I suspect you may be letting your bias and prejudice be coloring things a bit. After all, there is certainly no shortage of those who point out inconsistencies and contradictions in the books of the Bible which you accept; however I am confident that you have already resolved in your own mind a rebuttal to such claims; and thus will argue confidently in the consistency and lack of any contradiction in the 66 books which you accept.
If your argument is "These books have contradictions" and "But these books don't"; and the chief rationale being simply that you have resolved to addressing accusations of contradiction in the books you accept; but easily accept the claim of contradictions in these other books then I suspect you are working from a framework of confirmation bias rather than objectivity.
I am well aware of St. Jerome's hesitancy in regard to the Deuterocanonicals. Indeed, Dr. Martin Luther likewise saw in Jerome precedent for questioning the authority of the Deuterocanonical books. That said, let's be clear, when we look at the patristic witness there are many opinions about many books.
Why does such diversity of opinion exist? Because the evolution and development of the Biblical Canon was an ongoing process.
However, I am quite confident that your appeal to Jerome is, again, merely a case of confirmation bias. After all, if I should present an ancient witness questioning one of the books you accept, it would mean nothing to you; and you would dismiss it as freely as you dismissed the Apostles' Creed.
I have been asking you questions in order to get you to step back and engage in a bit of critical thinking. I don't think that's working, as you want to simply pass the buck off to your religious organization's official website. I'm not interested in official Jehovah's Witness dogma, I am interested in engaging in a dialogue with you, a distinct person. To try and get you to try and explore questions honestly and more objectively.
Your statements of "internal consistency" and "external evidence" have no real meat behind them.
If you are honest with yourself you would admit that the reason you accept only the 66 books of the modern Protestant Canon is because that is the Bible the founders of your religious organization in the 19th century had and used, and which your organization continues to use.
There's nothing wrong with that.
All Christians use the Bible because of
tradition. The books you accept you accept because you received them from those who came before you. You don't accept other books because those who gave you the tradition of a sixty-six book Canon of Scripture didn't accept any other books.
That's not unique to your religious tradition, that is a universally true statement for all groups that identify themselves as Christian. The reason why modern Protestants accept only 66 books is because their Protestant forebearers only accepted 66 books, based upon Martin Luther's translation of the German Bible and which was codified in early Protestant confessional texts such as the Westminster Confession and the 39 Articles of Religion. Later Protestant confessions likewise made similar statements, such as the 1689 London Baptist Confession, the Methodist 25 Articles of Religion, etc.
Charles Taze Russel, Joseph Rutherford, et al were simply working from within the broad religious milieu of 19th and early 20th century American Protestantism. And so the Protestant Bible, sans Deuterocanonicals, is what they--and ergo you--use.
What you are attempting to provide isn't much more than an
ad hoc rationalization after the fact.
More to the point, however, is that the reason why you, or anyone else for that matter, has a Bible at all is because the ancient Church preserved and confessed certain books as Scripture through the general consensus and practice of Christianity.
There are four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John because those four were accepted as the only canonical Gospels to be read in gatherings of Christian worship--
liturgy. Not other gospels, though other "gospel"
texts did exist, even from fairly early on; and not just one Gospel text, but all four.
The acceptance of these four--and all four and only these four--happened very early on in the life of the Christian Church, by the mid-to-late 2nd century there is sufficient evidence of this, such as in the writings of St. Irenaeus (c. 180-190 AD). By around this time, there was already something of a proto-New Testament, the core books of the New Testament known as the Homolegomena, that is, the universally received and accepted books (homolegomena = "same books" or "books of the same" that is of equal and universal recognition and acceptance). These books are in distinction to the Antilegomena or "disputed books", which includes books such as Hebrews, 3 John, 2 Peter, Jude, James, and the Revelation of St. John; but also includes books such as The Shepherd, the Epistle of St. Clement to the Corinthians, the Didache, and the Epistle of Barnabas.
And debates over these books continued for quite some time. Our earliest biblical codices such as Sinaiticus contain Clement, but not Revelation. Later biblical codices likewise do not necessarily have a New Testament identical to our own. This is especially true in the case of early versions of the Syriac Peshitta or Armenian Bible. For example the Peshitta did not contain the Revelation until about the 8th century. And even into the high middle ages (IIRC) the Armenian Bible continued to include the spurious work known as 3 Corinthians.
Even in the Latin West some versions of the Vulgate contained the spurious letter of Paul to the Laodiceans, which is why John Wycliffe included Laodiceans in his translation of the Vulgate into English.
The Bible didn't fall out of the sky. The Bible came together, over time, through a growing and evolving consensus. Today we are the heirs of that
tradition.
And this is therefore the heart of my original point: The tradition which gave us the Apostles' Creed is the same tradition that gave us the Bible. The Creed and the Scriptures, as received matters of Christian faith and practice,
come from the same source.
If that source cannot be considered trustworthy whatsoever (say, if there were some sort of "Great Apostasy" in the past), then that renders everything from that source suspect.
If you can accept an "apostate Bible", but not an "apostate Creed", then the really essential question is:
why?
And I'm not asking "why?" so you can parrot talking points at me, I'm asking why so that you can actually step back and
think about the question.
-CryptoLutheran
