Hello and welcome to Capagance's Live. Thanks so much for being here with us on this Friday afternoon or perhaps it's a Friday evening where you are even a Saturday morning and hello to James and the Philippines who listens on Saturday morning there.

Thank you very much for listening James and for anybody else who's listening because we really like having the opportunity to do what we do here and if you've got a question today we're taking Bible questions it's your Bible questions for Jimmy Aiken this hour and next maybe you've got a question about a particular text in the Bible a book in the Bible maybe a more general question about the composition or the timing or the personalities of the Bible whatever you've got if you've got a Bible question the number is eight eight eight three one eight seven eight

eight four triple eight three one eight seven eight four your Bible questions with Jimmy Aiken this hour and next Jimmy of course senior apologist here at Catholic Answers in the author of the Bible is a Catholic book the proprietor of Jimmy Aiken's mysterious world. Hello again Jimmy Aiken. Hello again serial killer. I want to say a special thanks to you for being here for us. We will give you a little bit of short notice today but you're always very gracious about that so thanks Jimmy. Oh happy to help out.

And I know you like talking about the Bible so yeah yeah I'm so glad we'll be getting a bunch of Bible questions are there have there been Bible mist I think they're have but if there are Bible mysteries on Jimmy Aiken's mysterious world oh yeah we periodically cover religious mysteries some of which are related to scripture like for example I did one on what's the mark of the beast I did another one I did the Exodus happen did another one on apocryphal gospel

whole bunch of different things and this we are today's episode is the fifth anniversary episode. Yes so today I was talking to the I was interacting with feedback that the listeners sent us about their mysterious experiences and we covered all kinds of different mysterious experiences and I talked about what could explain them both in terms of natural explanations and in terms of paranormal or supernatural explanations.

That's a fun fifth anniversary episode and and again congratulations on on five years of it and approaching 300 episodes now yeah and we'll get we'll be into the next five year slot next Friday and also be closer to 300 episodes with our next one so next Friday we have an episode coming out about a an incident that occurred in the late 1800s where you had a French

free thinker who is born Catholic but he he became a free thinker and a mason named Leo Taxel who then reverted to the Catholic Church and began publishing exposés of the free masons and he was very highly regarded he got lots of letters and had contacts with you know various officials at the Vatican including having an audience a private audience with Pope Leo the 13th.

And other he made some really amazing revelations and other people came forward and confirmed them and it's a really dramatic story so you want to miss it about Leo Taxel's Masonic revelations all right next week starting off the second five years on Jimmy Ackens mysterious world you can find it mysterious dot FM or just type in Jimmy Ackens mysterious world.

It's your Bible questions for Jimmy Ackens this hour and what I should also have said and been more inviting about is if you really don't know much about the Bible.

You're welcome as well you don't have you don't have to know tons about the Bible maybe you just have a curiosity about it about who wrote it where it came from why did they put it in leather.

The what why did they put the Bible in leather if you know that could be a basic question curiosity question why did they put it in leather yeah well why do they why do they edge the pages with gold sometimes I would but you got those are some fancy by was you got there Jimmy well.

I have a wide selection to choose from yeah I bet you do yeah but you the the thing about some of these websites now will have I don't know maybe scores a versions of the Bible that you could just sit and compare it's but I kind of like that I have to be honest with you to be able to just take a passage and look at it in five different translations or whatever.

I once saw a version I guess it was of just the New Testament but and it was multi volumes but it was like 26 versions of the Bible under one cover so you look at say it's Matthew one one you look down the page and there are 26 different translations of Matthew one one wow wow that's really something yeah and that's kind of what you can get on some of these websites now and pick any passage that you like and you can get a whole variety.

There's a couple lines open still if you got a Bible question 8883187884 will start in Boise Idaho or Pat is listening on salt and light radio Pat we're glad you're here go ahead with your question for Jimmy.

Thank you Jimmy at the question that I have is for another person actually a woman here that I live in my building she is thinking of becoming a Catholic and she frequently talks about the gospel of Thomas and I've told her that Thomas is not in.

The Bible and I want to be able to tell her the reasons why he was not included in the Bible I don't know she quotes him a lot so I don't know where she gets her information but I know that you would know what the criteria that were used for people to be in the Bible for the books that were chosen and why he was not chosen that's the essence of my question yeah so the basic thing that resulted in a book being.

regarded as sacred and canonical and thus to be put in the Bible was the book needed to have a tradition of having been handed on to us as scripture by Christ and the Apostles so that would cover the books the Old Testament which of course the they handed on to the church is these are scripture and it also applied to the books the New Testament which were either written by Apostles or by men who were closely associated with the Bible.

The Apostles and thus were operating with the blessing of the Apostles and so if a work had a tradition of being apostolic in this sense of being handed on to us from the Apostles as an authoritative work of of of scripture then it got included in the Bible if it didn't have such a tradition then it didn't get included in the Bible and there were generally two ways that a book could get the Bible.

It was being that someone might wonder should this go in the Bible there were generally two ways of establishing that it didn't have an apostolic tradition one of them is if it disagreed with the teachings of the Apostles so in addition to giving us the Bible the Apostles also gave us their teaching in oral form and it was preserved through the churches through the preaching of priests and bishops and so forth.

And if someone had a book and it disagreed with the teachings that had been passed down from Christ in the Apostles then that was a good sign it wasn't really written by one of the Apostles or an associate of an Apostle because if it had been you would expect it to have correct teaching.

The other criterion that was sort of a negative criterion that would indicate this book does not belong in the Bible is if there was no tradition of it having been read in the churches as scripture because back then most people were not literate and so the way they got exposed to scripture was by listening to it being read in church and in fact we continue that tradition today we continue to read the books of the Bible in church.

Well if all of a sudden let's say you're in the second or third or fourth century and someone says hey I got this book it's it's by so and so you know the Apostle Thomas let's say one of the questions you'd ask is okay so which churches have been reading this you know because if it's really from the Apostle Thomas he lived in the first century so if this is a genuine work of the Apostle Thomas it there should be a tradition of churches reading it that dates back to the first century.

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