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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 ...
- What is The Antilegomena
The antilegomena is a collection of Bible texts that were...
- Muratorian Canon
The Muratorian Canon (also called the Muratorian Fragment)...
- How Do We Decide Which Books Belong in The Bible Since The Bible Does Not Say Which Books Belong in The Bible
We are careful to say that God determined the canon, and the...
- What is The Antilegomena
A biblical canon is a set of texts (also called "books") which a particular Jewish or Christian religious community regards as part of the Bible. The English word canon comes from the Greek κανών kanōn, meaning "rule" or "measuring stick". The use of the word "canon" to refer to a set of religious scriptures was first used by David ...
The "canon" of Scripture is defined as the books of the Bible officially accepted as Holy Scripture. Written by about forty authors over the course of 1500 years, it was essential that a list be drawn up of the books which reflected the truth of God's message and were inspired by the Holy Spirit. Although each book was canon in God's eyes as it ...
- Overview
- What is canon?
- Canon of the Old Testament
- Jewish canon
- Christian canon
- Canon of the New Testament
- Canon and tradition
- Acknowledged books
- Disputed books
- Formation of the canon
biblical canon, collection of sacred texts of Judaism and Christianity which, after being determined either by general agreement or by official religious bodies, are alone viewed as fully authoritative and truly beyond all further change or alteration. The works not admitted to the canons (apocryphal literature of semisacred or semicanonical charac...
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 Christian scripture. While the definition of biblical canon seemed clear, the question of what constituted it—within both Judaism and Christianity—remained unsettled for centuries.
The books of the Bible are like a series of pictures, some of them simple portraits, others more subtle sketches, still others highly abstract symbols. For that reason the determination of what does or does not belong in the canon was not an easy task. The translation of this variety of language and literature into a new language likewise creates difficulties. When a Protestant examines a Roman Catholic version of the Bible, it is apparent that certain books appear in one but not the other. “Why should this be so”?, the reader may ask, and “how did those books get into the Bible”? To answer these questions is the purpose of studies in the history of the biblical canon.
The question as to which books belong in the Old Testament is complicated by the history of the Old Testament in both Judaism and Christianity. Not only is the use of the word canon as a designation for an authoritative list of sacred books a rather late phenomenon, even the idea of a fixed and final list came about only after a long evolution.
The Hebrew Bible is often known among Jews as TaNaKh, an acronym derived from the names of its three divisions: Torah (Instruction, or Law, also called the Pentateuch), Neviʾim (Prophets), and Ketuvim (Writings, referred to as the Hagiographa in Greek).
The Torah contains five books: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The Neviʾim comprise eight books divided into the Former Prophets, containing the four historical works Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, and the Latter Prophets, the oracular discourses of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and The Twelve (Minor—i.e., smaller) Prophets, with the narratives of Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. The Twelve were formerly written on a single scroll and thus reckoned as one book. The Ketuvim consist of religious poetry and wisdom literature—Psalms, Proverbs, and Job, a collection known as the Five Megillot (Five Scrolls; i.e., Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther, which have been grouped together according to the annual cycle of their public reading in the synagogue)—and the books of Daniel, Ezra and Nehemiah, and Chronicles.
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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 2 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. Flavius Josephus, a 1st-century-ce Jewish historian, and some of the Church Fathers, such as Origen (the 3rd-century Alexandrian theologian), appear to have had a 22-book canon.
It is not known when and how the earliest collection of sacred writings in Hebrew arose. The incident reported in 2 Kings 22:8 (“I have found the book of the law in the house of the Lord.”) clearly presupposes the existence of some such collection. Both the incident and the collection are impossible to date, however, and some critics believe that the whole story is actually intended to explain the composition of portions of the Pentateuch, including most or all of Deuteronomy. Evidently, however, the Pentateuch (or at least its first four books) was in process of assembly in Jerusalem before that time.
The Bible of Jesus and of the early Christians was the Hebrew Bible, but no list of the books it might have included exists. To ascertain its scope it is necessary therefore to scrutinize the Old Testament quotations and references that appear in the New Testament. Such scrutiny has occupied generations of biblical scholars, who have identified references and allusions to most of the books of the Old Testament, though not to all of them. Among the books to which the New Testament refers are several of the deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament, as well as some books, such as Enoch, that do not belong to any canon. Some scholars even have attempted to identify two canons of the Old Testament lying behind the New; they contend that the Old Testament used by the Epistle to the Hebrews was the Septuagint canon, while that used by other portions of the New Testament was the narrower Palestinian canon. These attempts, however, have not proved convincing to the majority of biblical historians. Thus it seems that the study of the Old Testament quotations in the New Testament has led to an ambiguous conclusion regarding the state of the Old Testament canon in the 1st century ce.
