by Fr. Ignatius
The Bible is a collection of books
written by different human authors over a period of more than one
thousand years that are together considered the inspired written
Word of God. Very few Christians today who study their Bible or
hear it being proclaimed at Church worry about the authenticity
of the books as being God’s written Word. They implicitly
accept the validity of their church’s estimation of them or
of Christianity’s use of them from time immemorial. Yet the
canon of inspired Scripture did not just instantaneously come
into being. It took time and involved some controversy to
establish.
When we speak today of the “canon” of Scripture we mean
those collected books accepted by Christians as inspired by God.
The term “canon” comes from the Greek word kanon which
means a “measuring stick” or a defining rule. It was
used by the early Christians to mean a “measure” or
“rule” by which to establish what is normative in the
Church. It could be used to refer to behaviour but by the 4th
century it especially referred to the collection of books
belonging to Holy Scripture. There is no Jewish concept exactly
corresponding to “canon” but Jewish authorities did
speak of “what is read” and “the books” of
Scripture in contrast to “the external books” or
“books that render the hands unclean” (Joseph Lienhard,
The Bible, the Church, and Authority, 1995).
Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Christians all esteem the Bible
as the written Word of God. However, they do not all agree on
which books make up the canon of Holy Scripture. There is general
agreement on the 27 books of the New Testament. It is the canon
of the Old Testament which is more disputed. The Catholic Bible
has 46 books in the Old Testament (45 if we count Jeremiah and
Lamentations as one) which when added to the 27 books of the New
Testament gives a canon of 73 books. The various Orthodox
churches have some differences amongst themselves in their canon.
They all include the books found in the Catholic Bible but can
have extra. The Greek Orthodox Church, for example, has an Old
Testament of 49 books (48 if we count the Letter of Jeremiah as
part of Baruch, as Catholics do) which when added to the New
Testament gives a total of 76 books. The additional books not
found in the Catholic Bible are I Esdras and 3 Maccabees.
Additional passages incorporated into canonical books are the
Prayer of Manassah and Psalm 151. The exact status of these
additional books and passages in the various Orthodox churches,
however, is not clear: are they considered divinely inspired or
“ecclesiastical” writings? The Protestant version of
the Bible has only 39 books in the Old Testament for a total of
66 books when combined with the New. The parts of the Old
Testament not recognized by Protestants as Scripture are the
books of Baruch, Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), 1 and 2 Maccabees,
Tobit, Judith, and the Wisdom of Solomon plus the longer versions
of Esther and Daniel found in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles. How
did the differences in canons come about?
The process by which the books of the Bible were collected into a
closed canon lasted for centuries. Our concern here is with only
the Old Testament. According to most scholars the collection of
Jewish Scriptures took place in three stages. By the 2nd century
B.C. the books were in fact divided in three parts: the Law, the
Prophets, and the (other) Writings. Jesus Himself refers to
“the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms” (Lk
24:44). The first part is the Torah which is also called the Law
or the Pentateuch. It was believed written by Moses and long
accepted as supernaturally inspired and of divine authority. In
fact, the Sadducees of Jesus’ day accepted only these books
as divinely authoritative. According to patristics scholar Joseph
Lienhard “the Torah, or Pentateuch, reached its final,
closed form by 400 B.C., at the latest.”
The second grouping, the books of the Prophets, reached its final form by 200 B.C. The historical books of Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings are included by Jews under this category since believed either written by prophets or containing their lives. The last grouping, the Writings, was closed according to Lienhard, “in the course of the second century A.D.” In other words the Torah, comprising the five books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), was first to be “canonized.” The second part to be canonized was the Prophets. Prophecy was believed to have ceased during the time of Ezra (450 B.C.). Jewish and later Protestant apologists tried to claim the entire canon was closed by “the Great Synagogue” in Ezra’s time but historical research has shown this to be an anachronism, not attested to earlier than about A.D. 200.
The third group in the Jewish
canon is the Writings. It is also the most diverse group and the
last to be fixed. It includes a hymn book like Psalms, wisdom
literature like Job and Proverbs, apocalyptic literature like the
book of Daniel, and short books like Esther that were read at
annual festivals. It was not closed until after the rise of
Christianity and the destruction of the Second Temple in A.D. 70.
