Re: If the gospel of Judas was true, would it shift your fai
Great question.
The issue I have always wrestled with over this is God's providence. If he loves us and promised us he would give us his word, and that the faith was delivered unto the saints (Jude 3) then I'm not sure how it would have been left out of the canon of Scripture all of these years.
I suppose Dr. Wayne Grudem's position on this has always been helpful to me in this situation. This professor has stated this:
"At this point someone may ask a hypotethical question about what should we if another one of Paul's epistles were discovered, for example., Would we add it to Scripture? This is a difficult question, because two conflicting considerations are involved. On the one hand, if a great majority of believers were convinced that this was indeed an authentic Pauline epistle, written in the course of Paul's fulfillment of his apostolic office, then the nature of Paul's apostolic authority would guarantee that the writing would be God's very words (as well as Paul's), and that its teachings would be consistent with the rest of scripture. But the fact that it was not preserved as part of the canon would indicate that it was not among the writings the apostles wanted the church to preserve as part of Scripture. Morever, it must immediately be said that such a hypothetical question is just that: hypothetical. It is exceptionally difficult to imagine what kind of of historical data might be discovered that could convincingly demonstrate to the church as a whole that a letter lost for over 1,900 years was genuinely authored by Paul, and it is more difficult still to understand how our sovereign God could have faithfully cared for his people for over 1,900 years and still allowed them to be continually deprived of something he intended them to have as part of his final revelation of himself in Jesus Christ. These considerations make it so highly improbable that any such manuscript would be discovered at some time in the future, that such a hypotethical question really does not merit further serious consideration" (Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine, p. 68).
I tend to think his view on this is helpful, at least until I see something that would make me think otherwise. A tough question though that many have wrestled with for years. It has been one of the large debates between Roman Catholicism and Protestasntism. Rome says they CREATED the canon of Scripture (and thus can add to it the apocrypha writings). Evangelical or orthodox Protestants have always insisted that the church did not CREATE the canon but simply RECOGNIZED it back in the early part of church history.
Just my two cents on the matter.
Dr. Allen
