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lemerjoe
Guest
Why did the specific books in the Bible get in? Was there some sort of criteria used to decide which books where cannon and which were not? How do we know that other texts aren’t cannon and vice versa?
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PaulfromIowa
Guest
The short answer is that we know because the Catholic Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, has infallibly defined the canonical books.
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MarcoPolo
Guest
PaulfromIowa’s answer is ultimately the correct one.
But to get a window on some of the signs that alert the Church of the Spirit’s truth, I think this quote from Augustine is worthwhile:Now, in regard to the canonical Scriptures, he must follow the judgment of the greater number of Catholic churches; and among these, of course, a high place must be given to such as have been thought worthy to be the seat of an apostle and to receive epistles. Accordingly, among the canonical Scriptures he will judge according to the following standard: to prefer those that are received by all the Catholic churches to those which some do not receive. Among those, again, which are not received by all, he will prefer such as have the sanction of the greater number and those of greater authority, to such as are held by the smaller number and those of less authority. If, however, he shall find that some books are held by the greater number of churches, and others by the churches of greater authority (though this is not a very likely thing to happen), I think that in such a case the authority on the two sides is to be looked upon as equal. (Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, II.12)
But to get a window on some of the signs that alert the Church of the Spirit’s truth, I think this quote from Augustine is worthwhile:Now, in regard to the canonical Scriptures, he must follow the judgment of the greater number of Catholic churches; and among these, of course, a high place must be given to such as have been thought worthy to be the seat of an apostle and to receive epistles. Accordingly, among the canonical Scriptures he will judge according to the following standard: to prefer those that are received by all the Catholic churches to those which some do not receive. Among those, again, which are not received by all, he will prefer such as have the sanction of the greater number and those of greater authority, to such as are held by the smaller number and those of less authority. If, however, he shall find that some books are held by the greater number of churches, and others by the churches of greater authority (though this is not a very likely thing to happen), I think that in such a case the authority on the two sides is to be looked upon as equal. (Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, II.12)
po18guy
Well-known member
Oddly enough, the Jehovah’s Witness Corporation gives complete credibility to the Catholic Church’s selection of Gospels (no copy of which is written by the original author) in the April, 2012 pulp fiction edition of Watchtower. They offer their take on the apocryphal and Gnostic gospels and state clearly that there has never been a question of the authenticity of the four canonical Gospels. Thank you very much, Arian brothers and sisters!
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Mystophilus
Guest
There is a good introduction to the process here. The really short version is that the OT is the Scriptures which Jews were using in the first century, and the NT is the Scriptures which the early Church decided were authentic and orthodox. Some of the unorthodox ones have some truly wacky stuff in them, whereas others looked pretty much okay but were attributed to people who could not possibly have written them.
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patrick457
Guest
This is THE answer. Everything else is just academic squabbling.
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Mystophilus
Guest
I would feel better about that had they not altered the text of the original four…Oddly enough, the Jehovah’s Witness Corporation gives complete credibility to the Catholic Church’s selection of Gospels (no copy of which is written by the original author) in the April, 2012 pulp fiction edition of Watchtower. They offer their take on the apocryphal and Gnostic gospels and state clearly that there has never been a question of the authenticity of the four canonical Gospels. Thank you very much, Arian brothers and sisters!
po18guy
Well-known member
Yet, they had only one source to go to for their “raw material.” They, to put it succinctly, are in a jam when it comes to explaining the origin of the canon.
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Rolltide
Guest
As an historian myself, I can tell you that we know quite a lot about the selection process. It worked like this. Most books could be grouped into a few categories:
- Those which pretty much everyone agreed as legitimate. This included the four canonical Gospels, and most of the Letters of Paul. This legitimacy was also confirmed by their age. Most were written no more than 30 years after the fact. ALL of the canonical New Testament books were written before the year 100 AD.
- Those which were absolutely clear forgeries. Some forgeries were easy to pick out, and everyone agreed. These were either books that were written hundreds of years later, or had ridiculous content, or both. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is a great example of this. It purports to tell the story of Jesus’s life as a child and teen. It was regarded, even at the time, as little more than a collection of folk tales made up to fill the gaps in the Bible. (Call it early fan fiction if you like.) The behavior of Jesus in the book is so ridiculous at times as to not be credible.
