mayra hart:
it is a fact that jesus,his apostles, the new testament writers,and the early church all used a bible that included the apocrytha.
Yes, the Septuagint did include the apocrypha (Catholic Deuterocanonicals), and many books that Catholics don’t accept, too. So, if being in the Septuagint automatically makes a book canonical, then Catholics must accept 3 and 4 Maccabees and 3 Esdras. As Henry Swete points out:
"The MSS. and many of the lists of the Greek Old Testament include certain books
which find no place in the Hebrew Canon. The number of these books varies…but the fullest collections contain the following: I Esdras, Wisdom of Solomon, Wisdom of Sirach, Judith, Tobit, Baruch and the Epistle of Jeremiah, i.-iv. Maccabees. We may add the Psalms of Solomon, a book which was sometimes included in MSS. of Salomonic books, or, in complete Bibles, at the end of the Canon… "
–Henry Barclay Swete,
An Introduction ot the Old Testament in Greek, 1968, p. 265
the palestine canon, which excluded these books, had not been “invented” yet.
The Palestinian vs. Alexandrian Canon is just a theory that was all the rage in the 19th Century, but has fallen from grace as of the last 100 years. It basically says that during Jesus’ time there were two canons floating around, the Palestinian, which did not contain the apocrypha, and the Alexandrian, which was Hellenistic, and in fact contained some of the Apocrypha.
As F.F. Bruce writes,
"It has frequently been suggested that, while the canon of the Palestinian Jews was limited to the twenty-four books of the Law, Prophets and Writings, the canon of the Alexandian Jews was more comprehensive.
There is no evidence that this was so–indeed, there is no evidence that the Alexandrian Jews ever promulgated a canon of scripture. "
–FF Bruce,
The Canon of Scripture, pp. 44-45
on the contrary, councils of the church had included the apocrypha in the list of the canon long before the reformation.
Yes, provincial (non-infallible) councils did include the Deuteros in their lists–however this did not settle the canon for the Church as a whole. This would explain the dissenting views up until Trent.
One cannot obtain an infallible canon from a fallible council as the
Catholic Encyclopedia attests:
"St. Jerome distinguished between canonical books and ecclesiastical books. The latter he judged were circulated by the Church as good spiritual reading but were not recognized as authoritative Scripture.
The situation remained unclear in the ensuing centuries…For example, John of Damascus, Gregory the Great, Walafrid, Nicolas of Lyra and Tostado continued to doubt the canonicity of the deuterocanonical books.
According to Catholic doctrine, the proximate criterion of the biblical canon is the infallible decision of the Church. This decision was not given until rather late in the history of the Church at the Council of Trent. The Council of Trent definitively settled the matter of the Old Testament Canon.
That this had not been done previously is apparent from the uncertainty that persisted up to the time of Trent. "
–The New Catholic Encyclopedia, The Canon
Many of the great Early Church Fathers, who you would no doubt defend as Roman Catholic, disagreed with Carthage and Hippo:
Origen, Melito of Sardis, Athanasius, Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory of Nazianzus, Hilary of Poitiers, Epiphanius, Basil the Great, Jerome, Rufinus and many others. They hold to the view, generally speaking, that the Old Testament books were 22 in number or sometimes listed as 24 depending on how the books were grouped together.
God bless,
c0ach
