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hn160
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The LC-MS Concordia Publishing House is going to publish “The Apocrypha: Lutheran Study Edition” in 2012. I wished that it would have been included with the Lutheran Study Bible.
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cooterhein
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The Tanakh was the first canon ever created; in fact, no canon had ever existed before this. If you consider any OT canon besides this, you must first come up with credible reasons to reject the accuracy of the Tanakh.
Please indicate an understanding of the fact that Christians within the Roman Empire did reach an early consensus on which books belong in the NT but they did not reach a consensus on which books belong in the OT.
Less than 30% of early Christian theologians interpreted that passage in this way, and it was not even the most prevalent of the minority opinions.
The entirety of the bible was not set at 382, although that is a credible date at which all Christians had reached consensus on the NT canon. Rome didn’t set the OT canon until Trent, however. Please indicate a general understanding of this fact. Also indicate that you are aware of the existence of Greek Christians (who predate Roman Christians, and from whom you initially received the Septuagint). Please indicate that you know they were never in general agreement with the OT canon that was set at Trent.
There was a council in 382. It was in Rome. There was a list of books enumerating the books of the Bible.
This was not an authoritative and universal pronouncement of what the OT canon was. After 382, Greek Christians continued using Greek tradition in defining what the extent of their Greek Septuagint was. They were not in rebellion of papal authority because the list of books from 382 was not authoritative or universal. Some people within the specifically Roman tradition continued to question the full extent of the Septuagint or whether the Tanakh should be the basis rather than the table of contents from the Septuagint. They were not in rebellion of papal authority because these things had not been authoritatively “set.”
It wasn’t until Trent that Catholics were no longer free to question these things. That is when the OT canon was “set.” After that, Catholics were bound to a particular OT canon and could not question it without questioning and violating Catholic authority. At any point prior to that, it was possible to do so with regard to the OT- but not after. That’s what it means for a canon to be “set.”
Please indicate that you understand this distinction.
I’m pretty sure the Greek bible was actually the first bible…if by “bible” you mean collection of books that are Scripture which includes both the Old Testament and the New Testament. There was some variety in terms of books that were included in the earliest manuscripts of the Septuagint, but as I’m sure you know, none of them are a perfect match to your Roman bible and all of them contained material that is not in yours…but it is in “theirs.” And by “theirs,” I mean the Greek bible. Which pre-dates any Roman bible by plenty.
Right, because Jesus sailed to the capitol of the empire and set up an earthly government for His Church right there.
Christians had reached a consensus on the NT canon by this point, but they had not reached a consensus on the extent of the OT canon- and they never did. Please indicate that you understand this.
I really don’t think that’s entirely correct. It’s one of those things that makes you feel good about yourself and where you are in terms of your religion right now, but it’s not really borne out by historical fact.
The NT canon (which Protestants use, btw) was established before the Reformation and before the Schism. However, the OT canon was not established by Rome until Trent, and Christianity as it existed within the Roman Empire never did reach a consensus on the full extent of the Septuagint. Please indicate that you understand this.
You should find out. This is relevant.
Ancient Christianity did not reach a consensus on these books. Roman consensus was achieved well after the Schism. And Rome, as it were, never did reach consensus with Greece- with whom they initially collaborated in establishing the NT canon.
Yes it is. And the Tanakh excludes the books you call apocryphal along the with ones you call deuterocanonical.
I disagree.
The initial premise is faulty. I never implied that we should believe only what is in the Tanakh. You know this. Don’t be dense on purpose. It would make just as much sense for me to say “If we are only to believe what is in the Septuagint, we should also deny the NT.”
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ajcstr
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Since the completion of the Vulgate, was there ever a Catholic Bible that included a different set of books?
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StrawberryJam
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I think it’s shorter so that people can read it cover to cover in less time. Catholics use the longer version because they can offer up their extra reading time to help shorten someone’s stay in purgatory. That simple.
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elvisman
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Regardless of what Cooterhein and Dave Noonan are claiming - the plain fact is that there was NO closed canon during the time of Christ. Jesus and the NT writers studied and quoted from the Deuterocanonicals dozens of times.
There is NO scholarly consensus as the setting of the Jewish canon – period. The only thing that comes close to being accurate as far as their claims is that there was no formal Council of Jamnia. The closure of the Jewish canon, however is often attributed by scholars to be AFTER the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.