- Those which were rejected because they were Gnostic. This included many false “Gospels” that might contain elements of the original Gospels, but were distorted to conform with Gnostic ideas. Almost all were written a good 100-200 years (or more) after the canonical Gospels, and cannot be traced back any further than that. Gnostics believed that only by deciphering secret wisdom or knowledge in the Bible could one get into heaven. In other words, salvation was NOT for all, but a select, learned few. It also was completely independent of behavior often times, so, it didn’t matter if you were Mother Teresa or Adolf Hitler… crack the Bible code, and you make it to heaven. (There’s shades of Gnosticism in Scientology, although the two are unrelated.)
- Those which contained some true knowledge, but also contained clear falsehoods. These were problematic documents. Some of the information might be true, but because they were written down much later than the canonical books, other information was exaggerated or false, making it impossible to decipher what parts were genuine and what weren’t. As a result, they were left out of the Bible out of an abundance of caution. However, there are tidbits that come from these books that are almost certainly true. For example, it’s where we learn about the upside-down crucifixion of Peter.
- A few books which were highly debated, and eventually accepted or rejected. There were a select few books that everyone was on the fence about. They included (among a few others) the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, Revelation, and the Didache. Out of those I just listed, of course only Revelation made it in. The Didache is one of the oldest genuine Christian documents out there, but it was rejected for being more of an early catechism. In other words, while it accurately described first century Christians, it contained no inspired knowledge that would help one achieve salvation, so it was left out to remain an historical document of the time. The Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas were included by some early on as canon, but were eventually left out due to an abundance of caution due to some mildly controversial theological statements. They are, however, also considered genuine statements and ideas of the early Christian community.
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PoorKnight
Guest
Ok I read all that I could stand of that link… It’s full of twists, half truths and “out and out” (as my mother-in-law would say) lies.
One point made is that it was “easy” for the NT to be collected because everything was either “written by an apostle or by one of their closest friends”. And all the individual chuches had to do was to take the writtings from the apostles, hand them down faithfully to their decendants. Really? Where is that in the Bible? It also says that Hebrews was written by Paul… again where, chapter and verse please? That Mark was written by Mark… again, Chapter and verse.
The ‘other’ books were ‘obvioiusly’ not written by an apostle or one of their ‘closest friends’. Where is it in Scripture the Clement (baptised by Peter, learned from Paul) is NOT one of some apostles friends. Or Polycarp of Smyrna - learned from John the Apostle… etc etc etc… Chapter and verse please.
Short of the Long of it, the first page I clicked on made a big case that it was “Individual churches” that decided on their own what books belonged in the NT and (my paraphrase here) lo and behold they were “almost” identical… “except for a few minor exceptions” Yeah like “Letter of Hermes” “Letter of Clement to the Corinthians” both considered Scripture by many Christians. Or Hebrews, Revelations and others that were NOT considered Scripture by many Christians.
It seemed to me that it’s making the case that the Bible just dropped from the sky complete with RC Sproles Imprimatur!
Also the paper passes over the whole OT as if it was just the canon of the Jews. The Jews had NO CANON. The Sadduces were “Sola Pentateuch” subscribers. Pharasees had many more books and the Essenes had copies of Tobit and other of the Deuterocaniconicals in Hebrew - which throws “Jamnia” on its ear.
Sorry to say, and I mean this in the most brotherly way, that web site is someone’s attempt to re-write history.
God Bless
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patrick457
Guest
No. This assertion gets repeated very often, but to shamelessly quote myself:
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patrick457
Guest
Another shameless quote:
Correct! The codex was not attested until the 1st century BC.There is, however, a problem with the idea that they had “a standard canon and a standard version of each book in the canon.” On the contrary, Jews of the time had anything but. Quoting myself again: “I should warn about projecting modern ideas of a fixed, closed canon of Scripture at this time. While the Torah was held by every Jew to be authoritative and people already had pretty good guesses about the Prophets and a few Writings, the ‘canon’ (I’m using it in a loose sense here) was far from being closed: people could conceivably consider other books as authoritative (*deutero-*canonical) and question some books that were in this de facto ‘canon’.”
