How canon decided

Indeed, I am amazed at how this great wealth has made its home in this poverty. Where there are two or one, I am with him. While still at home he drew his sword and thrust it into the wall to find out whether his hand would go in.

Then he killed the powerful one. For every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of Heaven. Previous: Is the Bible Inspired? Is the Bible the Word of God? Who Determined the Canon?

Brent Kercheville January 5, Introduction: It is interesting to see how people are attempting to put forth their ideas recently. Rather than be required to have any factual evidence, people have begun to write fiction novels, but declare the material to be based on facts.

Then, if there is a historical discrepancy or untruth, no one can argue with the material because it has been presented as fiction.

This is certainly true when speaking about The DaVinci Code. The book declares itself to be a fiction novel, but lays down certain suppositions as though they were facts. One of these suppositions is that the church has suppressed certain Bible books and information concerning Jesus. In light of such charges, it is all the more important for us to determine who decided what became scripture and what did not. The Old Testament Canon A. Defining the canon Before we begin, we need to define some of the words that are used in such a study.

When we speak of the canon, we mean the accepted writings that are inspired, or God breathed 2 Timothy It is clear from the scriptures that there was a standard set of writings that were accepted as inspired. I believe Paul is asking Timothy to bring these writings while he is imprisoned in Rome. Paul was asking for the body of scriptures to be brought when Timothy came.

In the same way, we commend the Bereans for testing what they heard to the scriptures. It becomes clear that even in the days of the first century, there was a body of writings that were considered to be from God.

There are many ways that have been used to prove the canon of 66 books that we have in our English Bibles today are the same books that were used by the early Christians and were considered inspired.

I do not want this lesson to become too bogged down in detail and minutia in an effort to prove the canon. Rather, I would like to take a very simple approach, considering a little history along the way, so that we can have confidence in the books we have.

What did happen It is important for us to realize that we do not read that there is any time in the history of the early church that a group of people came together for the express purpose of determining the canon. This has been advanced by liberal scholars but simply cannot be proven. The Old Testament canon had been understood for quite a time before the first century.

The Jews were very meticulous about the preserving and studying the inspired writings. Liberal scholars assume they came together to determine which books would be included in the Hebrew canon and which would not. But that is not at all historically true and scholars are begin to retract this theory. The primary purpose of the gathering of these rabbis was to question books that were already considered canonical, not to add books that were not canonical.

Generally it is believed that the Epistle of James is one of the earliest if not the earliest books of the New Testament to be written, usually dated about the year 50 A. Probably the latest date for the completion of St.

This means that for nearly half a century, we had a Catholic Church, but no complete Bible. Think about this. In the year 70 A. First and foremost this shows that Jesus did not build his Church on a book, or rather, a collection of books.

Instead, he founded his Church on the rock Matthew and gave to this Church a real teaching authority Matthew ; Matthew Despite not having a complete Bible, the apostles and their disciples were able to spread the gospel through word of mouth, and were able to reference the Scripture that they already had, i. As our Lord Jesus said to his apostles:. We see this concretely through the Sacred Tradition that was passed down from the apostles to their successors, as well as in our modern day with said successors exercising their authority through the Magisterium of the Church.

The Holy Spirit continued his revelation to us through the writers of the New Testament. And when the time came, the Holy Spirit guided the Magisterium of the Catholic Church to proclaim which books were indeed Sacred Scripture and which were not. Now this prompts the question: just when were these inspired texts canonized and who placed them into the table of contents we all find at the front of our Bibles today?

Oftentimes, our Protestant brethren forget that the Bible is a Catholic book. It was Pope St. Innocent I that had authoritatively confirmed the declarations of local councils in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. The New Testament that the various Protestant denominations have received, and still use today, was decided upon by the successors of the apostles; that is, the bishops of the Catholic Church.

Believe it or not many early Christians, including saints and early Church Fathers, rejected books such as the Letter to the Hebrews and the Book of Revelation. On the flip side, books like the Shepherd of Hermas, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Letters of Clement, and even the Didache, were accepted by many as truly inspired Scripture.

Today we recognize those books as apocrypha, but still receive spiritual benefit from reading these writings. The earliest surviving list of books comes from the Muratorian Fragment , dated between the years A. This canon excluded the Letter to the Hebrews, James, and both letters of Peter, yet included the apocryphal Apocalypse of Peter. As time went on, the various canons floating around became more and more streamlined.

By the late fourth century, many canons which mirror the definitive canon we have today had fully emerged.

One criterion for determining authenticity was whether or not the work was apostolic. Certain spurious writings had become lesser read in churches, while those that we recognize as authentic Scripture continued to be used throughout the sacred liturgy. These factors helped lead to the solemn declarations of canonicity at such gatherings as the Council of Hippo in and the Council of Carthage in At this point in history, the canon had already been met with unanimity by virtually all of Christendom, but these two councils solemnly defined the canon.

In fact, agreement on much of the list had been reached more than a century earlier. The process of forming a canon had begun even earlier. What did he write to you at first, when he was just beginning to proclaim the gospel? It indicates that the Christians in Rome owned a copy of it, and that the church in Corinth still had a copy in its possession, half a century after Paul wrote it. Also in the early second century, Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, wrote letters to seven churches while he was en route to Rome, where he was martyred.

In his letters he uses language that clearly shows his familiarity with the letters of Paul. He refers to Paul frequently by name. The Sayings Gospel Q is just such a compendium of sayings, and the Signs Gospel underlying the Gospel of John is a collection of wondrous deeds ascribed to Jesus. These collections were incorporated into the narrative gospels.

The authors of those gospels rearranged the collections of sayings and stories to form continuous stories. Like the letters of Paul, these gospels, along with other writings, were collected by various churches. By mid-second century C. The church was rapidly becoming a literate church. However, as yet there was no proposal to create an official list, a canon.

The first significant move toward the creation of a new Christian canon was initiated by Marcion, a ship owner and merchant, the son of a bishop of the church in Asia Minor. Marcion proposed that the church reject the Jewish scriptures and embrace a new canon of its own.

That canon was to be composed of only one gospel, Luke, and one apostle, Paul. The church, for the sake of its unity and for the truth of its gospel, ought to identify its own normative writings and cease its use of Jewish scriptures. Marcion was convinced that references to the God worshiped by the Jews appearing in the writings of Luke and Paul were corruptions of what Luke and Paul wrote originally. As a result, he expunged such references from the versions he included in his proposed New Testament.

Marcion took Paul as his guide to the correct Christian view of these matters. The Roman suppression of the Bar Kochba rebellion of — C.

If the Jewish scriptures had to do only with the history of the Jewish nation and temple, and if those institutions had come to an end, the church need no longer be concerned with the Jewish scriptures.

The disregard of the Hebrew scriptures had been confirmed by events. He was clearly the first to propose a specific new canon for the Christian movement. It required response. It forced the church to make a case for the value and status of the Jewish scriptures it had adopted as its own, and it prompted the church to determine which of its own writings ought to be regarded as canonical — as normative and why.

The earliest of these, the Muratorian Canon, is usually dated to the end of the second century. The most illuminating is the one drawn up by Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, in his multi-volume history of the church published in C.