Certain religious adherents, especially fundamentalist Christian and orthodox Jewish leaders, represent the canon of the Holy Scriptures as having been decided millennia ago and remaining unchanging all the time. Nothing could be farther from the truth. As a matter of fact, canon was decided rather late, even among the Jews.
The Samaritans, as well as
the Jewish Sadducees, are well-known to have held sacred only the five books of
the Torah, or Pentateuch.
The Septuagint, accepted by
Hellenistic Jews throughout the Mediterranean and Southwest Asia, was complete
about the year 132 BCE. It was, however,
not ordained by any religious authority, except perhaps the Jewish leaders of
Alexandria. Of course, that city hosted
the largest synagogue in the entire world.
The Council of Jamnia,
supposedly meeting in 90 CE to decide a number of matters relating to the
Jewish religion, is now widely acknowledged to be only legend.
Jewish canon, including the
Tanakh, Aramaic Targum, midrashim, Mishna, and the two Talmuds, was only
defined in 1525 when the first version was printed (rather than scribed).
The Lutherans agreed on
their canon after much acrimonious debate in 1534.
The Reformers on the
Continent, with Calvin at their head, issued their canon with little debate in
1539. Sometimes it’s good to be the
dictator.
The Church of Rome,
although using the Vulgate for centuries, did not actually rule on what books
made up the official canon until the Council of Trent in 1546.
The Church of England set
forth its canon in one section of its Thirty-nine Articles of the Christian
Faith adopted in 1563 and accepted by all Anglicans, including Episcopalians.
Insular Calvinists defined
their canon in the Westminster Confession of Faith of 1647, which became the
official statement of the Church of Scotland in its Presbyterian guise. Their southern ideological cousins, the
Congregationalist Puritans, modified the statement (though not the canon) in
1658 as the Savoy Confession.
The Eastern Orthodox
Churches, those in communion with the Ecumenical Patriarch and See of
Constantinople, decided their canon the latest in 1672.
In previous posts of Hebrew
and Christian Scriptures, I noted that there are only five of the books which
make up the modern Tanakh/Old Testament which have always been agreed upon by
authorities of all Hebrews and that quite a number of writings of the Christian
New Testament have been challenged over the past two millennia. If we were to put together a collection of sacred
scriptures into a “holy bible” of just the universally-accepted books, that
canon of scripture would look like:
Unchallenged Holy Scripture
Genesis
Exodus
Leviticus
Numbers
Deuteronomy
Exodus
Leviticus
Numbers
Deuteronomy
*****
Gospel
of Matthew
Gospel
of Mark
Gospel
of Luke
Acts
of the Apostles
Epistle
of Paul to the Romans
1st
Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians
2nd
Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians
Epistle
of Paul to the Galatians
Epistle
of Paul to the Philippians
1st
Epistle of Paul to the Thessalonians
Epistle
of Paul to Philemon
1st
Epistle of Peter
1st
Epistle of John
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