That ambiguity makes it understandable that the early Fathers of the Christian Church were unclear about the canon of the Old Testament. Melito of Sardis, who lived during the 2nd century, is said by Eusebius to have inquired among eastern rabbis about the scope of their canon. The catalog they gave him, as reproduced by Eusebius, corresponds neither to the Hebrew nor to the Greek list of books: it contains the Wisdom of Solomon, but it does not contain Esther. A list given by Origen during the 3rd century includes Esther but puts it at the very end; the catalog of Athanasius (4th century) omits Esther altogether. For most of the early Christian Fathers the Old Testament meant the Septuagint, since few of them other than Origen knew Hebrew. Although they were aware of the divergence between the canon as accepted by the Jews and the list of books contained in the Septuagint, the examples of Melito, Origen, and Athanasius suggest that the status of the disputed books remained in doubt during the first four centuries of the Christian era.
Jerome (c. 347–c. 420) was one of the few Christians in those centuries to learn Hebrew. What he learned from Jewish rabbis caused him to distinguish sharply between the canon as approved by the Jews and the catalog represented in the Septuagint. As he came to prefer the Hebrew text to the Septuagint, so he also assigned primary authority to the Jewish canon and put the deuterocanonical books or Apocrypha into, at best, a secondary position. Jerome’s contemporary, Augustine, on the other hand, provided a catalog of Old Testament writings that includes those books. Throughout the middle ages the status of the deuterocanonical books remained doubtful. Some theologians followed Jerome and excluded them altogether from the Bible in the strict sense; others followed Augustine and accepted them with very little hesitation; still others had reservations about them but used them as holy scripture. Contact between Jewish and Christian scholars, which was commoner during the Middle Ages than is often supposed, served to point out to many Christian theologians the discrepancies between their Old Testament and the Bible of the Jews. But it was not until the period of the Reformation that the issue once more became a matter of concern and of controversy to Christian thinkers.
As part of their insistence that the church return to the Bible, the Protestant Reformers called for the elimination of the deuterocanonical books from the scriptures. Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible included them but put them into a separate section as Apocrypha, which deserved to be read but not to be put on the same level as canonical scripture. The other Reformers were even more vigorous in their opposition. Believing that the Old Testament canon in use among the Jews of their time was also the Bible of Jesus and of the early Christians, they refused to accept quotations from the Apocrypha as support for Christian teaching. The use of certain passages in the Apocrypha to support prayers for the dead and other Roman Catholic practices and doctrines only strengthened them in this refusal.
During the 19th century Protestants in England went so far as to prohibit the printing of Bibles that included the Apocrypha, even with an explanatory note, such as the one in Luther’s translation. Not until the 20th century did it become possible once more to issue the Apocrypha within the covers of Protestant Bibles, and that only in some few editions.
In antithesis to the position of the Reformers, the Roman Catholic Council of Trent (1545–63) made the larger canon, including the deuterocanonical books, the official list of books for the church. A century later, in 1672, the Synod of Jerusalem established the Old Testament canon for the Eastern Orthodox churches, accepting four of the books in the Septuagint (Tobit, Judith, Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus) but rejecting Baruch and the Books of the Maccabees. Ever since the 16th and 17th centuries, therefore, the churches of Christendom have had a clearly defined canon of the Old Testament—or, rather, three canons, one each for Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Eastern Orthodoxy. The canon of Protestantism and that of Judaism are identical, but the order of books is different. The differences among the several canons can best be illustrated by means of a table, in which are given also the names of the Biblical books as they are used in Judaism, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism.
Modern Christians may be surprised to learn that there was once a time when the Christian Bible did not contain both the Old and the New Testament. New Testament statements such as 2 Timothy 3:16, “All scripture is inspired by God,” are predicated on what came later to be called the Old Testament. So too are many of the references to “scripture” in...
Before any books were included in the canon of the New Testament, or even composed, the Christian church used the Old Testament as its Bible, but it possessed also its tradition of memory about Jesus Christ. This tradition lies behind and is presupposed throughout the New Testament. To it St. Paul could refer in discussing the Eucharist or the Resurrection. His Epistles say as little as they do about the life and teachings of Jesus at least partly because the church was already rehearsing these in the forms of its tradition. Its teaching, preaching, and worship all reflected this tradition. Its very interpretation of the Old Testament appears to have been part of the tradition, as the use of certain Old Testament passages in the New Testament and in the writings of the early Church Fathers suggests. Awareness of this tradition is necessary for understanding of the processes by which the canon of the New Testament evolved, for it helps to explain why certain books were selected as canonical and at least some of the criteria by which the selection was made.