Josephus, for instance, says this in his work Against Apion (1.8):
For we have not an innumerable multitude of books among us, disagreeing from and contradicting one another, [as the Greeks have,] but only twenty-two books, which contain the records of all the past times; which are justly believed to be divine; and of them five belong to Moses, which contain his laws and the traditions of the origin of mankind till his death. This interval of time was little short of three thousand years; but as to the time from the death of Moses till the reign of Artaxerxes king of Persia, who reigned after Xerxes, the prophets, who were after Moses, wrote down what was done in their times in thirteen books. The remaining four books contain hymns to God, and precepts for the conduct of human life. It is true, our history hath been written since Artaxerxes very particularly, but hath not been esteemed of the like authority with the former by our forefathers, because there hath not been an exact succession of prophets since that time; and how firmly we have given credit to these books of our own nation is evident by what we do; for during so many ages as have already passed, no one has been so bold as either to add any thing to them, to take any thing from them, or to make any change in them; but it is become natural to all Jews immediately, and from their very birth, to esteem these books to contain Divine doctrines, and to persist in them, and, if occasion be willingly to die for them.
Josephus is our earliest reference to a ‘fixed’ collection of Jewish Scriptures. As per his reckoning, his ‘canon’ consisted of: (1) the Torah (Genesis to Deuteronomy); (2) the Prophets (Joshua, Judges-Ruth, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah-Lamentations, Ezekiel, Minor Prophets, Job, Daniel, Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah, Esther); (3) the “four books”: Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs. This is almost identical (but at the same time, different) to the later rabbinic categorization of twenty-four books (counting Ruth and Lamentations separately from Judges and Jeremiah, respectively) into the tripartite category of Law-Prophets-Writings. There might also be a reference to the tradition of reckoning twenty-four (as opposed to Josephus’ twenty-two) books in a near-contemporary apocryphal work known as 2 Esdras (aka 4 Ezra):
And on the next day, behold, a voice called me, saying, “Ezra, open your mouth and drink what I give you to drink.” Then I opened my mouth, and behold, a full cup was offered to me; it was full of something like water, but its color was like fire. And I took it and drank; and when I had drunk it, my heart poured forth understanding, and wisdom increased in my breast, for my spirit retained its memory; and my mouth was opened, and was no longer closed. And the Most High gave understanding to the five men, and by turns they wrote what was dictated, in characters which they did not know. They sat forty days, and wrote during the daytime, and ate their bread at night. As for me, I spoke in the daytime and was not silent at night. So during the forty days ninety-four books were written.
And when the forty days were ended, the Most High spoke to me, saying, “Make public the twenty-four books that you wrote first and let the worthy and the unworthy read them; but keep the seventy that were written last, in order to give them to the wise among your people. For in them is the spring of understanding, the fountain of wisdom, and the river of knowledge.” And I did so.
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PJM
Guest
The SHORT answer is BECAUSR THAT WAS AND REMAIND GOD’S DESIRE
Read 2nd. Tim. 3:16-17
Either the Bible HAS TO BE THE SINGULAT TRUTHS OF GOD or:
We’d not have a way to Know God
Know what God Taught
Know what God Commands:thumbsup:
The seected text were “HOTLY and widely” debated and gudied by God Himself.
That my friend is why we proclaim that “God authroed the bible” NOT by Himself by by Divine Guidance of what the authors choose to write.
THERE ARE very many text that were not selected because they did not meet the criteria set by The Fathers,
God Bless,
Pat
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Mystophilus
Guest
I am sorry, but, having read your accusation that he is lying, I could not then find how you justify such an extreme charge.
I am certainly not about to say that the first essay is perfect, especially when it deliberately simplifies matters for ease of reading, but that is what an introduction is meant to do.
Why should it be in the Bible?It is in the Early Church commentaries on the canon-forming process, in the links which he provides, if you want to read it.
Again, why should it be in the Bible??
It’s in Origen, here. It’s one of the lists to which that first essay links.
Yet again, why should this be in the Bible???
He describes apostolic authorship as a justification for inclusion, and that is evident in Early Church discussions of the books. He does not go into detail regarding the process of exclusion.
The noun phrase “each congregation” and the adverb “independently”, each used only once, are all that I could find of this “big case” which you describe, and it is worth pointing out that he attributes this more particularly to “the grace of God”.
He gives a handy table of differences in inclusions and exclusions, and there is a link to that table given in that first essay.
He never says that they did. In his “Reception of the Old Testament in Greek”, he notes that “It is inaccurate to talk about the Septuagint as a single book in apostolic days”, and makes three other comments, in that single, short section, upon the variations in the LXX’s collection of books.
He gives another handy table of differences in inclusions and exclusions of OT books, again given in a link from that first essay.