Conclusion: The Church accepts the tentative canon that existed, including the Deuterocanonicals that Jesus and the Apostles studied and quoted from. Why? Because t****he Church doesn’t hold to this post-Christ, post-temple canon. The mantle of authority under the New Covenant had been passed from Judaism to Christianity. The old wine and wineskin (Judaism) was now replaced by new wine (the Gospel) and new wineskins (the Church).
As far as the books being debated – MANY canonical Books were debated and MANY didn’t make the cut, including the Shepherd of Hermas, the Letter of Clement and the Gospel of Peter. Whether or not Jerome himself initially considered them non-inspired is of no consequence because he was not an infallible source. He finally DID accept them as canonical because the Church deemed them so.
If it weren’t for his contemporaries like Philip Melanchton, Luther would have done away with James, Esther, Hebrews, Jude and Revelation. Calvin and Zwingli also didn’t like Revelation. Does that make these books un-canonical? NO - because the Church declared them canonical under the guidance of the Holy Spirit (John 16:12-15).
There is NO scholarly consensus as the setting of the Jewish canon – period. The only thing that comes close to being accurate as far as their claims is that there was no formal Council of Jamnia. The closure of the Jewish canon, however is often attributed by scholars to be AFTER the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.
Conclusion: The Church accepts the tentative canon that existed, including the Deuterocanonicals that Jesus and the Apostles studied and quoted from. Why? Because t****he Church doesn’t hold to this post-Christ, post-temple canon. The mantle of authority under the New Covenant had been passed from Judaism to Christianity. The old wine and wineskin (Judaism) was now replaced by new wine (the Gospel) and new wineskins (the Church).
As far as the books being debated – MANY canonical Books were debated and MANY didn’t make the cut, including the Shepherd of Hermas, the Letter of Clement and the Gospel of Peter. Whether or not Jerome himself initially considered them non-inspired is of no consequence because he was not an infallible source. He finally DID accept them as canonical because the Church deemed them so.
If it weren’t for his contemporaries like Philip Melanchton, Luther would have done away with James, Esther, Hebrews, Jude and Revelation. Calvin and Zwingli also didn’t like Revelation. Does that make these books un-canonical? NO - because the Church declared them canonical under the guidance of the Holy Spirit (John 16:12-15).
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Nicea325
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The above statement is absolutely FALSE! The canon was formally established centuries before;hence precisely why there existed councils such as Hippo. Trent merely re-confirmed what was already established.
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Nicea325
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Amen! The whole Jerome argument against the 7 books truly does not prove anything. As you stated,Jerome was only one man and he was not “the” infallible source to make such a determination,that belongs to the church.
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Nicea325
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Really? When,where, under whose authority and who decided to “fix” the Tanakh as a canon?
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ajcstr
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I want to ask this another way. There was obviously a schism between the Greek and Latin and the Greeks accepted a broader set of books from the beginning. I would also think that the Septuigant was not a product of the Greek Church but rather of Jews. I honestly don’t know if there was ONE Septuigant or if the idea of what books made it up varied by region.
Sticking with the Latin side, was there ever a deviation in the accepted books from the time of the Vulgate on? My understanding is that the Vulgate was the “official” set of books of the Roman Church and I don’t know what existed between that and the Douay which I would also consider as “official” set of books. What else was out there that would support the claim that the OT was not settled for the Roman Church until Trent?
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Dave_Noonan
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True. And the Armenian, Ethiopic and Syriac speaking churches (e.g.) had still other ideas of what should be in the biblical canon that varied from the Byzantine.
True, as far as we know.
I don’t think anyone does. Until the invention of the codex (the idea of a book with pages between covers) you don’t really have to decide what goes in a book–what’s “in” or “out.” I imagine people had varying collections of scrolls and/or parchment based on what they thought was important and what they could afford.
For the Latinate Church ONLY (i.e., definitely not to be applied universally to all other churches everywhere throughout the world) I think it would be very difficult to argue that there was a different or competing canon after the Vulgate in the WEST–primarily because we have so little evidence. I think one could potentially try to base an argument on the biblical canons we can see in:
Codex Vaticanus en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Vaticanus
and Codex Sinaiticus en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Sinaiticus
…which differ from the Vulgate, but there would be two weaknesses. These collections are probably near contemporaries of the Vulgate, so you couldn’t definitively say they were produced AFTER the Vulgate, although it’s certainly possible.
Second, although many scholars consider these to be Roman-produced documents, it’s really impossible to tell whether they represent a Latinate idea of the biblical canon in the fourth century or whether they come from somewhere else (Caesarea?) and thus represent more of a Byzantine idea of the biblical canon in the fourth century.