These events motivated rabbis to a closer consideration as to
what books were recognized as divinely authoritative, especially
as Christians were now using Jewish Scriptures. This is often
said to have happened at a “council” of rabbis held in
Jamnia (Javneh) around A.D. 90 but the historical accuracy of
this claim is questioned. What is known is that some time around
the beginning of the second century A.D. Palestinian Jews closed
for themselves the third group of Scriptures, and thus
established the current Jewish canon that is recognized by
Protestants as comprising the Old Testament in its entirety. The
criteria used for including or excluding books are not known.
Speaking speculatively it appears to have included: (1) the book
having been written at or before the time of Ezra (2) having been
written in Palestine, and (3) having been written in Hebrew.
What is evident is that before Christianity began Judaism had a
fixed corpus for the Law and the Prophets but not for the
Writings. “Writings” were still being composed,
translated and circulated. The early Church had thus inherited a
still open canon from Judaism. It disregarded any later decisions
of Jewish rabbis as no longer authoritative or binding. The Holy
Spirit had come upon the Church at Pentecost to guide it in such
matters. The Church’s revealed teachings and tradition would
be used to discern truth from error, inspired writings from
uninspired.
Before going any further we need to examine another factor that
influenced the formation of the Church canon. Ever since the
Babylonian Exile large populations of Jews resided in regions
outside the Holy Land – and non-Jewish cultural influences
were found within it. One effect of this was that Hebrew became
essentially a dead language read only by rabbis. By Christ’s
day the vernacular language of Jews in Palestine was Aramaic
while Jews in other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean used
“koine” (common) Greek. If Jews were going to
appreciate their Scriptures some form of translation would have
to be made. In Palestine, targums, Aramaic paraphrased
commentaries of sacred books, were used. Outside Palestine
Diaspora, Jews relied on a Greek translation of Jewish Scripture.
The Greek translation was called the Septuagint (Latin
for “seventy” and hence often abbreviated as LXX). It
was begun in Alexandria, Egypt in the 3rd century B.C. The
Septuagint was quoted by Jewish historians, poets and
philosophers and also used in synagogues – that is until the
end of the first century A.D. when many Jews ceased to use the
Septuagint probably because of Christian adoption of it.
The Septuagint contained a Greek translation of the books found
in the later Jewish canon but also other books. Some of these
other books were originally written in Hebrew while others were
composed by Jews in Greek. The Septuagint typically had a
different three-part structure. It arranged books by style:
Narrative, poetical and prophetic. Further, since most
post-exilic Jews wrote in Greek or Aramaic, it added historical
books not found in any Hebrew versions. Because the Septuagint
did not have a standard ordering or a completely standard list of
books (the Jewish canon still being relatively open) the books
included varied according to collection. The books found in it
(depending on the collection) that varied from the later Jewish
canon are: Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch
(including the Letter of Jeremiah), 1-3 Maccabees, the Prayer of
Manasseh, Psalm 151, the Book of Jubilees, 1 Esdras, additions to
Esther and Daniel, and less commonly 4 Maccabees. Since none of
these books contained law or prophecy they all properly belonged
to the Writings. A substantial number of them, but not all, were
recognized by the Catholic Church as divinely inspired.
We know that from the beginning the Church made use of the
Septuagint because it is extensively quoted from in the New
Testament as well as in contemporaneous and later Christian
writings. A conservative estimate puts over two-thirds of the Old
Testament citations found in the New Testament as taken from the
Septuagint. A higher estimate claims it to be about 300 of a
total 350 quotes. The Septuagint influenced the New Testament
profoundly. Terms used and even created in the Septuagint became
part of the New Testament vocabulary. Probably the most famous
and controversial reference to it is Matthew 1:23 citation of
Isaiah 7:14: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive…”
The Septuagint renders the passage from Isaiah exactly in this
manner while the Hebrew version appears more ambiguous.
The Christian Church used the Septuagint for evangelization as
well as making the first translations of the Old Testament into
Latin from it. Early Christian authors referred not only to the
books of the Jewish canon found in it but also to the books later
rejected by the Jews. In the 16th century, Sixtus of Siena coined
the term “protocanonical” to refer to the undisputed
books of the Old Testament and “deuterocanonical”
(second canon) to refer to the disputed texts. The term was not
meant to suggest these books suffered from an inferior sort of
inspiration but simply that controversy attended their acceptance
by the Church. Protestants refer to them by the mildly pejorative
term first used by Jerome of “Apocrypha” meaning
“things that are hidden.”
