The common lie through the ages is that the books of the Bible weren’t decided on until the third and fourth century when a bunch of Church Council people got together.

As my pastor, Richard Jordan, says, “That’s hogwash. It’s just rank unbelief. Before 70 A.D., your whole New Testament was written, copied out, distributed and collated together in one book and understood to be the Word of God.

“And there was a special group of people in the church (the Body of Christ) at that time making sure no one made any mistakes and everything was understood to be authoritative. That was one of the jobs of the prophets.

“You know how Paul said that ‘God hath set some in the church, first apostles, secondarily prophets, thirdly teachers’?

“Did you ever wonder what those prophets were supposed to do? That’s not talking about Old Testament prophets; that’s prophets God gave to the church the Body of Christ.

“Did you ever read over in I Cor.14: 37, and I quote this verse all the time, ‘If any man think himself to be a prophet, or spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things that I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord’?

“One of the things a prophet in the church was to do was identify a book Paul wrote and say, ‘That’s the Word of God.’

“Look in I Cor. 5:9 where Paul writes the Corinthians and he talks about how in a previous epistle he wrote ‘not to company with fornicators.’ Well, where is that epistle? It’s not in your Bible. Is your Bible missing a book? No.

“Well, what about the epistle to the Corinthians that he wrote before he wrote I Corinthians? Shouldn’t I Corinthians really be II Corinthians, or at least I Corinthians B? No. The letter to the Laodiceans Paul talks about in Colossians 4:16 is not in your Bible either.

“Paul wrote a lot of things that aren’t in the Bible. Why? Because God didn’t write them. Just because Paul wrote it, didn’t make it Scripture. God wrote it, and that’s what made it Scripture.

“You read all this stuff going around last year with that Da Vinci Code book and all that stuff about the lost books of the Bible; the books of Thomas and Philip and stuff. Yawn.

“I read that stuff in the ’60s, folks. I read the Gospel of Judas when I was in school in the ’60s. They didn’t just find that! That was just a big hullabaloo they were making.

In I Corinthians 11:25, when Paul writes, “This cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me,” he’s quoting from Luke 22:19, demonstrating that he had a copy of Luke in his possession.

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Jordan says, “When somebody says, ‘Well, you guys make too much of Paul; you don’t really study the rest of the Bible,’ realize that it would be impossible to study Paul’s epistles without studying the rest of the Bible.

“There are so many places in Paul’s epistles where he’ll make a point, using an allusion, or some information from the Old Testament and the rest of Scripture, to illustrate and amplify a point he’s making.

“You could never make the Bible anything other that what it is, and that’s one whole book. Now, when we ‘rightly divide’ it, we’re not chopping it up. It’s one book; it’s got one author who uses 40 different human authors over almost 2,000 years of time.

“There are things that are written back in Genesis that you really can’t understand the importance of them until you come way over to late in the New Testament. And when you read over here in the New Testament something that’s written, you’ll say, ‘You know, what He wrote there, He had that in mind back there when He wrote Genesis,’ and you’ll see it.

“You’ll say, ‘Wait a minute, Matthew or John, Peter or Paul, they didn’t live back there; they lived over here. But whoever wrote back here—say Moses—knew what those men were going to know!’

“There were things that weren’t revealed until Paul—nobody knew about them until Paul came of the scene—and yet these men wrote things back there (in the Old Testament) that tell you, ‘Whoever wrote this knew all of that was coming.’

“You see, that just proves to you there had to be one real author, and that he was an ET; an extra-terrestrial, outside of time and over time. God did that.

“That’s why when you just read and study the Bible, it demonstrates itself to you to be the Word of God. I’ve read other religious literature—the Koran I’ve read through five times; just sat and read it—and they don’t commend themselves to you like that at all. I’ve got a Muslim neighbor who can quote the Koran in Arabic but he doesn’t know what he’s quoting!”