I think the oldest extant manuscript of the Vulgate is Codex Amiatinus, which is 8th century and thus a long time after Jerome. It would be interesting to know its contents.
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ajcstr
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Just to answer you directly, I have often asked this question myself and actually, with the reading I have done, once I got past the “The Catholics added them at Trent” and the “The canon was set in 382” extremes, I found a lot of the arguments (in my opinion) are murky on both sides.
For me, I see the issue has been disputed for centuries, long before the Reformation. Jerome, for example, initially thought that these books did not belong in Scripture. What I keep coming back to is that if you take those that recognize papal authority, from the Latin Vulgate to the New American Bible, the books are the same. Disputed at times, but always included.
Of course, the Orthodox Church has a different set as do the Protestants but neither follows the Pope so there are other differences beside what the Bible is.
I don’t know what the Eastern Catholic Churches hold as OT Scripture and I would be very interested in that if anyone knows.
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theistgal
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Sorry, I just had to comment on this because I did a
when I saw it.Tobit is one of my favorite books of the Bible - it’s the original “Touched by an Angel”! I can’t for the life of me see anything in it that endorses witchcraft! What exactly is the “spell” they’re talking about, do you think?
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Dave_Noonan
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Yes, I think you’re definitely on the right track. The other (equally) inaccurate comment that I often see here at CAF is “Luther removed seven books” which fails to take into account a) what actually happened and b) Luther’s pretty innovative biblical theology. To me this is just as outrageous as “the Catholics added them at Trent” and none of these do anything to advance understanding. The biblical canon involves some pretty complex issues and histories that don’t do well when boiled down to sound-bites and slogans.
As for the Eastern Churches I often refer to this:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_canon
(Scroll down to the chart.)
I keep checking it against whatever other information I find and as far as I know, it’s accurate.
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ajcstr
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Please elaborate. My understanding is that Luther disagreed with several books (the OT books because of Jerome’s arguments and I have no idea why for the NT books) .
Also, If the 7 books were part of the Bible from the time of the Vulgate, why would it be inaccurate to say they were removed? Though I don’t believe they were actually removed until the 1800’s
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Dave_Noonan
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Well, first off, Luther translated all of the material that was in the Vulgate, just as Jerome did, and he had some of the same complaints that Jerome did–that some of books he was translating had no available copy in the original language, which is what Luther’s (and Jerome’s) translations were all about–getting back to the original language. But no Bible that Luther had a hand in publishing omitted the “7 books” (which I’ll just use here as a short-hand to refer to the difference between the material included in the Hebrew Bible and the Vulgate.) I’ll get to how the books were dropped in a second.
One feature of Luther’s innovative biblical theology was that not all parts of the Bible are equally important. Of course you don’t have to agree with this, but understanding this element is important for understanding what transpired in his version of the Bible. Because Luther was part of the growing “plain sense” movement of his time, he thought certain texts (genealogies, etc.–probably all the parts that we now would find pretty boring as well) just didn’t matter very much because in his view, the Scriptures constitute the “bearer of Christ.” The parts about God, Jesus and Salvation were important in his mind–the other parts, not so much. Ultimately he developed a sort of informal “ranking” for the books of the Bible. So, for example, the Books of Maccabees didn’t seem to have very much to do with God and were primarily dry historical accounts, so they were ranked lower and placed in a separate section at the end of the Old Testament. And the fact that he didn’t have a Hebrew copy of these books didn’t help in his mind. The same was true with books like James and Hebrews in terms of being of lesser importance–to Luther–theologically. And he placed those at the end of the New Testament. Did his theology affect his judgment?–yes of course. And I’m not saying you should agree with his theology or what he did. But what he was actually attempting to do was to highlight for his readers what he thought was important for salvation and diminish what he saw was less than important–but still of value for historical reasons and for general information.
BUT the point is, Luther never took anything out. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read here at CAF “Luther removed books” (usually followed by some sort of ad hominem screed) and “he wanted to take out more from the New Testament but his friends stopped him.” These are just plain false statements that probably show up here almost daily, or sometimes multiple times a day.
So, what ultimately happened is that in later additions of the King James Bible (after the first edition) printers wanted to save money and dropped the least-important-book section entirely from the Old Testament. This was around 100 years after Luther was dead. Now perhaps you could say that what ultimately happened was a natural evolution of what Luther started–I think that would even be a fair statement. But you can’t say “Luther removed books.” They were still part of the Bible in his mind.
