260824 – The Canon, the Back Door, and the Trust Chain: An Analysis

A fellowship essay from a conversation between Thomas Abshier and Isak Gutierrez, Monday, August 24, 2026 — continuing the canon question raised in the Sunday fellowship of August 23

Introduction

Sunday’s fellowship ended with a question we did not finish: on what ground does the Bible’s authority actually stand?  What do we say to the claim — Leonard’s claim, Joseph Smith’s claim, the New Age claim — that the canon is corrupted, incomplete, or awaiting supplementation by new revelation? The following day’s conversation carried the question further, and this essay presents the analysis that emerged. It proceeds in six movements: the historical account and evidence of biblical reliability; the discovery of the Septuagint and what it does to the “removed books” mythology; the anatomy of the corrupted-Bible narrative as a strategic attack; the historical mechanics of the Mormon counter-canon, examined as the type-specimen of that attack; the epistemology of trust chains that governs all of it; and the practical conclusion — how a moral witness should speak to a nation, which turns out to be the same question at civilizational scale.

I. The Ground of Biblical Reliability

The Sunday examination established what the Bible’s authority does not rest on: it does not rest on the Bible’s own commands not to alter it. Deuteronomy 4:2 seals the Law given through Moses; Revelation 22:18–19 seals the vision given through John. Both are the signatures of particular revelation-events, not padlocks on the future canon — and using the Bible to prove that nothing may follow the Bible is circular validation, the very epistemic structure used in cult systems. The Bible’s authority must stand on other grounds, and I believe the analysis identifies that ground.

The New Testament is reliable because it is testimony to an extraordinary man by those who were there. Jesus Christ is a man who claimed to be from the Father and one with the Father. He is a man who did miracles, who raised the dead, who predicted His own death and resurrection, who died and came back to life — and the written testimonies of the disciples who saw it. To this is added one apostle of a different kind: Paul, who never met Jesus in the flesh but encountered Him directly in the spirit, reported on that encounter, and whose letters make up most of the New Testament’s instruction on how to actually live the life of Christ.

The Old Testament is reliable on the parallel ground: it preserves the record of encounters so extraordinary — Abraham, Jacob, Moses, the Red Sea, the prophets — that a people carried them faithfully across thousands of years. The Dead Sea Scrolls supply the empirical check: the Isaiah scroll, a thousand years older than our previous oldest copy, shows that the scribal chain transmitted the text with remarkable fidelity. Oral and scribal transmission can corrupt; the evidence shows that, for this text, carried by this people, it substantially did not.

The formation of the canon, examined historically, confirms rather than undermines this ground. No council created the canon; the councils — Hippo (393), Carthage (397) — recognized what the churches had already used for centuries, by the criterion of apostolic connection: first-person proximity to the Lord. The Old Testament stabilized gradually — Torah by Ezra’s day, Prophets by 200 BC, Writings last — recognized, not invented, through centuries of a worshiping people’s usage. The process was, to use the word from Sunday, somewhat haphazard — “a little here, a little there” (cf. Isaiah 28:10) — and that is precisely its strength. A canon assembled by long, distributed, multi-generational recognition is a triangulated canon: hundreds of congregations, across centuries and continents, independently converging on the same books. A canon delivered whole by one angel to one man in one grove is a declared canon — one line on the chart, crossing nothing.

II. The Septuagint: What the “Removed Books” Story Actually Is

The conversation’s discovery concerns the difference between the Catholic 73-book canon and the Protestant 66. The received folklore, absorbed from a hundred directions, says “the Church removed books from the Bible,” and this folklore does heavy service in every corrupted-canon argument from the New Age to Nauvoo. The history says nearly the opposite.

