Oh, you're willing to accept books rejected by ECFs? Hm. Kinda defeats the point of Apostolic Succession being a preserving hermeneutic.
Of course, we all know that the ECF's weren't infallible, and we should be wary to follow the opinions of one ECF at the exclusion of the other's. Rather, we should seek the mind of the church through all their writings. However, you seem to be defending Melito's canon in particular here. Should we then exclude Esther from scripture? Surely not. Rather, we should see what the other ECF's have to say about scripture as well before making our conclusions. That is, after all, how the councils functioned. Btw, this thread isn't about apostolic succession.
Apparently nobody speaks for anybody except when they're agreed, where they're agreed, while they're agreed. Get enough people to accept it, and God's suddenly written it. Really?
IIRC, you were defending the position that the deutero's weren't accepted by enough people, i.e. "they're not trusted by the wider-ranging church early on" so you seem to be guilty of the same thing you're accusing.
Maybe that's why Protestantism has so many techniques, and generally a single canon (if uninfluenced by A.S.). The criteria seemed to be better in almost every case, and pointed to a canon that's pretty uniform.
techniques that are considered later innovations and were foreign to the early church and even the reformers themselves, yes.
1-yes
2-They're not trusted by the wider-ranging church early on.
3-That's NT, which means distribution follows rather different paths.
4-There are different criteria between what's handed down to us from those who received the oracles of God before us, and what's given to us through Apostles.
Ok, let's unpack this a bit. Do you deny that the septuagint was widely considered the primary translation of the jewish scriptures used in the predominatly greek speaking world until the 2 century AD? And do you also acknowledge that they were widely used by Christians as the primary source of OT scripture until the west switched to the latin vulgate (while the east retained the greek)? If so, can you explain how the septuagint was not "trusted by the wider ranging churches early on" as you say, and perhaps you can provide sources?
Finally, the earliest manuscripts of the LXX we have include the deutero's. If the majority of (greek speaking) Jews and early Christians (including Jesus and Apostles) around the time of Christ used this text and considered it to be reliable, then why should we now reject it?
I will leave the NT alone for now and focus on the OT.
More specifically, why does the A.S. church use the term "deuterocanonical"?
to distinguish them from the proto's I suppose.