Disputes in the Church over which books were inspired and thus
canonical were not restricted to the Old Testament. Prior to the
Church councils of the late 300s, there was a wide range of
disagreement over some of the books of the New Testament. Certain
books, such as the Gospels, Acts of the Apostles, and most of the
epistles of Saint Paul had long been agreed upon. However a
number of the books, most notably Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2
& 3 John, and Revelation remained disputed until the canon
was finally settled. These are, in effect, New Testament
“deuterocanonicals” books. Other books often cited by
early Christian writers and sometimes even thought inspired
included the Didache, 1 Clement, the Shepherd of Hermas, and the
Letter to Barnabas. Their non-canonical status was eventually
established but they were still recognized as morally edifying to
read. They are thus more properly classified as early
ecclesiastical writings.
As well as entire books of the New Testament being contested so
were some individual passages. For example, in the Gospels Mark
16:9-20; Luke 22:43-44; John 5:4 and John 8:1-11 are not found in
every ancient manuscript. Yet how many Christians today worry
about the inspiration of these verses which tell us about the
woman caught in adultery, of Jesus' sweat dripping like blood
during the Agony in the Garden, of an angel that stirred the pool
of Siloam, or describing Christ’s appearance to Mary
Magdelene? Why would one accept such deuterocanonical New
Testament books and passages while rejecting deuterocanonical Old
Testament books and passages? If the Popes and the Church
councils can be wrong on the Old Testament, logic dictates they
can be wrong on the New Testament. If the Church is not
infallible in its universal decisions, including its decisions
about the canon of Scripture, then how can anyone be certain that
they have a true canon of Scripture?
In the 18th century, the scholar, Johann Salomo Semler, tried to
explain why a large part of the Christian world used a longer
canon than the Jews or the Protestants of his day by postulating
that at the time of Jesus the Jews actually had two closed canons
of Scripture: the shorter Palestinian canon and the longer
Alexandrian canon. He conjectured that Gentile Christians, who
predominated, took over the longer canon of the Hellenistic Jews.
The double closed canon theory became popular later among
Protestant apologists when the claims made for the Great
Synagogue of the 5th century B.C. fell apart. It made the
Palestinian canon sound more authentic and superior. The problem
with the theory of a closed Alexandrian canon in Judaism, as
American scholar Albert Sundberg demonstrated (The Old
Testament of the Early Church, 1964), is that there is no
evidence for it. It is a magnificent theory constructed without
anyone noticing that it lacked historical foundations.
There is no doubt that the New Testament authors used the
Septuagint but did they make reference to its deuterocanonical
books? While there is no exact quote from the deuterocanonical
books in the New Testament there are a number of probable
allusions made. The enthusiastic German, E. R. Stier, in 1828
published a collection of 102 New Testament passages that he
believed resembled the Apocrypha. A more conservative estimate
would put the number at over two dozen (David Currie, Born
Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic, 1996). For example, the
Gospel writers tell of a question put to Jesus by the Sadducees
of a widow who had been married to seven brothers (Matt. 22:25;
Mark 12:20; Luke 20:29). This may be an allusion to the book of
Tobit (3:8 and 7:11). Jesus’ description of hell where
“the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched”
(Mark 9:48) is an image used in the book of Judith (16:17). In 1
Cor. 10:1 Paul’s statement of “our fathers being under
the cloud passing through the sea” is described in the book
of Wisdom (19:7). Some of the parallels are much clearer in Greek
than in English, but even in English James 1:19, “Be quick
to listen, slow to speak,” is very similar to Sirach 5:11,
“Be swift in listening, but slow in answering.”
While allusions to a text or even quotes from it made by New
Testament authors obviously carries some weight, it does not in
and of itself prove a book inspired. For example, the New
Testament never quotes from the Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes,
Esther, Obadiah, Zephaniah, Judges, 1 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah,
Lamentations or Nahum which are nonetheless accepted as
Scripture. It does, however, allude to the Assumption of Moses
and refers to the Book of Enoch (in the Letter of Jude 9 and 14)
and to the writings of pagan poets like Epimenides, Aratus, and
Menander (quoted by Paul in Acts, 1 Corinthians, and Titus),
which are not accepted as Scripture or the authors as inspired.