The early church’s Bible was the Septuagint—the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures made in the third to first centuries BC. It included Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, the Maccabees, and the Greek additions to Esther and Daniel. This was the Bible Jesus and the apostles used; the New Testament quotes the Septuagint 80 to 90 percent of the time; Clement, Irenaeus, and Augustine cite its books as Scripture; and the councils of Rome, Hippo, and Carthage affirmed the full 73-book, Septuagint-based canon, which remained the standard Christian Bible for over a thousand years. The 66-book Bible is the newer artifact: at the Reformation, Luther and the reformers chose to follow the Masoretic canon — the Hebrew collection finalized by rabbinic Judaism after AD 70, after the church and synagogue had parted — moved the seven books to an appendix labeled Apocrypha (“good to read but not Scripture”), and later Protestant publishers dropped them entirely. Trent (1546) did not add books; it reaffirmed the fourth-century canon against the reduction.

Three analytical consequences follow. First, the “books were removed” narrative is real—but our own tradition, the Reformation, removed them for reasons partly textual and partly doctrinal (Second Maccabees’ prayers for the dead), and it removed books the apostolic church demonstrably used. Whatever one concludes about the deuterocanon’s inspiration requires telling the story forward, not backward. Second, the discovery disarms the corrupted-canon attack at its favorite point: the attacker says “the Church hid books from you,” and the informed answer is, “No — the history is public, the books are printed, and the shorter canon is the Protestant choice, not a conspiracy; here is exactly what happened and when.” Sunlight is the whole rebuttal. Third, the right response to learning this is not anxiety but appetite: read them. Susan said the same on Sunday. The Berean posture (Acts 17:11) is not a defensive crouch around 66 books; it is confident examination of everything, “proving all things, holding fast that which is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21), with the recognized canon as the standard against which the rest is measured.

III. The Corrupted-Bible Narrative as Strategic Attack

With the history established, the analysis turns to the use made of canon skepticism, and here the conversation produced its central thesis. The claim “the Bible is corrupted — councils added and subtracted — you can’t trust it” is not, in practice, a historical conclusion. It is the necessary first move of every system that intends to install a new revelator. The logic is strictly sequential: the standard must be discredited before the replacement can be seated. New Ageism runs this program diffusely. The need for restoration is the primary ground upon which the need for the Mormon claim by Joseph Smith arises.

I believe Joseph Smith’s encounter with Moroni and the subsequent translation of the gold and brass plates using a seer stone is best understood as a demonic strategy. I think its genius lies not in any single doctrine but in its architecture. What the new revelation established was not merely a new book but a new mechanism — the principle that a person can deliver new canon. In software terms, it left a back door open. Once “a prophet may add doctrine” is installed as a principle, the channel is permanent: any voice, at any time, can be seated in the prophet’s chair, and the system has no means of refusing it — indeed it has a standing office awaiting it, “prophet, seer, and revelator,” sustained by vote, generating (as Charlie observed Sunday of the Journal of Discourses) endless words without end. The content flowing through such a door is unverifiable by design: revelations from a faraway land, angels no one else saw, plates no one else may examine, delivered as “new” precisely so that nothing existing can check them. And the door’s traffic will not announce itself honestly — “no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14). No one follows a horned figure in red; everyone wants to follow an angel bearing light and a better story.

The analysis notes the seduction mechanism with care, because it is instructive rather than contemptible: the new revelation works on its audience because it is more vivid than the canon — emotional, personal, immediate, “you were there.” Detail masquerades as authenticity; completeness of narrative is mistaken for completeness of truth. And it very likely contains much that is true — it must, to be believed at all. The tares are sown among wheat (Matthew 13:25), not in a separate field. This is why the test can never be vividness, comfort, or even partial truth, but only the convergence of independent witnesses against the recognized standard — which is what the Bereans did to Paul himself, and what Paul commended them for.

IV. The Type-Specimen Examined: Masonry, the Seer Stone, and the Category of Magic

The conversation then subjected the Mormon origin claims to exactly the historical scrutiny the back-door thesis predicts they cannot survive. We must examine the results drawn from consensus scholarship, including faithful LDS historians. This enables triangulation of Joseph Smith’s revelations.

