It is not faithful and reasonable to interpret the phrase ‘all their parts,’ infallibly taught by the Council of Trent, as referring only to the Deuterocanonical parts of two books. The phrase refers to the entire Canon, and the term ‘all’ by no stretch of the imagination cannot refer to only two out of 73 books.
If a scholar can drop any phrase or verse from the Bible, without exception, on the basis of scholarship, then faith would be deprived of its certitude which is based on the authority of the Word of God. For then every verse would be suspect as being possibly a verse that scholars will drop from the text at a later time.
And this process of dropping verses has only begun in recent times (beginning in the 20th century). This implies that for nearly two thousand years (!!!) the Church was teaching from a Canon of Scripture that contained non-canonical non-inspired verses (the verses and parts of verses that were later dropped), and so the Church was teaching from a non-canonical source.
Therefore, the only faithful and reasonable understanding of ‘all their parts’ must include all of the verses and parts of verses of all the books in the Canon of Scripture.
Hi Ron, I’ve usually enjoyed your postings because they were thoughtfully and carefully written, and you’ve probably spent some time to understand the topics you write on, so I’ve learnt from what you’ve written.
Regarding your concern of the Church teaching from verses of Scripture that are dropped in later editions of the Bible (including the Nova Vulgata), Protestants would rightly be concerned and must logically be stumped given their sola scriptura beliefs; but not Catholics nor Orthodox Christians. The Catholic Church never bases any of her teachings on Scripture alone, much less on a specific verse, and has generously made use of other sources of knowledge, such as history, philosophy, natural law, science and even non-canonical literature (e.g. the writings of doctors of the Church, and St Jude quoted from apocryphal works) to explain her doctrines. Somehow, I don’t think any of the verses dropped so far under the critical scholarship would be earth-shaking enough to affect any of the Church’s reasonings offered to explain or elucidate her teachings. Though I must note that when the 1st edition RSV NT dropped sections of the gospels (e.g. the Story of the Adulterous Woman in John and the ending to Mark’s gospel), Catholic scholars saw to it that these chunks were reinstated for the RSV-CE.
I would agree that Trent’s decree would prevent sections from the Vulgate from being “decanonised” (e.g. what the 1st edition RSV NT tried to do); this extended to the deuterocanonical portions then rejected by the reformers, as well as to future excising that might arise from future textual criticisms. (Don’t ask me how many verses are needed to make a section; I don’t think the Church is ever going to say anything that precisely, much less would I have the wisdom to make an exact determination.) However, I think it is difficult to build a case that Trent wanted to micromanage each sentence and canonise each sentence in the Vulgate (the Fathers of the Council were not dealing with such sentence-by-sentence mutilation). The Magisterium of the Church has not supported an interpretation, such as yours, of the Council of Trent. Furthermore, there are many minor variations between different textual traditions of the same book, such as in Acts, and between the Septuagint texts used in the Greek-speaking Church and the Vulgate of the Latin Church. If Trent were to be read to such a micro level, would that make the Greek Church’s Bible to contain false interpolations or deletions?
Admittedly, the theological underpinings on the Canon of Scripture probably hasn’t undergone the rigorous development that would help us answer certain questions that inevitably will be raised based on current biblical scholarship. For example, what does it mean to say that a book is canonical Scripture when there are textual variations and different recensions of the same book (e.g. Tobit, Ecclesiasticus, Acts) accepted by different parts of the Church even before all the schisms? How can we describe more precisely the interplay between text and community? Previously, it was thought that biblical scholarship would allow us to arrive at a critical construction of the “original” text and would make this question superfluous, but now, scholars are increasingly aware of the textual diversity traditionally followed by the different Churches (Latin, Greek, Syraic etc) and that an “original” reconstruction is neither possible, nor perhaps useful (thus Ecole Bibique in Jerusalem has embarked on a new paradigm for translating the Scriptures). The Catholic Church embraces a diversity of scriptural traditions besides the Latin tradition as witnessed to in the Vulgate, but since Catholics hold that Scripture and Tradition form one single deposit of the Word of God, Catholic theology probably has the means to tackle such questions logically and meaningfully. But it might not have occured… just yet.
