What do you think of this Bible Cannon History from the EO Church?

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From Wikipedia:

Deuterocanon
& Apocrypha

Catholic, Orthodox: Baruch & Letter of Jeremiah · Additions to Daniel (Susanna, Song of the Three Children, Bel & the Dragon) · Additions to Esther · Judith · 1 Maccabees · 2 Maccabees · Sirach · Tobit · Wisdom ·

Orthodox: Prayer of Manasseh · 1 Esdras · 2 Esdras · Orthodox: 3 Maccabees · 4 Maccabees · Odes · Psalm 151 ·

Syriac Peshitta only: 2 Baruch · Psalms 152–155 ·

Ethiopian Orthodox only: 4 Baruch · Enoch · Jubilees · 1-3 Meqabyan
 
From a Catholic Site writing about the early fathers:

[a.d. 30–100.] Clement was probably a Gentile and a Roman. He seems to have been at Philippi with St. Paul (a.d. 57) when that first-born of the Western churches was passing through great trials of faith. There, with holy women and others, he ministered to the apostle and to the saints. As this city was a Roman colony, we need not inquire how a Roman happened to be there. He was possibly in some public service, and it is not improbable that he had visited Corinth in those days. From the apostle, and his companion, St. Luke, he had no doubt learned the use of the Septuagint, in which his knowledge of the Greek tongue soon rendered him an adept. His copy of that version, however, does not always agree with the Received Text, as the reader will perceive.

ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf01.ii.i.html

So Clement used the Septuagint, which the Orthodox church uses and that Jesus supposedly learned from, so what is up with this statement?

“he had no doubt learned the use of the Septuagint, in which his knowledge of the Greek tongue soon rendered him an adept. His copy of that version, however, does not always agree with the Received Text, as the reader will perceive.”

Why have not Catholics commented on this thread?

This is not an attack thread, I would just like an explanation. All signs are starting to point towards Eastern Orthodox as being the true church from my research, but I would love to hear the other side.
 
If we read the article carefully, we’d realise that the Orthodox Churches have not defined their Old Testament Canon. So the idea that the Apostles used the Septuagint, and X books are in the Septuagint, thus all X books are in the Old Testament Canon doesn’t even have currency among Orthodox theologians and Bishops.

Ultimately, it is the Church that determines the Canon of Scripture. The Catholic Church determined the Canon during the Council of Trent; the Orthodox Churches have yet to do so, although that is supposed to be on the agenda for a pan-Orthdox synod to be held later this year.
 
The great problem with the idea that the Septuagint was this way and was accepted this way and so we accept it that way is that there really isn’t much evidence for it. Matter of fact, the evidence tends to be contrary to that.

First of all, at the time of Jesus, it doesn’t seem that putting things in a book was the way it was normally done. Books were on scrolls. If you read from one scroll is that automatically an endorsement of another scroll because someone who came after you put it in a codex?

Secondly, the oldest codexes we have of the Septuagint aren’t in complete agreement. Seems quite strange if it was a set canon in the Septuagint that the examples we have from 400 years later aren’t more standardized.

Third, there is Athanasius, the Bishop of Constantinople. Head of the Orthodox Church, if the canon was set with the authoritative books being the broader canon, you’d have thought someone would have told him. He lists the canon with but one variation substituting one of the deuteros for Esther, but he was adamant on the number of authoritative books.

And then we get to today, now the Orthodox Church really doesn’t conflict with Athanasius in the way one would think if you think in black and white in the canon equals things are all authoritative.

While the broader canon is definitely a part of Orthodox practice in reading, it is not used for doctrine. In that way, it’s really like the practice of the Reformers who set it in a separate section to point out it’s different status, but who continued to use it in the church.

The most obvious example of these differences is the Ethipian Church and it’s broad canon. Yes, they have a broad canon, but the books are not held in equality.

If you take it in practice, the Orthodox and the Anglicans are the closest to each other. Lutherans would fit in there but generally have reduced their usage of the deteros. Though I think that’s starting to swing again.
 
Not strictly on topic but does anyone know if the “St Thomas Christians” of India (now the Malabar Rite) originally included the apocryphal “Acts of Thomas” and “Gospel of Thomas” in their NT canon?
 
Crimson_Seraph said:
Why do Roman Catholics reject I Esdras, III Maccabees and the Prayer of Manasses when they were in the Septuagint? Wasn’t it the Bible the Apostles used? The Orthodox would say that you have taken books away from the Bible wouldn’t they?

I’ve always wanted to ask you folks this question, but didn’t want to start a new topic on it hehe.
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This is a simplification, but it might help: the problem with talking about the Bible which the Apostles used is the fact that they did not use one. Rather than having a canon, a specific selection of texts, they had a general collection of texts, and different individuals accepted and read different ones.

Over time, people worked to decide what was legitimate and what was not, which was how the canons were formed.

Thus, in the late 4th and early 5th centuries, when translating the Vulgate, Jerome decided that he wanted to be very historicist, and stick to the OT books for which he could find Hebrew originals. In other words, he was following the Masoretic/Tanakh canon.

However, the Church of Rome, for whom he was doing the work, wanted him to include the texts which they actually read in their churches. As the Christian Church had developed with the usage of the Septuagint, this canon included a few texts which were not included in the Tanakh canon.

So, he included what they wanted, although he also wrote prefaces in which he complained about the inclusion of these texts. You can still read his argument in letters with Augustine of Hippo, and his prefaces, if you want to see all of this.

Eventually, the Protestants came along in the 16th century and decided to go back to Jerome’s preferred canon, the Tanakh canon, for the OT. This was probably about as much a result of being historicist as it was a result of being unCatholic.

This move, however, prompted Rome to validate the Vulgate canon as the correct one, at the Council of Trent.

Because the Orthodox have never done a similar thing, they do not precisely have a canon, and so some of them still read some of the other OT texts.

Did the Apostles read III Maccabees? Who knows? There are some suggestions that they may have read 1 Enoch, but what matters is not whether they read it, but how true they believed it to be, which is rather hard to say until we can actually find evidence of any one of them saying any thing about it.

(That got a lot longer than I expected; sorry.)
 
I think it is a great history of the Bible Canon.

Why does the Catholic Church have a different Canon from the EO. I believe it is pretty much the same except in a couple parts which the Council of Trent also allowance for. So the EO and the Catholic Canon are compatible. We had a thread on this which shows that the Catholic and EO canons are pretty much compatible as opposed to the modern Protestant Canon.

The modern Protestant Canon is incompatible as it is incompatible with history, logic and any Christian ideal. It is upholding a rejection of Christ from the early Jewish tradition as opposed to submitting to Christ.

As the article mentioned most modern Protestants use truncated Bibles which is a recent innovation of the last 150 years or so. I have a Protestant Bible which is about 160 years old, which has 73 books as opposed to the modern 66.

In Christ
Scylla
 
Oh ok, I’ll be sure to read it and get back to the discussion. Thanks!
 
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