Their work takes them beyond polishing sentences and sharpening nuances. Compilers determine which texts see the light of another day, which are worthy of promoting. They arrange material, bringing some ideas to the front and tucking others to the rear. They put contradictory passages side by side to remind the reader that there are other points of view. How did this material get organized into the familiar package we call the Bible today? This is a question of canon.
The word is derived from the Greek word for bar or rod. Early church fathers used the term to describe the norm of revealed truth. Collections of texts were endorsed by Origen and others, though none claimed to be definitive—until Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, added his considerable opinion at the start of the fourth century. Eusebius was in love with lists. He offered the earliest known listing of what we call today New Testament writings.
Eusebius called it simply a catalogue. That explains the origin of the Christian catalogue of sacred books. How did we come to acquire our Old Testament? Both Athanasius and Jerome agreed that 22 books from the Hebrew writings should be included in the Christian Bible. Twenty-two sounds like a petite number compared to the 46 Old Testament books in our current Catholic Bible.
But the count is actually much closer. All 12 of the minor prophets inhabiting the same scroll were considered a single book, and the presently numbered double books Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Jeremiah-Lamentations were counted as five, not The Book of Ruth was likewise attached to Judges, and so 39 of our 46 books appeared on the fourth-century lists of Athanasius and Jerome.
Who spoke up for the outlying seven texts? No less a figure than Augustine, who fought above his weight class in every ecclesial debate and generally won. Catholic Vol. About the author. You may also like. Was the first Thanksgiving Catholic? Damian Costello. Add comment. Share This! Alice Camille. Religion What is in the Bible? Voltaire , writing in the 18th century, repeated a centuries-old myth that the Bible was canonized in Nicea by placing all of the known books on a table, saying a prayer and seeing which illegitimate texts fell to the floor.
In truth, there was no single church authority or council that convened to rubber stamp the biblical canon official list of books in the Bible , not at Nicea or anywhere else in antiquity, explains Jason Combs , an assistant professor at Brigham Young University specializing in ancient Christianity.
What evidence scholars do have — in the form of theological treatises, letters and church histories that have survived for millennia — points to a much longer process of canonization. From the first through the fourth centuries and beyond, different church leaders and theologians made arguments about which books belonged in the canon, often casting their opponents as heretics.
The books that make up the Bible were written by various people over a period of more than 1, years, between B. The Bible contains a variety of literary genres, including poetry, history, songs, stories, letters and prophetic writings.
These were originally written on scrolls of parchment, as opposed to being encapsulated in "books" as we think of them today. Remember, the printing press wasn't invented until Over time, the books that were deemed authentic and authoritative by the communities who used them were included in the canon and the rest were discarded. Although the bulk of that editing work ended in the late s, the debate over which books were theologically legit continued until at least the 16th century when church reformer Martin Luther published his German translation of the Bible.
Luther had issues with the book of James, which emphasized the role of "works" alongside faith, so he stuck James and Hebrews in the back of the Bible alongside Jude and Revelation, which he also thought were questionable. Combs says that in Luther's original Bible, those four books don't even appear in the table of contents.
Eusebius was a Christian historian writing in the early s who provided one of the early lists of which books were considered legit and which were borderline bogus. Eusebius broke his list down into different categories: recognized, disputed, spurious and heretical. Under "disputed," Eusebius included James and Jude — the same books Luther didn't like — plus a few others that are now considered canon, like 2 Peter, 2 John and 3 John.
When Eusebius turns to the "spurious" and "heretical" categories, we get a glimpse into just how many other texts were in circulation in the second and third century C. Combs says that there were hundreds of texts similar to those found in the New Testament and Old Testament that didn't make it into the canon. Why did some books make the cut and not others? Combs cites three criteria used by early church leaders. The first was authorship, whether it was believed to have been written by an apostle, by Paul or by someone close to them.
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