Discourses on Holy Scripture Author:John Kelly General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1850 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: THE OLD TESTAMENT CANON. ROMANS III. 2. UNTO THEM WERE COMMITTED THE ORACLES OF GoD. In the former discourse, it was our object to present before you, in as brief and comprehensive a form as possible, the evidence which exists in support of the Canon of the New Testament. The remarks there made, summary as they necessarily were, will have served, we hope, to put you in possession of the nature of the evidence to which we must look in a question of this sort -- of the source from which that evidence is derived -- and of the means of judging of its general conclusiveness. The object which we have now before us relates to the Canon of the Old Testament Scriptures. We mean, in humble dependence on the blessing of God, to place before you, in a similar condensed form, a statement of the evidence which we possess on this point. We might, indeed, reduce this proof to a very narrow compass. Regarding the New Testament as settled, we might confine ourselves to the very ample testimony which it contains to the Old Testament Scriptures as they now exist. Adducing the testimony of Jesus Christ and his Apostles, varied and abundant as it is, we mightsatisfy ourselves with their evidence as conclusive. If the Old Testament existed in their day in the same state as it does in ours; if it was composed of the same books; and if our Lord and his Apostles spoke of it and treated it as genuine and authoritative, then to all those with whom their decision is final, the proof is complete. Still, on many accounts, it may be desirable to go further. Beginning with the conclusive evidence of the New Testament, we may trace b...« less