I would never make the statement “Catholics added to the Bible at Trent” as that’s just not in any way shape or form an accurate statement. The people that make such statements are clearly ignorant of how the Bible came together and certainly I think Catholics have a right to defend their faith and dispute false charges made against Catholicism. But the way to do that is not (at least in my opinion) to make equally ignorant statements to counter other ignorant statements. I’m not Lutheran and I really have no dog in this fight–usually JonNC attempts to come to Luther’s rescue. But I think we should all be interested in working toward the truth.
Thanks for being open to more information. It gives me hope.
And acutally, his translation had one more book than Catholic Bibles - The Prayer of Manassess.
Jon
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Dave_Noonan
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Thanks!
I knew I could count on you.
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ajcstr
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Agreed, this is a pet project of mine - always interested in more info because this is a historical argument, it happened one way or another.
So let me throw a couple random things out and you tell me if you agree or not. I don;t really have strong evidence for these, and I’m not trying to argue - just really throwing them out there.
I believe Luther inserted the “alone” in Romans to match his theology (sort of like a dynamic equivalent).
I believe Luther would have liked to nix James because it had the only true occurrence of “faith alone” but it had a “not by” in front of it, He called it the “epistle of straw” which to me would indicate he did not consider it inspired.
I believe Luther piggybacked on Jerome’s objection to the 7 books because of the lack of Hebrew versions and because they were rejected by the Jews. I have read that Hebrew fragments of some of these books were discovered among the dead sea scrolls and that there really was no binding Jewish council of 90 that rejected these books. Also, Jerome ultimately submitted to the authority of the Church and included the books in his translation.
As I said before, to my knowledge, the books included in the Vulgate are the books that have been in every Catholic bible since then, plus there are ancient councils going back to 382 that list these same books. Whether or not this was only made “official” at Trent, so I believe that the Bible as I know it has existed for 1600 years (I would guess the same can be true for the Greek version) and the more limited OT used in protestant bibles did not exist among Christians prior to the Reformation.
Ultimately, this topic has been debated and debated and debated which tells me there is no definitive answer.
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Dave_Noonan
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Sure. I appreciate your spirit.
Just my opinion, but I tend to agree. I don’t think that HE thought he was changing the meaning of the verse. This was probably unfortunate as he could have made his case elsewhere, like Galatians 3:6.
I think it’s hard to hypothesize what Luther would have liked to have done, but I would point out that whatever you might say about Luther, he basically followed his beliefs, so I can’t imagine this supposed situation where he “wants to do something” but “his friends don’t let him.” As I recall, Luther called James “devoid of evangelical worth” which I think for Luther was (see above) code for “doesn’t tell us much about Jesus, God or Salvation” and thus sort of only a “one star” book (at best), whereas Romans would have been a “five star” book. (Just trying to put it in contemporary terms.) I think if he was absolutely convinced that it was NOT inspired, he would not have included it in his Bible. Also remember that Luther is pretty prone to overstatement and hyperbole, so sometimes it’s difficult to know how these two can be reconciled (words and actions).
Yes.
That, I don’t know. Luther was a big anti-semite.
Some, yes. I think Sirach, Tobit and Baruch.
Correct. This was a big figment of someone’s imagination. This comes up again and again and again here at CAF.
Yup.
I think that’s a reasonable assumption, although I’ve never researched it in any depth.
I really object to calling these “councils” because I think it makes them sound like they were somehow equivalents to Ecumenical Councils with bishops of the entire world attending and agreeing on a canon. (You can read about them at Wikipedia. I think the records for some are pretty skimpy, incidentally.) But I DO think the West has has a pretty consistent biblical canon since the 4th century.
My objection is that some posters here assume that because these meetings are referred to as “councils,” this means that all the apostolic churches throughout the world had one and the same biblical canon from the fourth century until Luther came along–and this idea is also used to support ideas of one church and one papal leader until 1056, which is really a distortion.
I think that if the issue had been crystal clear prior to Trent, the Council would have simply said, “We affirm what has been stated at Council XYZ that the canon is…” There must have been some question about whether it had ever been officially declared as such. But you’re right–in the WEST, as far as I know, the canon has been stable since the fourth century…
Probably, and for the Syriac canon, and the Ethiopic canon, etc. etc., which are all somewhat different from the Latinate canon.
Yes, I think this was clearly a departure in the West–and certainly isn’t matched anywhere else in the world. This is new.
To compound things, I think some of the major writers (mostly Protestant) on the topic champion their own biased views back onto what actually happened in the fourth century. I’d say we have very few, if any, very high quality resources, so people have to be willing to muddle through the facts and keep learning.
Thanks again for being such a breath of fresh air here.
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