but still, I’m starting another end-2-end reading pass thru the bible, and some of the earlier books seem to be mind-numbing brief histories of who killed who, why is all that needed ? sure have some of it, but why so much ? not that I feel qualified to say which book or paragraph should not have been included/excluded in the OT canon, but some of them seem dubious
and why not more stuff in the NT ? there must have been more writings available, the obvious answer is the various councils & people over the years thought the current set was enough, approved at Trent etc. it just seems like there should be more in NT, why not 1/2 OT & 1/2 NT ? etc
more than that I don’t have much to add, maybe I will look into this more when I get time. there are those ‘early fathers & doctors’ books etc
First of all, there are more in the Old Testament because these books cover a far lengthier amount of time; these are books (such as those “mind-numbing histories”) tell the story of the People from which would come the Messiah of the world; many of these books (especially of the prophets) tell of the promise of God to those who entered into the original Covenant with Him and awaited the fulfillment of His promise, the Christ of God. Briefly put, the New Testament canon is far shorter because
public revelation ended with the death of the last Apostle; thus it was not extend with writings of, e.g., the earliest Church Fathers. So it is not, then, unusual that the OT contains more books – far from it - one would expect it.
Second, the Bible is composed of the canonical books of the Church, that is, those books which the Church ruled as fit for reading at the Liturgy of the Church (the Mass).This does not mean that there are not other books which are also inspired. It just means that these other inspired books are not to be read at Mass. This is what the Bible actually is - the collection of inspired books which are to be read publicly in the Church’s liturgy.
Third, the Catholic Church infallibly decided the canon of the OT too (thus, you aren’t qualified to decide which books to include or exclude
). There was no closed OT canon before the Catholic Church closed it. Universal Judaism still doesn’t have a closed canon. While most Jews follow the canon of Jamnia (A.D. 90 - defined after Judaism and the Christian Church went their separate ways - this is also the canon which the first Protestants, wrongly, assumed was the canon in the time of Christ), the Ethiopian Jews and some other Jewish groups hold to a larger canon, which is similar (but not identical) to the Catholic/Eastern Orthodox OT.
