Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!cs.utexas.edu!bcm!dimacs.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: poc@cathedral.cerc.wvu.wvnet.edu (Pedro Oscar Cubillos) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: The canons Message-ID: Date: 20 Mar 91 08:38:56 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 92 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu I have a question for this group. How did each of the Christian religions got to adopt their canon of the OT and NT or whatever they call the books of the Bible. My background: I do not believe in God but I am interested in the history of religions. Thanks Oscar [If you want to know the details, there are a number of historical studies on the subject. Here's a summary based on the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church: There's no difference among churches about the NT. The NT is those books written by Christians, describing the life of Jesus and events in the early church. The kernel, which is the 4 gospels and 13 letters of Paul, was accepted by about 130 A.D. and were considered to be on the same footing as the OT between 170 and 220. Discussions persisted about other books, especially Hebrews, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, and Revelation. The first list that exactly agrees with the current NT is from 367. However by the 200's the disagreements were over just a few books. (Indeed those that form the original core are probably the most important, even now.) There are a few books not on the current list that were accepted in some areas, e.g. the Shepherd of Hermas. This discussion is based on what I'd call the "mainstream" church, i.e. what became the Catholic and Orthodox branches, from which the Protestants and other current groups also came. There were other groups such as the Gnostics and Arians, which were wiped out (sometimes forcefully). The Gnostics had very different ideas about religious documents. The mainstream church accepted only documents whose ancestery could be traced back to the apostles. Modern scholars think their judgements may have been a bit optimistic in some cases. However apostolic needn't have meant that one of the original apostles actually wrote it, just that the authority for the book could be traced back to them. Gnostics valued creativity, and their gospels tended to be rather fanciful when evaluated by our standards. Somewhere in the middle are books that circulated in orthodox circles, but which are more legendary. They have stories of the child Jesus giving life to a clay pigeon and things like that. These books also didn't make it into the canon. In general I'd say the only document that current scholars think has some claim to having independent historical content that didn't make it in is the Gospel of Thomas. It has some parables and sayings that may well go back to Jesus, and do not appear in the NT. It may also have Gnostic influences. That is a matter of debate. The OT is a set of books that Christians inherited from the Jews. Since the earliest Christians were Jews (as Jesus was), their initial bible was simply the Jewish one. The NT was added later, as Christian books came to be written and to be accepted generally by the Church. There are disagreements among various Christians groups about the exact contents of the OT, primarily because there were disagreements among the Jews. During the first centuries A.D., many Greek-speaking Jews accepted books that are not part of the Hebrew OT, and which are not considered part of the Jewish Bible by modern Jews. Generally these books describe more recent events than in the Hebrew OT. Apparently Christians originally accepted this larger OT canon from the Greek-speaking Jews. Doubts were expressed by Christians in the 4th and 5th Cents. about the books that did not appear in the Hebrew OT. Generally they continued in the Christian Bible, though with occasional doubts expressed. In the 16th Cent. Catholics definitively accepted them in the Council of Trent, and Protestants definitively rejected them. Protestants tended to have doubts because the texts for some doctrines they didn't like tended to come from these books, and because Protestant revival of Biblical scholarship based its OT ideas to some extent on Jewish scholarship, and by the 16th Cent. the Jews accepted only the Hebrew OT. The following information is based on the introduction to the Apocrypha/Deuterocanonical books in the Oxford Annotated Bible. It uses the book names adopted by the New Revised Standard Version. The exact set of Greek OT books is different in different sources. In fact there are now several different sets accepted by different groups. Beyond the Hebrew canon, the Roman Catholic Church accepts Tobit, Judith, additions to the book of Esther (i.e. sections in the Greek but not the Hebrew text), Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, the Letter of Jeremiah, the Prayer of Azariah, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, 1 and 2 Maccabees. The Eastern Orthodox churches include these plus 1 Esdras, Psalm 151, the Prayer of Manasseh, and 3 Maccabees, with 4 Maccabees in an appendix. Slavonic Bibles approved by the Russian Orthodox Church include the Roman Catholic list plus 1 and 2 Esdras, Psalm 151, and 3 Maccabees. There are confusions about naming, because some editions refer to the Hebrew books of Ezra and Nehemiah as 1 or 2 Esdras (or both), thus causing what I've called 1 and 2 Esdras to become 2 and 3 Esdras or 3 and 4 Esdras. Some Latin manuscripts even have a 5 Esdras, breaking what I have called 2 Esdras into 3 books: 2, 4 and 5 Esdras.