Could we add lost books to the Bible?

In this episode, Jimmy Akin Cy Kellett follows to discuss how the church looks at the canon of the script and why not everything Paul wrote was part of the New Testament.

Transcript:

Caller: Imagine you will find the letter from St. Paulus to the Athenians. And from reasoning it is completely Orthodox, and we know with a 100% certainty that Paul wrote it. Would it be the writing? And could it ever become a writing if we use them in liturgy?

Jimmy: Okay, first of all we do not know that there was a letter to the Athenians. We have indications of some letters that we know that St. Paul is not included in the New Testament that has been lost, but we do not know if there was one for the Athens. But assume that there was, ask if the writing would exist? And I assume you think, would it be divinely inspired?

Well, there is no way to answer that. Just because a book is divinely inspired does not mean that it was automatically preserved. And so God could have inspired works by St. Paul or another writer so divine that he did not decide to have survived and become part of the canon of the church.

So I would say that there is no way to answer if you know that. Even if we know that Paul wrote what we would never do, and even if it were 100% Orthodox, there is no way to determine whether it is inspired or not. It would require a new revelation of God to tell us that it was inspired. And even that would only be a private revelation, so it would not be binding in faith.

So I would say, could it be divinely inspired? Hypothetically does it have to be inspired divinely? No, it is not. Paul undoubtedly wrote a lot of things that we don't have and what we didn't inspire.

This is the first thing I would say. Then you said, could it become the writing? And I would say no, because the way the Church is the scripture is Scripture by looking at what has passed on to us for the use in the churches.

And when it comes to Paul's letters, we even have evidence for it. And this goes into some interesting areas in which I don't know whether we have time today. But we have evidence that Paul himself was the author of the letters. We have evidence that Paul wrote a whole series of letters. The question is why we have those we do. Why were these letters collected?

For a certain time in the 20th century, it was assumed that they were gathered here and there by churches here and there, and it was a way that we landed these letters. But the proof is that this is not the case. They had old brief collections in antiquity.

For example, Cicero, the Roman author, was very famous for writing letters and he collected them. Similarly, he collected his letters with the governor of Bithynia, Plinius the younger. And we know something about how this process worked. As a rule, the first collection of letters would be carried out by the author himself and he would organize it according to a criterion.

He was able to organize her by date, he could organize them to whom they were written. He was able to order it with the length from the smallest to the longest. He was able to order them from the long to the shortest. But it was up to the first author to determine what went into the first letter collection and with which organizational principle it would be used.

And when you study Paul's letters, it looks like we have a first collection that consisted of Romans, 1. Corinthians, 2 Corinthians and Galatians. The normal pattern was that the author himself carried out a first collection. Later extended expenses could be carried out by someone else, but they would follow the author's pattern.

In the case of St. Paul's letters, they are arranged in a descending order. So the Romans is his longest letter, the first Corinthians, next Corinthians, next Galatian. But then there is a bump and the bump is Ephesians. It is a little longer than Galatians and then it starts to shrink again. And then they have the pastoral letters written on the last individuals.

It looks like St. Paul is probably an edition of Romans through Galatians in his own life. And then either Paul or one of his employees expanded this collection later to form the collection that we now have.

What this means is that it was deliberately considered which letters would go into this collection and which would not. For example, this is one reason why we don't have 0 Corinthians because we know that he wrote a 0 Corinthians, but it was not selected to go to this collection.

Well, this collection was selected by Paul and possibly by his employees to become the Scripture for the Church. And everything else that Paul wrote was implicitly passed on to the church to become the writing.

And so I would say if we discovered a letter to the Athenians or if we discovered 0 Corinthians or the like, it was not selected to become the Scripture for the Church. It was deliberately excluded by this role by not being included in Paul's letter collection.

And so I would say, even if it were inspired what we would not know, since inspiration is not a detectable literary quality, I would say that it would not be canonical. I would say it would never be canonical because it does not correspond to the criterion that the church used to be passed on to us as writing.

Cy: Liam, I wanted to thank you very much for the call. I would like to send you a copy of Jimmy's book, *The Bible is a Catholic book *if you want it. Hold on the line and we will send it to you.