The early acceptance by Christians of the deuterocanonicals
as Scripture is clearly demonstrated by history. On the walls of
the catacombs one can find scenes depicting the three young men
in the fiery furnace, Daniel in the lion’s den, Tobit,
Raphael and the fish, Judith with the head of Holofernes, Judas
Maccabees, and the martyred mother and seven sons. All these
images are based on persons or events recorded in the
deuterocanonical books. No scene strictly found in a book the
Catholic Church considers apocryphal is depicted in the
catacombs.
The Protestant patristics scholar J. N. D. Kelly concedes:
“It should be observed that the Old Testament thus admitted
as authoritative in the Church was somewhat bulkier and more
comprehensive [than the Protestant Bible]…It always
included, though with varying degrees of recognition, the
so-called apocrypha or deuterocanonical books.…In the first
two centuries…the Church seems to have accepted all, or most
of, these additional books as inspired and to have treated them
without question as Scripture. Quotations from Wisdom, for
example, occur in 1 Clement and Barnabas…Polycarp cites
Tobit, and the Didache [cites] Ecclesiasticus. Irenaeus refers to
Wisdom, the History of Susannah, Bel and the Dragon [i.e., the
deuterocanonical portions of Daniel], and Baruch. The use made of
the Apocrypha by Tertullian, Hippolytus, Cyprian and Clement of
Alexandria is too frequent for detailed references to be
necessary” (Early Christian Doctrines, 53-54). Irenaeus,
Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus, Origen, and others at times
explicitly refer to certain deuterocanonical books as
“Scripture.”
With the exception of Melito of Sardis (A.D. 160), and to a
lesser extent Origen, Christian writers of the first three
centuries treated the deuterocanonical books as they did the
protocanonical ones. (Origen accepted Esther and probably Baruch
as Scripture but not the books of Maccabees.) It was not until
the 4th century that some of the Fathers, most notably the great
biblical scholar Jerome, began to have reservations concerning
them. Jerome counseled that the deuterocanonical books not
available in Hebrew or not considered canonical by the Jews could
be permitted as models of faith and conduct but should not be
used to establish doctrine. In other words he was recommending
they be treated like other books found in some editions of the
Septuagint that are not considered inspired but are treated as
“ecclesiastical” books (e.g. 3 Maccabees and the Book
of Jubilees). Such a change of view is difficult to explain. In
the case of Jerome he may have been influenced by Jewish teachers
who instructed him in Hebrew. In a reply to Rufinus, however,
Jerome did defend the deuterocanonical portions of Daniel as
Scripture even though the Jews of his day did not accept them as
such. A near contemporary of Jerome, Athanasius, disputed the
inspiration of the deuterocanonicals except the “epistle of
Baruch” which he included as part of the Old Testament
(Festal Letter 39). Cyril of Alexandria included Baruch and
Esther but excluded the rest from his listing of Scripture (he
also excluded from his New Testament listing Hebrews and
Revelation). The patriarch of Constantinople, Gregory of
Nazianzus, fails to mention any of the deuterocanonical books
– as well as Hebrews and Revelation – in his listing of
Scripture.
The recognition of the deuterocanonicals as part of inspired
Scripture given by individual Fathers was more formally and
authoritatively given by the Church when it met in synods or
councils. The results of such deliberations are especially useful
because they do not represent the views of only one person, but
what was accepted by the Church leaders of whole regions. The
canon of Scripture, Old and New Testament, was given at the Synod
of Rome in 382, under the authority of Pope Damasus I. It was
reaffirmed at the Council of Hippo in 393 and at the First
Council of Carthage in 397. In 405 Pope Innocent I reaffirmed the
canon in a letter dispatched to Exuperius, bishop of Toulouse.
Another council at Carthage in 419 reaffirmed the canon of its
predecessors and asked Pope Boniface to “confirm this canon,
for these are the things which we have received from our fathers
to be read in church.” All of these canons were
identical to the modern Catholic Bible, and all of them included
the deuterocanonical books.
