Fighting over the Bible?

[mrs_abbott]

I’ve been reading some Church history about the time the councils started in mid 400 A.D. over Church beliefs, like Mary being the Mother of God and Jesus being both God and man.
The Bible was composed in Latin by St. Jerome shortly before that. Did the creation of the Bible have anything to do with the start of the CC’s tension? Granted, it was 700 years later when the East-West Schism happened but I was just curious if the Bible might have started the quarreling within the CC. Or was it just coincidence?

 

[jdemelo]

No maam.

The Sebalian heresy occured in the 200s
The Arian heresy was present through most of the 300s
The Nestorian heresy turned the century into the early 400s.

All these heresies were about WHO Christ was, and the bible did not cause them simply because the canon was declared in the late 300s.

However, all heretical beliefs in one form or another, use scripture as a proof of their validity. That is why the bible alone can not guarantee orthodoxy, but only the Church can as the bible itself testifies in 1 Tim 3:15.

God Bless.

 

[lak611]

Any fighting amongst Christians is due to sin, which is caused by the devil, not the Bible. All sin is caused by Satan, the father of lies. We need to resist him so he will flee. Prayer is our best defense.

 

[runandsew]

No I think it was earlier that the canon of the Bible when fighting began, you can read in the book of Acts and the writings of St. John and St. Paul, that there was already squabbling over faith issues, and over their authority.
And even in Mark 9:38-41 John said to him, "Teacher, we saw a man casting out demons in your name, and we forbade him, because he was not following us.

So it appears to me that the fighting was right from the beginning.

 

[Contarini]

I’ve been reading some Church history about the time the councils started in mid 400 A.D. over Church beliefs, like Mary being the Mother of God and Jesus being both God and man.
The Bible was composed in Latin by St. Jerome shortly before that. Did the creation of the Bible have anything to do with the start of the CC’s tension? Granted, it was 700 years later when the East-West Schism happened but I was just curious if the Bible might have started the quarreling within the CC. Or was it just coincidence?

The Bible was not created in the fourth century. That is a lamentable lie peddled by apologists who seem incapable of serious thought.

I’m sorry for my strong language, but this is simply pernicious nonsense and it can’t be condemned strongly enough. Leaving the OT out of it (!!!), what was St. Peter talking about when he referred to St. Paul’s letters as Scripture??? Why on earth would you entertain for an instant such a weird idea as that the Bible didn’t exist until the fourth century?

OK, now that I’ve vented. . . .

What you are talking about is the fixing (more or less) of the limits of the canon. I don’t think this was the cause of the fourth-century controversies. Rather, the fixing of the canon and the settling of major dogmatic points such as the Trinity were all part of a process of setting boundaries and regularizing the Church’s life which naturally set in once the Church was legalized. As long as the Church was under somewhat of a legal shadow (at the best of times), it was impracticable to get big councils together to thrash out all of this stuff, so there were a lot of local variations. Once Christianity was legal, this was possible–and not only that, but as an official religion (by the end of the century *the *official religion) of the Empire Christianity was understood to have a social duty to provide order and stability.

It would be a mistake to think that pre-Nicene Christians didn’t argue and quarrel. They did, incessantly. Read any of the ante-Nicene Fathers and you’ll see that there were lots of controversies then as well. But it’s true that the classic debates happened in the fourth and fifth centuries. This was simply a stage in the development of Christianity, and the official establishment of a universally recognized canon (NOT in any sense the “creation of the Bible”) was part of that.

In Christ,

Edwin

 

[ALLFORHIM]

Any fighting amongst Christians is due to sin, which is caused by the devil, not the Bible. All sin is caused by Satan, the father of lies. We need to resist him so he will flee. Prayer is our best defense.

Amen Sister:thumbsup:

 

[ALLFORHIM]

Hi,

There has been fighting since the fall of man I believe back in the day the NT was cannonized so all churches would have ONE source to go to, so they could fight all the heresies that were out there.

All of this in-fighting has been going on from the begining and sadly will probably continue to the end.

My:twocents:

 

[vern_humphrey]

I’ve been reading some Church history about the time the councils started in mid 400 A.D. over Church beliefs, like Mary being the Mother of God and Jesus being both God and man.

The first Ecumenical Council was about 125 years before that. That first Ecumenical Council was the Council of Nicea and it was called to deal with the Arian Heresy (the idea that Jesus was not both God and man.)

The Bible was composed in Latin by St. Jerome shortly before that.

Saint Jerome did not “compose” the Bible . He translated it from Greek and Hebrew into Latin.

Did the creation of the Bible have anything to do with the start of the CC’s tension?

Granted, it was 700 years later when the East-West Schism happened but I was just curious if the Bible might have started the quarreling within the CC. Or was it just coincidence?

There were heresies – such as the Marcion heresy, Gnosticism and so on, hundreds of years before that. Read the Epistles of Paul, or Revelation and you will see there were heresies and false prophets in the First Century – long before Christians had any idea there would be a New Testament.

 

[mrs_abbott]

The Bible was not created in the fourth century. That is a lamentable lie peddled by apologists who seem incapable of serious thought.

