on their face. I said, "Where in the Bible does it say which books and verses should be included in the Bible?"

Again, no response. I said, "Isn’t that an important question? If you are basing your beliefs on this collection of books shouldn’t you know why you hold this book as inspired and inerrent? Surely, you wouldn’t think that the Mormon writings are inspired?"

“Oh no!” they replied, trying to get a foothold. And they continued by stating that God’s word is self evident, “We can tell which books are inspired because they fit with the whole of Scripture”.

I said, “Wait, hold the phone… Have you ever read the first letter of Clement?”. “No”, they replied, obviously oblivious to his writings. I continued, "Clement is mentioned in the Bible, He was a successor of Peter, and he wrote letters to the Corinthians. For hundreds of years, the Corinth church and other churches considered these letters to be inspired and canonical. In fact, they read from these letters when they gathered on the Lord’s day, just like some of the other New Testament writings they had. How do you know Clement’s letters are not inspired?”.

“Because it wasn’t written by an Apostle”, they replied. I said, "If that’s your criteria for something to be included in the Bible than we have a huge problem". “Why is that?", they asked. I said, "Because the Gospels of Mark and Luke were not written by an Apostle. Neither was ANY of the Old Testament…So then it doesn’t matter that Clement wasn’t an apostle. So why shouldn’t we include his writings in Scripture?”.

“Well”, they said, “All of the books of the Bible we written before the death of the last Apostle”. I told them that Clement wrote his letters around the same time the book of Revelation was written, "So why shouldn’t we include it?”.

Finally they responded with the answer I expected, “Because it didn’t fit with the whole of the Bible”. This seemed like a presumptuous answer, since they had obviously never read Clement’s letters. However, I was glad they were following my train of thought. I said, "Think about that for a moment. If you were a Christian in 34AD where would you go to find an answer to your question? Where would you get a definitive answer if you should baptize your baby, or if Jesus is God, or if the Holy Spirit is a person, etc.?”.

They said, “I don’t understand”. I responded saying, “Well, think about it. The books of the New Testament weren’t finished being written until almost the second Century. And even after they were written, they weren’t distributed. Ephesis had a couple writings (letters), Corinth had a few other ones, etc. There was no one collection of these Scriptures until Centuries later. And even when copies of these letters found their way to other churches, no one had definitively declared that this one is inspired and this one is not. Some were reading from Clement, most actually. While Revelation and Hebrews were doubted…"

“So”, I said, “They didn’t have anything to compare a particular writing with, because there was no New Testament! Not until Catholic bishops in 393 AD at the council of Hippo declared the 27 books of the New Testament you are holding in your hands and using today”.

Silence.

I took this as a sign I should keep on talking, so I asked, “Why do you have the book of Hebrews in your Bible?”.

“Because it’s the inspired word of God” they said.

"Prove it", I challenged. "Hebrews doesn’t claim to be written by Paul, yet you hold to that tradition of man. It doesn’t claim to be inspired, in fact, many of the churches doubted it’s authenticity! We don’t even have the original manuscripts! So how do we know Hebrews is any different from the book of Mormon of the letters of Clement?”.

Silence.

I kept on going… "You have 66 books in your Old Testament. Why? Did you know that Jesus, the Jews, all of the Apostles and the New Testmanet writers used the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament. The Septuigant has those seven extra books that we believe are inspired, but you call Apocrypha. In fact, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1950's demonstrates that even the Hebrew collection contained the Deuterocanonical books (Apocrypha), as well..."

"Martin Luther removed these books from the canon during the Reformation in the Sixteenth Century. He also removed James, Revelation, and Hebrews as well, but John Calvin pleaded with him to put them back in. You have been holding to Martin Luther’s tradition of man, a change which happened 480 years ago. Why? Why don’t you use the same collection of Scriptures as Jesus, and the Jews at the time of Christ, and the Apostles. Did you know that almost 80% of the quotes in the New Testament, from the Old Testament, are from the Septuigant? Did you know that they read from the Septuigant in the synagogues? Why don’t you?”.

"You trust that the Catholic Church determined the correct New Testament, having to choose between 250-300 writings, all claiming to be authentic and inspired, correctly narrowing that down to the 27 books of the New Testament we have today. Did you know that they also declared at that same council of Hippo in 393, the books of the Old Testament as well?”.

"Why do you follow the traditions of man? Why don’t you use the collection of Scriptures that Jesus used, that have been consistently kept declared canonical to this day by the Catholic Church?”.

They didn’t seem to like this line of questioning and started to get a bit squeamish. They directed me to the web site stating, “Honestly, I don’t know too much about that Septuagint stuff”.

I said, "it’s OK if you don’t have an answer. Maybe you can ask some of your elders and get back to me then?”. I chuckled when the husband told me he was an elder.

I said, "The reason I believe the Bible isn’t because of blind faith. Jesus Christ established a Church (Matt. 16:18-19). He gave authority to this church to teach all he commanded (Matt. 28:18). He picked leaders, the Apostles who elected successors to fill their offices so we would always know where to find truth (Acts 1:12-26). Just look at the first council of Jerusalem (Acts 15). The Jewish-Christians were telling the Gentiles that if you want to be Christian, you need to be circumcised. So what did they do? They took it to the church (Matt. 18:18). The Apostles and elders came together and declared dogmatically that no, Gentiles don’t need to be circumcised. This authority was in place long before the New Testament was ever written or compiled into a book. It was these successors of the Apostles who were guided by the Holy Spirit to correctly declare which books and verses are truly the inspired word of God".

I said, "But I think I’ve given you information overload. Maybe next time we can talk about the Apostles and this authoritative church". “Sure!” they said excitedly, to my surprise.

We’ll see if we can make this a five part series… if they do in fact return.