However, these early regional councils and papal letter are not
universally binding and definitive. This might explain why
Eastern Orthodox churches often have more books in their
Scriptures than just the deuterocanonicals affirmed by the
Catholic Church. They do accept as divinely inspired all the
books recognized by the Catholic Church. For example, at the
Synod of Jerusalem in 1672 the Orthodox churches’ expressed
their reaction to the Protestant canon by affirming Tobit,
Judith, Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), Wisdom, the additions to Daniel,
and 1 and 2 Maccabees as canonical. But with no definitive
listing of the Old Testament canon made before the Eastern Schism
of 1054, Orthodox churches also include other books and texts
found in various collections of the Septuagint. Another
explanation may be the Orthodox churches’ tendency to react
negatively to Catholic dogmatic pronouncements made after the
Schism. They may be overemphasizing the status of books
previously treated as ecclesiastical writings in response to the
Council of Trent. The eastern Council of Trullo (A.D. 692),
considered by Orthodox churches as an ecumenical extension of the
Third Council of Constantinople, did adopt the Catholic canon of
Carthage (A.D. 419).
In 1441 the Council of Florence promulgated the Catholic canon
for the Jacobites as is found in the 4th and 5th century
councils. But it was only at the Ecumentical Council of Trent, in
1546, that a universally binding and definitive listing of the
canon of Scripture was given. This was long after the Eastern
schism and in response to the Protestant rejection of the
deuterocanonical books. In doing this, the Council did not at
that point add the deuterocanonicals to Scripture but simply
reaffirmed what had been believed since the time of Christ and
stated by the earlier councils.
What led to the Protestant rejection of books held universally by
Christians, East and West, as inspired for 1500 years? Interest
in the Hebrew language and in things Jewish (like the Kabbalah)
had been growing among Christians in Europe for more than two
centuries before the Reformation. The Christian Humanists became
interested in the Hebrew language and those who learned it
naturally favoured the Hebrew books. Early in the 16th century
the Dominican Johannes Reuchlin had published a Hebrew grammar in
Latin and became the first modern Christian to translate part of
the Bible directly from Hebrew. All this focused new attention on
the shorter, Hebrew canon, and helped raise questions about the
accuracy and value of the Latin Vulgate.
Then in June and July of 1519 Martin Luther engaged in a historic
debate with Johannes Eck at Leipzig, Germany. The topic of the
debate was Purgatory. Luther appealed to the Bible as the final
authority. Eck quoted 2 Maccabees 12:45: “It is a holy and
salutary thought [to pray for the dead]. Therefore he made
atonement for the dead, so that they might be delivered from
their sin.” Luther admitted the accuracy of Eck’s
quotation but challenged the place of Maccabees in the canon. Eck
conceded that Maccabees was not in the Hebrew canon, but appealed
to the Church’s canon and to Augustine. Luther appealed to
Jerome and the “Hebrew verity.” Luther thus denied the
right of the Church to decide in matters of canonicity, instead
it was to be determined by the internal worth of the book
(Sundberg, The Old Testament of the Early Church). * Luther made
the canon an acute issue for the Church and eventually all the
Reformers insisted on the shorter Hebrew canon. For three
centuries they still continued to print the deuterocanonical
books in their Bibles (such as the King James Version) but in an
appendix as “Apocrypha.” The deuterocanonicals were
treated as worth reading for moral instruction but not as sources
of Christian doctrine (i.e. “ecclesiastical” writings).
Today some English Protestant Bibles still contain them as an
appendix, but not all. In 1827 the British and Foreign Bible
Society was the first to drop them completely from its published
editions. Thus we have the situation as it stands today.
Fr. Ignatius
The Catholic Legate
September 27, 2005
Endnotes
* Luther at one time even began to
question the apostolicity of the New Testament books Hebrews,
James, Jude, and Revelation. Of the Letter of James, he stated
that it was “flatly against Saint Paul and all the rest of
Scripture” (Works of Martin Luther, C.M. Jacobs, trans.,
1932). In his German New Testament of 1522 they come at the end
and in his list of books they are separated by a space and given
no numbers (like an appendix). But in time Luther modified his
views and found more value in them, particularly Hebrews; and
eventually he came to accept the New Testament canon of the
Catholic Church.
For more information read the article on the canon of Scripture
found at http://www.bridegroompress.com/sc/canon.htm#ot2nd
Read Mark Shea, “5 Myths about 7 Books,” at
http://www.envoymagazine.com/backissues/1.2/marapril_story2.html
See also the table listing the Old Testament books recognized as
canonical by the various Christian Churches at
http://my.execpc.com/~gto/Apocrypha/Summaries/table.html
Finally James Akin, “Deuterocanonical References in the New
Testament” at
http://www.cin.org/users/james/files/deutero3.htm#james.