Several factors seem to have been responsible for the rise of the New Testament canon, but church historians vary in the amount of weight they assign to each. One factor certainly was the sheer passage of time, as the church needed to discover whatever resources it could to bind it to its past and to guarantee its continuance in the tradition of the faith; the “memoirs of the Apostles” were one such resource. Also responsible for the establishment of the canon was the circulation of writings that bore the names of Apostles but did not contain apostolic teaching (as that apostolic teaching was being interpreted by the church). The only way to eliminate these questionable sources was to define the limits of the apostolic writings. Such a definition became a crucial necessity when the heretic Marcion compiled a canon of the New Testament containing his edition of the Epistles of Paul and of the Gospel According to Luke, which he regarded as the only genuine Gospel. Although it now appears that Marcion did not cause the church to establish its canon, he did accelerate the process. Another heretical movement that helped to accelerate it was Montanism, whose claim of speaking in the name of the Spirit could be countered only by reference to the authentic speaking of the Spirit in the apostolic witness of the New Testament writings. The task of sifting through the writings of the early church and of identifying this apostolic witness occupied Christians well into the 4th century. Eusebius suggested the following division of these writings: (1) some were acknowledged almost universally as part of the New Testament; (2) others were disputed but finally accepted; (3) still others were considered more or less seriously but eventually rejected.
The earliest pieces of Christian literature to be collected seem to have been the letters of Paul, but it could appear that initially at least they did not qualify as “scripture.” From the liturgical usage of the church at Rome it would appear that the Gospels were the first Christian books to be added to the Old Testament as supplementary scripture and that this had happened by the middle of the 2nd century. Also from Rome, and also apparently from the 2nd century, comes the oldest extant list of New Testament writings, the so-called Muratorian Fragment, so named because it was published by Lodovico Antonio Muratori. It was written in Latin and contains the names of the books being read in the church at Rome about 200 ce.
By about that time, as the writings of Irenaeus and Tertullian suggest, both Lyon and Carthage were using the Gospels, the Epistles of Paul, and some other Epistles as scripture. A few years later the works of Origen in Alexandria make it clear that he also was working with a similar though not an identical collection. From these four places—Rome, Lyon, Carthage, and Alexandria—may be compiled a list of books on which they all seem to have been agreed. That list would include the following, given in the order now employed in the New Testament:
•Matthew
•Mark
•Luke
•John
From these same sources and from several Church Fathers quoted by Eusebius may be assembled also a list of the books that were disputed on one or another ground but that were eventually included in the canon of the New Testament. The Epistle to the Hebrews belongs to this category. It seems to have been accepted in the eastern section of the church...
The writings of Eusebius and of his contemporary Athanasius make it evident that agreement on the disputed books was approaching by the middle of the 4th century, and that the canon of the New Testament that now appears in the Christian Bible was gaining general, if not quite universal, acceptance. That canon appears for the first time in the 39th Festal Letter of Athanasius, 367 ce. After the Festal Letter, other traditions held their own for a time. Thus the school of Antioch in general accepted only three Epistles—James, 1 Peter, and 1 John—while one of its most illustrious representatives, Theodore of Mopsuestia, rejected the whole of this section of the canon. The West followed the lead of Athanasius.
In 382 a synod was held at Rome under Pope Damasus at which the influence of Jerome secured the adoption of a list of books answering to that of Athanasius. This was ratified by Pope Gelasius at the end of the 5th century. The same list was confirmed independently for the province of Africa in a series of synods at Hippo Regius in 393 and at Carthage in 397 and 419 under the leadership of Augustine. The second canon of the second Trullan council of 692, the Quinisextum, may be taken to have formally closed the process of the formation of the canon for East and West. Yet Eusebius’s distinction between acknowledged books (homologoumena) and disputed books (antilegomena) did not disappear completely from the church. It was revived by Luther in his objections to the Epistle of St. James, and it formed part of the basis for the modern reconsideration of the canon.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Mar 5, 2024 · The word "canon" comes from the Greek word "kanon," meaning a rule or standard. The Bible Canon varies among religious groups, but the term is most commonly associated with the Christian Bible ...
- Michael Milton
Canon (Bible canon) The expression “Bible canon” came to denote the collection, or list, of books accepted as genuine inspired Scripture. The word “canon” is also often applied to ancient lists of Bible books. The term “canon” is derived from the Hebrew word qa·nehʹ (reed). Reeds were used as a rule or measuring device.
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Summary. The biblical canon is the collection of scriptural books that God has given his corporate people. These books were grouped together by God’s people relatively early, with the OT being settled and stable by the birth of Jesus at latest, and the NT gaining large agreement even before the end of the second century.