The Masonic timeline. Joseph Smith was initiated an Entered Apprentice Mason on March 15, 1842, and raised a Master Mason on March 16 — unusually fast. Fifty days later, in May 1842, he introduced the Nauvoo endowment to a select group above the red brick store. The ritual mechanics that entered LDS temple worship — secret signs, tokens, passwords, penalty gestures (throat, chest, bowels), progressive degrees, the ritual drama, the compass and square, the veil, the apron, the handshakes — are Masonic ritual vocabulary, matched element for element; every major historian, LDS scholars included, acknowledges the connection. Smith’s own explanation — that Masonry preserved corrupted fragments of Solomon’s temple rites, now divinely restored through him — is itself the tell: it borrows Old Testament gravitas (the temple was no minor thing) to authorize a nineteenth-century ritual innovation. The blood-oath penalties persisted in the endowment until 1990; the separate oath of vengeance, until 1927. These are not the marks of an ancient restoration; they are the marks of a ready-made ritual scaffolding, adopted whole and retheologized.

The translation mechanism. By the consistent testimony of the witnesses, the Book of Mormon was produced by Joseph Smith placing a seer stone — a folk-magic instrument he had used for years, of a kind common in 1820s New England treasure-seeking — into a hat, pressing his face into the hat, and dictating; the plates themselves were frequently covered or absent from the process, serving as ritual object rather than linguistic source. The brass plates exist only inside the narrative; the gold plates rest entirely on the word of Smith and his witnesses; no external evidence exists for either. Whatever else this is, it is not translation; it is divination — it is magic. Scripture’s verdict on the category is uniform and severe: divination, enchantment, the consulter of familiar spirits are an abomination (Deuteronomy 18:10–12); the instrument in the hat stands in the lineage of the occult, not of the scribes.

Regarding the connection between Masonic rituals and ancient pagan mystery religions: there is no organizational lineage from the ancient mysteries through the Illuminati to modern lodges. Many claim the historical Bavarian Illuminati lasted nine years, but many believe otherwise (a contention which has no bearing on this analysis). But a real symbolic inheritance exists: initiation degrees, oaths of secrecy, ritual death-and-rebirth, and hidden knowledge flow from the mysteries through Hermeticism to Freemasonry, and from the Nauvoo lodge into the endowment. Conceptual and ritualistic continuity, not the continuation of an ancient conspiracy.

The secrecy analysis. The question is why does the category matter beyond taxonomy? Because secrecy is an organizational technology. A secret, oath-bound, hierarchically covenanted society is a command structure exempt from external accountability — no surveillance, tight leadership control, total discipleship — which is precisely the instrument required for coordinated action against an existing order. Hence secret societies recur as the vehicle of conspiracy throughout history; and hence, plausibly, the cultural depreciation of “conspiracy theory” as a category. By eliminating the very idea of conspiracy as credible, the real instances are hidden behind the mockery of the imagined ones. The sober position: conspiracies have happened throughout history and have not stopped because humans improved and no longer band together secretly to exert influence unseen. The present fog of partisan conspiracy-mongering — each party laughing at the other’s theories in alternation — has so polluted the category that discernment, not credulity and not dismissal, is the only rational posture. We see in this analysis sufficient explanation for most worldly evil. We do not need baby-sacrificing Satanists to explain the behavior of those who have degraded the culture of business and government. Most people at the top are bought, not sworn allies of Satan. The Boeing story (the “Free Fall” Netflix documentary) is an example of the pattern: a company once wholly dedicated to quality changes leadership. The new leader is an acolyte of the shareholder-value creed, service is exchanged for stock price, and the degradation proceeds “little by little, here and there” until planes crash and a door falls off an aircraft. No cabal is required where seduction suffices. A CEO salary of thirty million dollars a year purchases most souls without any ceremony at all. “For the love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:10). The demonic does not need most men to hail Satan; it needs them to follow, sincerely, something that looked like a good idea, but had within it a transgression; the trading of quality for profit is one trade people can make.