I’m sorry for my strong language, but this is simply pernicious nonsense and it can’t be condemned strongly enough. Leaving the OT out of it (!!!), what was St. Peter talking about when he referred to St. Paul’s letters as Scripture??? Why on earth would you entertain for an instant such a weird idea as that the Bible didn’t exist until the fourth century?

Whoa, Contarini! You can breathe now.
I was just searching on the internet for Church history and stumbled across that stuff that I put in my OP.
Finding a date on when the Bible was written was VERY hard. The only thing that was factual that I found was when St. Jerome wrote it in Latin.
Do you have some other sources for me to look at? I seriously want to know because I am ignorant when it comes to the history of Christianity.

 

[Contarini]

Whoa, Contarini! You can breathe now.
I was just searching on the internet for Church history and stumbled across that stuff that I put in my OP.
Finding a date on when the Bible was written was VERY hard. The only thing that was factual that I found was when St. Jerome wrote it in Latin.
Do you have some other sources for me to look at? I seriously want to know because I am ignorant when it comes to the history of Christianity.

Sorry This happens to be one of my pet peeves.

Try to get ahold of a good NT introduction, such as Bruce Metzger’s *Background, Growth, and Content, *F. F. Bruce’s *The New Testament Documents *or Luke Timothy Johnson’s *The Writings of the New Testament. *

No one knows for sure when the documents of the NT were written, but they were definitely all written by the middle of the second century (in my opinion by the end of the first century, and in some conservative scholars’ view by 70 AD). The easiest to date are the seven undisputed letters of Paul: 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1-2 Corinthians, Romans, Philippians, and Philemon. The basic chronology of Paul’s life is not in dispute, so they must all have been written at some time in the 50s or early 60s. Mark was probably written before AD 70, though not everyone would agree with that. Matthew is usually put after AD 70 and after Mark, but not everyone would agree there either–some think Matthew was written first. Luke was probably later than the other two (certainly was not written first)–it’s been dated as early as the 60s or (like Matthew) as late as the end of the first century. (Acts was presumably written shortly after Luke.) John was probably written in the 90s, though some liberal scholars would put it early in the 2nd century and some conservatives would put it before AD 70 as well.

And so on, and so forth.

2 Peter (itself placed by conservatives in the early 60s and by some more liberal scholars as late as the 2nd century) refers to Paul’s letters as Scripture. Christian writers from around 100 were apparently already speaking of the Gospels as Scripture. Irenaeus late in the 2nd century speaks of a canon of four Gospels. Most of the books in our NT were commonly accepted by the end of the 2nd century, but Revelation and some of the non-Pauline epistles were debated right up to the fourth century, and the debate was reopened briefly in the Renaissance.

I hope this is somewhat helpful. Sorry for being snippy–Catholic apologists have a habit of using the claim that there was “no Bible” until the fourth century as an argument in a way I find wholly illegitimate. And after one has refuted something a dozen times, one tends to lose patience hearing it again, even though the person repeating it is doing so perfectly innocently.

In Christ,

Edwin

 

[vern_humphrey]

Whoa, Contarini! You can breathe now.
I was just searching on the internet for Church history and stumbled across that stuff that I put in my OP.
Finding a date on when the Bible was written was VERY hard. The only thing that was factual that I found was when St. Jerome wrote it in Latin.
Do you have some other sources for me to look at? I seriously want to know because I am ignorant when it comes to the history of Christianity.

Why not get a good edition of the Bible and read it? I like the Saint Joseph edition of the New American Bible for Catholics. It’s full of notes, explanations, maps and so on to help you understand it.

Couple that with two very good study books – Reading the Old Testament and Reading the New Testament from Paulist Press, 997 Macarthur Blvd, Mahwah, NJ 07430.

 

[MrS]

The Bible was not created in the fourth century. That is a lamentable lie peddled by apologists who seem incapable of serious thought.

Actually, if you consider that the Bible is understood as the collection of inspired books, then yes… that canon was declared as such in the late fourth century.

If you object to the confusion of when the human authors actually penned their writings… then yes, I would agree.

Holy Scripture, as we know it today, developed from lots of NT possibilities… The Canon of Scripture was long studied, long discussed, and finally declared (and then re-declared at Trent)

Lamentable lie… come on, now. Who told you that.?

 

[vern_humphrey]

Actually, if you consider that the Bible is understood as the collection of inspired books, then yes… that canon was declared as such in the late fourth century.

If you object to the confusion of when the human authors actually penned their writings… then yes, I would agree.

Without the canon, there literally is no Bible – merely a collection of ancient writings. Some, of course are inspired, but others are not, and a good many are blatant forgeries. The canon allows us to distinguish the inspired writing from the rest.

Holy Scripture, as we know it today, developed from lots of NT possibilities… The Canon of Scripture was long studied, long discussed, and finally declared (and then re-declared at Trent)

There are some 40 known gospels, along with apocalypses, acts, epistles and other documents. The compliers of the canon had their work cut out for them.

Of course, they couldn’t begin their work until the concept of a New Testament jelled.

And we have no Christian writings that date back to within a generation of the Crucifixion – the earliest we have are the Epistles of Paul, written more than 20 years later.

Lamentable lie… come on, now. Who told you that.?

Well, if you believe in Sola Scriptura, how else can you deal with the fact that the early Church didn’t have a New Testament, and that idea of having one emerged very slowly.