What I find most peculiar here is that you arraign him for his simplifications, even going so far as to accuse him of dishonesty, and yet you yourself oversimplify what he is saying. Are you being dishonest? No. So how is he?
If you are reacting to his partisan-Protestant commentary about the Catholic Church, something which you have not mentioned, he certainly does show his prejudice there, but that does not make his collection of Early Church sources any less useful.
If you have some other introduction to which you would prefer people were directed, feel free to mention it.
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COPLAND_3
Guest
This right here is the most important and the one criteria that has only one absolute conclusion. While there was a process and criteria used by the Church to decide, it was the Holy Spirit that guided that process to provide the canon, BECAUSE OF APOSTOLIC AUTHORITY. All the other means of deciding what is canonical is open for different conclusions because, just as we see among those who use the same Bible but come up with different doctrines that contradict each other, many can use the exact criteria to decide what they think is canonical but would end up with different (so-called) canons.
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teeboy
Guest
Yes.
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PoorKnight
Guest
Sorry, I’m not going back to read any more of that. It’s an attempt to remove the Catholic Church and her authority from the canon of Scripture. It’s an unfortunate necessity for non-Catholic Christians to do when they start studying the history of the Bible.I am sorry, but, having read your accusation that he is lying, I could not then find how you justify such an extreme charge.
I am certainly not about to say that the first essay is perfect, especially when it deliberately simplifies matters for ease of reading, but that is what an introduction is meant to do.
It is in the Early Church commentaries on the canon-forming process, in the links which he provides, if you want to read it.
Again, why should it be in the Bible??
It’s in Origen, here. It’s one of the lists to which that first essay links.
Yet again, why should this be in the Bible???
He describes apostolic authorship as a justification for inclusion, and that is evident in Early Church discussions of the books. He does not go into detail regarding the process of exclusion.
The noun phrase “each congregation” and the adverb “independently”, each used only once, are all that I could find of this “big case” which you describe, and it is worth pointing out that he attributes this more particularly to “the grace of God”.
He gives a handy table of differences in inclusions and exclusions, and there is a link to that table given in that first essay.
He never says that they did. In his “Reception of the Old Testament in Greek”, he notes that “It is inaccurate to talk about the Septuagint as a single book in apostolic days”, and makes three other comments, in that single, short section, upon the variations in the LXX’s collection of books.
He gives another handy table of differences in inclusions and exclusions of OT books, again given in a link from that first essay.
What I find most peculiar here is that you arraign him for his simplifications, even going so far as to accuse him of dishonesty, and yet you yourself oversimplify what he is saying. Are you being dishonest? No. So how is he?
If you are reacting to his partisan-Protestant commentary about the Catholic Church, something which you have not mentioned, he certainly does show his prejudice there, but that does not make his collection of Early Church sources any less useful.
If you have some other introduction to which you would prefer people were directed, feel free to mention it.
Phil Vischer does it in a completely different way… just blames the whole thing (collection of and the “problem” of the “extra books”) on St. Jerome.
If there was no Catholic Church heirarchy there would be no unified canon of the NT. If it wasn’t for Martin Luther, we would still have a unified canon of OT Scripture too.
When someone removes the Catholic Church and her authority from the canon of Scripture, you’re left with what R.C. Sprole said “a FALIBLE list of infalible books”.
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bmonk
Guest
And what evidence do you have of that? Perhaps they were edited–but is there evidence of a specific group that did the editing?
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Dave_Noonan
Guest
I’d be curious as to who you are thinking is included in “we” since the orthodox churches have biblical canons that differ from the Latinate church. Just the West?
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mercytruth
Guest
If one was to look at all the citations of the early church fathers, that is, before the Nicene councils, one will see that all of the books of the OT and NT that we now have were quoted. Gnostic writings were not quoted by these early church fathers.
Writings such as the Didache, Barnabas, Clement, the Shepherd of Hermas were considered as worthy, but not included in the canon.
Very occasionally, one will find quotations by the early church fathers which can not be indentified with any known scripture, or other work.
There are over 50 pages of scripture citations in the 8 volumes of early church fathers.
For example, Genesis 1:1 is quoted twenty-five times amongst the 8 volumes.
i represents volume 1, followed by the page number(s), ii represents volume 2, followed by the page number(s), etc.
My heartfelt thanks to the website below.
ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf10.ix.html
God’s peace
micah
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