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The books that compose the Old Testament canon and their order and names differ between various branches of Christianity. The canons of the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches comprise up to 49 books; the Catholic canon comprises 46 books; and the most common of the Protestant canons comprises 39 books. [3]
Apr 18, 2022 · The Bible has three major compositions. The word canon is used to identify the collection of sacred books that comprise the Bible. The canon of the Protestant Bible totals 66 books—39 Old Testament (OT) and 27 New Testament (NT); the Catholic Bible numbers 73 books (46 OT, 27 NT), and Greek and Russian Orthodox, 79 (52 OT, 27 NT) (Ethiopian ...
Jul 10, 2023 · The first “canon” was the Muratorian Canon, which was compiled in AD 170. The Muratorian Canon included all of the New Testament books except Hebrews, James, 1 and 2 Peter, and 3 John. In AD 363, the Council of Laodicea stated that only the Old Testament (along with one book of the Apocrypha) and 26 books of the New Testament (everything ...
Christianity accepts sixty-six books of the Bible, thirty-nine Old Testament books and twenty-seven New Testament books. Josephus, a Jewish historian during the life of Christ, testified that the books of the Old Testament were brought together during the reign of Artaxerxes Longimanus (464 to 424 B.C.) during the life of Ezra the Scribe (Neh. 8:1, 4, 99 14; 7:6, 11; 12:26, 36).
- Overview
- The canon
- The number of books
- The tripartite canon
- The history of canonization
The term canon, from a Hebrew-Greek word meaning “cane” or “measuring rod,” passed into Christian usage to mean “norm” or “rule of faith.” The Church Fathers of the 4th century ce first employed it in reference to the definitive, authoritative nature of the body of sacred Scripture.
The term canon, from a Hebrew-Greek word meaning “cane” or “measuring rod,” passed into Christian usage to mean “norm” or “rule of faith.” The Church Fathers of the 4th century ce first employed it in reference to the definitive, authoritative nature of the body of sacred Scripture.
The number of books in the Hebrew canon is thus 24, referring to the sum of the separate scrolls on which these works were traditionally written in ancient times. This figure is first cited in II Esdras in a passage usually dated about 100 ce and is frequently mentioned in rabbinic (postbiblical) literature, but no authentic tradition exists to explain it. Josephus, a 1st-century-ce Jewish historian, and some of the Church Fathers, such as Origen (the great 3rd-century Alexandrian theologian), appear to have had a 22-book canon.
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English Bibles list 39 books for the Old Testament because of the practice of bisecting Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles and of counting Ezra, Nehemiah, and the 12 Minor Prophets as separate books.
The threefold nature of the Hebrew Bible (the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings) is reflected in the literature of the period of the Second Temple (6th–1st century bce) and soon after it. The earliest reference is that of the Jewish wisdom writer Ben Sira (flourished 180–175 bce), who speaks of “the law of the Most High…the wisdom of all the anci...
Because no explicit or reliable traditions concerning the criteria of canonicity, the canonizing authorities, the periods in which they lived, or the procedure adopted have been preserved, no more than a plausible reconstruction of the successive stages involved can be provided. First, it must be observed that sanctity and canonization are not synonymous terms. The first condition must have existed before the second could have been formally conferred. Next, the collection and organization of a number of sacred texts into a canonized corpus (body of writings) is quite a different problem from that of the growth and formation of the individual books themselves.
No longer are there compelling reasons to assume that the history of the canon must have commenced very late in Israel’s history, as was once accepted. The emergence in Mesopotamia, already in the second half of the 2nd millennium bce, of a standardized body of literature arranged in a more or less fixed order and with some kind of official text, expresses the notion of a canon in its secular sense. Because Babylonian and Assyrian patterns frequently served as the models for imitation throughout the Middle East, sacred documents in Israel may well have been carefully stored in temples and palaces, particularly if they were used in connection with the cult or studied in the priestly or wisdom schools. The injunction to deposit the two tables of the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) inside the Ark of the Covenant and the book of the Torah beside it and the chance find of a book of the Torah in the Temple in 622 bce tend to confirm the existence of such a practice in Israel.
Feb 3, 2022 · The biblical canon is the collection of literature recognized as being divinely inspired, that is, words penned by human authors who “were moved by the Holy Spirit, and they spoke from God” (2 Peter 1:21, NLT). The word canon comes from a Greek word meaning “rule” or “measuring stick.”. Based on Jude 1:3, the canon of Scripture has ...
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Jul 15, 2018 · The 39 books of the Old Testament were written over a period of approximately 1,000 years, beginning with Moses (around 1450 B.C.) until the time when the Jewish people returned to Judah from exile (538-400 B.C.) during the Persian Empire. The English Bible follows the order of the Greek translation of the Old Testament (the Septuagint) and thus differs in order from the Hebrew Bible.
