Here’s a reply I posted on a similar thread not too long ago, with some modifications:
As for the differences between the Western and the Eastern Canon, I personally think that these synods were authoritative only in the Western churches. The Christian churches of the East had no similar authoritative synodal decree.
The declarations of the Synods of Hippo and Carthage had more influence in the West than in the East (as they were
local synods as opposed to
ecumenical ones); the Eastern churches had, in general, a weaker feeling than the Western for the necessity of making a sharp delineation with regard to the Biblical canon. It was more conscious of the gradation of spiritual quality among the books that it accepted and was less often disposed to assert that the books which it rejected possessed no spiritual quality at all.
In fact, the canon defined by the Synod of Hippo originally met with dispute, especially from the church in North Africa, which is why it was necessary that the three synods in Carthage in 393, 397, and 419 confirm the decision. The Western churches could have chosen to summon more local councils to conform their canon with that of, say, the Ethiopians or the Greeks or vice versa, or they could have held an ecumenical council, consisting of “
all the holy churches of God”. But they didn’t. The western churches were happy with their canon, and the other churches were content with theirs (after all, the difference lies mostly in the fact that other churches had more books; no church lacked the ‘essential’ seven books which the Protestants dispute).
After centuries of being a technical non-issue in both sides (while the all-too familiar debates on leavened bread vs. unleavened bread or the
filioque raged on, no one publicly seemed to care about how many books of the Bible “the other side” had*), it was technically only during the Reformation that defining the Biblical canon became such a big deal in the West, prompting the Latin church to definitively and formally define what books went in or out in the Council of Trent. And eventually, as one poster mentioned, the 1672 Synod of Jerusalem happened for the Eastern churches.
- But then again, some books which the Eastern churches accept, such as 3 and 4 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasses, were at that time usually published as part of the OT in the Latin Vulgate…this was pre-Trent after all.
