What I am alleging, and no Protestant I know denies it, is that the full canon of the Bible as we know it was not collected and authorized and published and made available to all Christians until the 4th Century. Honestly, do you have a problem with that? Was it not the Catholic Church that did this in the 4th Century? Was it not therefore the Catholic Church that by its authority presented the New Testament and authorized it for all future generations, including the later generations of modern Protestants? That’s all I am alleging. What part of this paragraph do you dispute, because at this point I cannot figure out what your problem is with anything I’ve said.
The basic problem I have with what you are saying is that you speak as if the authoritative promulgation of the canon happened more or less all at once in the later fourth century, so that before that time there really wasn’t an NT canon, and after that time it was infallibly settled. Neither of these things is true. Formally, I don’t think the matter was infallibly settled by an act of the extraordinary magisterium until Trent. The councils of the later fourth century, taken as a whole, did fix the canon for all practical purposes for the Western Church (the Apocalypse of John was debated in the Eastern Church for some time longer). But more importantly, the process had been going on for some time, and most of the books of the NT canon were authoritatively promulgated by the Church as canonical from the late 2nd century on. As the
Catholic Encyclopedia says:
Thus Hebrews, James, Jude, and II Peter remained hovering outside the precincts of universal canonicity, and the controversy about them and the subsequently disputed Apocalypse form the larger part of the remaining history of the Canon of the New Testament. However, at the beginning of the third century the New Testament was formed in the sense that the content of its main divisions, what may be called its essence, was sharply defined and universally received, while all the secondary books were recognized in some Churches. A singular exception to the universality of the above-described substance of the New Testament was the Canon of the primitive East Syrian Church, which did not contain any of the Catholic Epistles or Apocalypse.
The fourth century was indeed important in the process. To quote the CE again:
So at the close of the first decade of the fifth century the entire Western Church was in possession of the full Canon of the New Testament. In the East, where, with the exception of the Edessene Syrian Church, approximate completeness had long obtained without the aid of formal enactments, opinions were still somewhat divided on the Apocalypse. But for the Catholic Church as a whole the content of the New Testament was definitely fixed, and the discussion closed.
If the above is all you are saying, then we agree (with the possible exception that I think the CE plays down the Eastern Church too much, by saying that the matter was fixed “for the Catholic Church as a whole,” having just said that it was fixed only for the Western Church!).
I recognize that your language “the New Testament as we know it” gives you a lot of room. But I still think it’s misleading and unwise, and some of the other claims you have made (such as that a four-book collection of the Gospels didn’t exist before the fourth century) are simply false. The impression left by your posts is that Christians didn’t have a functioning, authoritative NT canon until the councils of the late fourth century. Perhaps that is my misunderstanding of your posts, and I invite you to clarify.
Was the Catholic Church of the 4th Century blessed by the Holy Spirit to infallibly present the final version of the New Testament to the world or was it not?
Please answer yes or no, and then follow with commentary as you like. Thank you.
To your statement as a whole I have to say “no,” although my quibbles are fairly slight with the statements you have made in this post. The quibbles are as follows:
- It’s not clear that the matter was infallibly settled in the late fourth century, particularly with regard to Revelation, which continued to be questioned in the Eastern Church.
- All 27 books were widely used long before the fourth century, not just as interesting documents but as authoritative, canonical Scripture. Dispute focused, as the CE says, on four books, which were accepted by some local churches and rejected by others. I’m not sure this is an actual disagreement with what you are saying, so much as a nuance that needs to be expressed so that you don’t leave a wrong impression.
Now can you please answer a question:
Do you agree that the Church had a functioning NT canon by the end of the second century, and that the vast majority of the books of the present NT canon (the Gospels, Acts, and the Pauline Epistles at a minimum) were universally accepted and promulgated as authoritative by that time?
Edwin
