[DFWChristian] said: “I know the Bible is true because it’s author is God”, yet there are many books outside the Bible, they also claim to be inspired, so why don’t we have those books to be in our Canon? Like many in here said, “God didn’t send us an inspired table of content”, how do you know which book to put in the Bible? The Bible didn’t come down from the sky or according to Islam, given directly by Allah through Gabriel. The Bible was compiled throughout history by both Jews and Christians. Through different councils(Rome, Carthage, Trent…)_the Bible was put together by no other than the Catholic Church. Since you claim that your belief is based in the Bible alone, there’s no way to escape the truth that the Bible itself was brought together by “man-made” tradition.
My experience—perhaps atypical—has been that many protestants anacronously take “the Bible” as a given. The Bible is the Bible! It is a unity, a singular book whose contents is well-known to all and always has been; indeed, the Bible itself
has always been. They don’t ask how it came to be sifted from the larger corpus of early Christian writing. The word “canon” is unfamiliar and suspicious to them. It is obvious to them that the Gospel of Peter is aprocryphal because it isn’t in the Bible.
It is as if they suppose, I sometimes think, that the skies opened at some point shortly after John received his revelations (or perhaps at the time of Martin Luther), and out dropped a fully-formed volume entitled “The Bible”! (Some seem to suppose that the volume that dropped from heaven that day was subtitled “King James Edition,” too!) Of course they don’t think about it
consciously in these terms; that would be silly. They don’t think consciously about the question at all, because again, the Bible is the Bible. I have heard more than one preacher give a sermon which tried to get far too much mileage out of a key word, as if they think St. Paul chose that very word, as it exists in contemporary American English! The difficulties of translating across language and culture sometimes seem to slip away.
And quite naturally, starting from that point, they assume that the Catholic Church, for some unknown reason, added those extra books in her so-called Bible. It must have done so, because those books aren’t in
the Bible, and so it’s perfectly obvious, by ironclad, inexorable logic, that if those books aren’t in
the Bible, and they’re in the
Catholic Bible, they must have come from
somewhere, so the Church must have added them.
If I may presume, that, I suspect, is DFWChristian’s answer to why Maccabees isn’t an authority. It isn’t in the Bible, and the Catholic Church had no authority to add it to the Bible, as it did at the Council of Trent.
Except, of course, it didn’t. That view is anacronous and ahistoric. The Catholic Church didn’t add them at the Council of Trent; the reformers deleted them. So DFWChristian has it precisely backwards, if I’m correctly assessing his position. The question is not whether the Catholic Church had authority to add to the Bible, but whether protestants had the authority to subtract a number of books from the canon already established.
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