biz@soil.princeton.edu (Dave Bisignano) (05/05/91)
This is the first time that i've looked at this group and i have two questions (for now that is) I come from a Catholic background and they have extra books in their bible the apacropha(sp) and i know that they didn't pass the canon. What is the Canon and is it written somewhere that i can read it to see if i can understand how it worked? Also what is the best way to deal with a person that believes there is no such thing a God, and when we die we just feed the worms?? Dave Bisignano biz@soil.princton.edu [The canon wasn't established by a single group at single time. There were discussions over some period of time about the status of various books. There are some official decisions, but they functioned primarily to ratify and publicize what had been agreed to by a more informal process. The Gospels and most of Paul's letters were regarded as scriptural from as far back as we can see, certainly by 130. The first occurence of the current list of NT books is Athanasius' festal letter of 367. It was made official at a council in 382, and reaffirmed by Trent. However during most of this period, debates were over relatively "minor" books. Debate persisted especially about Heb, Jude, 2 Pet, 2 and 3 John, and Rev, with fewer books being under debate as time went on. As for the OT, most of the discussions were far enough back that we don't have accounts of them. There are legends that a decision was made around the time of Ezra, but there are scholarly doubts about this. There were certainly discussions among Jews in the 1st Cent. AD. The Catholic Church eventually adopted a list of OT books that was based on the contents of the Septuagint, a widely used Greek translation of the OT made (I think) in the 2nd Cent BC. (We don't know any of the details of its production, except legends.) The Hebrew canon eventually accepted by Jews was smaller, i.e. the same as the OT used by Protestants. Christians initially seem to have used the Septuagint as their Bible (not surprising, since most of them would have spoken Greek rather than Hebrew, and came from areas where the Septuagint was used by Jews). In the 4th and 5th Cent. there were debates among Christians about the status of those books (and portions of books) present in the Septuagint but not in the Hebrew canon. By and large the larger set continued being used. The council of Trent (16th Cent.) made a final authoritative decision to accept the larger list. Protestants generally used the Hebrew canon. Part of this is that Protestantism was based on a renewal in Biblical scholarship, and this naturally used the Hebrew OT, since Hebrew was the original language. There were also concerns that some doctrines that the Reformers disapproved of were justified primarily by references from the additional books (e.g. purgatory). I'd say the official definition of the canon for Catholics is the council of Trent. Oddly enough, there is no authoritative decision that can be pointed to for Protestants as a whole, because there wasn't a single Protestant council. However all the churches that came out of the Reformation (with the usual exception of the Anglicans, if you consider them to have come out of the Reformation) agreed on using the Hebrew canon for the OT. I don't know of any single official document for the Hebrew canon. --clh]