As the Christian community gradually separated from its Jewish roots, it was vital to determine which of the many instructive texts scattered around the Mediterranean region would be binding for each group.
Heavy hitters among ancient theologians, such as Origen, Athanasius, and Jerome, argued for a shorter canon than Augustine, especially when it came to these Hebrew books. The 27 books Athanasius proposed for the New Testament were not much in dispute and remain standard today. This article appeared in the April issue of U.
Catholic Vol. About the author. You may also like. The pope acknowledged that the remaining seven texts—Tobit, Judith, Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach, and Baruch, plus additions to Esther and Daniel—were still disputed by some. Emerging Protestant groups at the time would question the deuterocanon more seriously, and jettison it from their Bibles.
Three hundred years later, the First Vatican Council would have nothing left to do but to confirm the biblical list canonized at Trent. When it came to the canon of scripture, in those first centuries the faith of the age was up for grabs. Scripture scholar Raymond Collins asks us to make some nuances of our own when reflecting on the significance of the centuries-long battle for canonicity. Consider, Collins suggests, that canonicity and inspiration are not interchangeable terms.
A canon is a fixed list, a closed category. The historical impact of claiming 73 particular texts as canonical and sacred is indisputable. Nor would we want to necessarily. Imagine Genesis without apocalypse, or Moses without the kings. Consider an Old Testament with historical books but no prophecy, or both of these but lacking the entire Wisdom tradition.
Imagine a church with gospels from Matthew, Mark, and Luke but without the magnificent cosmic perspective of John.
No matter what we might choose to cull from the present collection, some richness, warning, comfort, challenge, or exaltation would be lost. Even passages we may dislike are valuable because of what they reveal about human nature and its pursuit of the divine. Inspiration acknowledges the divine movement in its composition. And once deemed inspired, a text has no place but in the canon.
Although the bulk of that editing work ended in the late s, the debate over which books were theologically legit continued until at least the 16th century when church reformer Martin Luther published his German translation of the Bible. Luther had issues with the book of James, which emphasized the role of "works" alongside faith, so he stuck James and Hebrews in the back of the Bible alongside Jude and Revelation, which he also thought were questionable.
Combs says that in Luther's original Bible, those four books don't even appear in the table of contents. Eusebius was a Christian historian writing in the early s who provided one of the early lists of which books were considered legit and which were borderline bogus.
Eusebius broke his list down into different categories: recognized, disputed, spurious and heretical. Under "disputed," Eusebius included James and Jude — the same books Luther didn't like — plus a few others that are now considered canon, like 2 Peter, 2 John and 3 John. When Eusebius turns to the "spurious" and "heretical" categories, we get a glimpse into just how many other texts were in circulation in the second and third century C.
Combs says that there were hundreds of texts similar to those found in the New Testament and Old Testament that didn't make it into the canon. Why did some books make the cut and not others?
Combs cites three criteria used by early church leaders. The first was authorship, whether it was believed to have been written by an apostle, by Paul or by someone close to them. Mark, for example, wasn't an apostle, but was an interpreter for Peter. The second criterium was antiquity, with older texts taking priority over newer ones. And the third was orthodoxy, or how well the text conformed with current Christian teaching.
While it's not true to say that a single church council ruled on which books to include in the canon, it's fair to say that over those first few centuries of theological debate, the winners got to decide which books would stay and which had to go.
Apocrypha are works of unknown authorship or doubtful origin. Jesus and the New Testament writers never quoted from the Apocrypha. But many Christians find them of interest, as they contain historical information.
Because of Jesus, early Christians believed God was ushering in a new covenant. As they believed the apostles possessed the authority of Christ, the early believers received their writings as the very words of Christ himself. The apostles spoke with authority, but they always based their claims solely and directly upon their commission by the Lord.
The initial reason for collecting and preserving these inspired books was that they were prophetic. As well, because of the rise of heretical movements — each with its own selected scriptures — the church needed to know which books should be revered, read in church services, and applied to life.
Early Christians needed assurance of which books served as their source of authority. Says scholar J. When each book circulated as a separate entity, obviously there was no limit to the number of texts that could be received. When certain, approved, texts were gathered into small collections this had the effect of ostracizing and isolating texts which were not deemed suitable for inclusion.
By the end of the fourth century the canon was definitively settled and accepted — but not as part of the Council of Nicea, as some wrongly believe.
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