V. The Trust Chain: AI, Textbooks, and the Universality of Faith

A methodological thread ran under the conversation that completes last week’s essay. The historical findings above were assembled in real time with AI assistance — and the immediate, correct question was: how far can AI be trusted, given that its makers have agendas and its training reflects a culture? The answer generalizes devastatingly: everything we know arrives through a chain of trust. We trust the textbook because of its sources; the sources because of their authors; the authors because of their institutions; the news because of its chain of custody. There is no unmediated knowledge of history, of science, of anything beyond immediate perception — and Sunday’s discussion established that even immediate perception rests on a final act of trust. This is the thesis of “Triangulating Truth” arriving from yet another direction: faith is required at every point in the experience of life. The question is never faith versus no faith; it is the quality of the chain — and the only known method for testing a chain is convergence across independent chains. That is why the canon findings above carry weight: AI answer, historical scholarship, LDS scholarship, and primary-source witness accounts all converge. One chain is a declaration; converging chains are a position. Limited trust, systematically cross-checked, is not cynicism; it is the Berean discipline applied to the information age.

VI. From Canon to Country: How a Witness Should Speak

The conversation’s final movement applied the same analysis to the civilizational question. A nation, like a canon, rests on a recognized standard; discredit the standard, and you open the back door for new revelators of every kind.

The diagnosis: America’s founding condition was the one Tocqueville named — America is great because America is good — and its goodness was confessedly Christian. The dismantling proceeded by the same mechanism as the canon attack: a false history installed as common knowledge. The “high wall of separation between church and state” is not in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or the Declaration; it is an altered phrase from Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, written to assure a religious minority that government would not dictate doctrine to the church — and in 1947, the Supreme Court, in Everson v. Board of Education, it was inverted into a doctrine that the church must be excluded from public life. We live inside a mythology, sincerely believed by people who think the founders wrote it in stone. Meanwhile, a watered-down Christianity — pray the prayer, change nothing, do as you please — cedes the field to systems that visibly stand for something, which is why Islam and Mormonism surge: people are starving for a faith with a spine. The remedy is not primarily political. The theory of social transformation stated in the conversation deserves canonical form: the renewal of the heart is at the bottom of it all. When enough people are simply good — equipped with a true standard (the Bible), a physics that lets them hold their heads up (there is a God, and materialism is the implausible story), and channels to speak (the feedback of the good) — then the degradations from excellence get refused at every level, the bought leadership finds no one below it willing to execute the degradation, and the cream rises. Government by renewed hearts, or not at all: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD” (Psalm 33:12).

And the manner of the witness matters as much as its content — this was the conversation’s pastoral conclusion, reached through the sobering case of the Netflix documentary on Mike Wallace. The muckraker’s road — confronting the world’s dark secrets face to face, daily, before cameras — extracted a terrible price from the man who walked it: lawsuits, despair, a family neglected unto tragedy. Exposure has its place; someone must sometimes say no to evil, cast the vote, name the thing. But a ministry built on confronting evil risks neglecting to teach the speaking what to do if it dwells endlessly on what not to do. The mind that recites “don’t drink today, don’t sin tonight” is dwelling on drink and sin. The mind pursuing “loving one another, and serving one another, and pleasing God with every thought, word, and deed,” has no bandwidth left for the degradations: “whatsoever things are true… honest… just… pure… lovely… think on these things” (Philippians 4:8). A witness that draws lines in the sand, and choose what is wrong and what is right can live a life of integrity without compromise and be at peace with God, living the life of a pure conscience. By living the life of purity, of edification, of serving those in need, the heart is full.

Conclusion

The analysis of the actual history of the Bible reveals a realistic understanding of the canon; it is trustworthy not because it says so, but because it is the triangulated eyewitness testimonies to extraordinary acts of God. Centuries of the church’s use recognized it as an authentic witness. The attacks on it, from Nauvoo to the New Age, share one architecture: discredit the standard, seat a revelator, hold the back door open to endless revelation. The defense against that architecture is not anxiety but examination — read the history, read even the disputed books, test the chains, and let convergence render its verdict. The same holds for the nation, whose founding standard was discredited by the same method and awaits the same Berean remedy. And the voice that carries this defense must be the positive voice — teaching what to do, unifying in Christ, reasoning together — because the renewal of hearts, one by one, widely, is the only transformation that holds. “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path” (Psalm 119:105).

— Thomas

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

Of one heart to make Christ King – 1 Chronicles 12:38