My understanding of of the Canon in use today in the RCC:...
- Around 367 AD Saint Athanasius is promoting as useful a list of divinely inspired Scripture that includes every book ratified by Trent almost 1200 years later.
What is the source for your understanding? Athanasius (c. 367), excluded the Book of Esther among the "7 books
not in the canon but to be read" along with the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), Judith, Tobit, the Didache, and the Shepherd of Hermas. (
Athanasius of Alexandria - Wikipedia)
Gregory of Nazianzus (330 – 390) concurred with the canon of Anastasius.
● The list of O.T. books by the
Council of Laodicea (363) may have been added later, and is that of Athanasius but with Esther included. It also contains the standard canon of the N.T. except that it omits Revelation, as does Cyril, thought to be due to excessive use of it by the Montanist cults
●
John of Damascus, eminent theologian of the Eastern Church in the 8th century, and Nicephorus, patriarch of Constantinople in the 9th century also rejected the apocrypha, as did others, in part or in whole.
● The fourth century historian
Euesibius also provides an early Christian list of both Old and New Testament books. In his
Ecclesiastical History (written about A.D. 324), in three places quoting from Josephus, Melito and Origen, lists of the books (slightly differing) according to the Hebrew Canon. These he calls in the first place 'the Canonical Scriptures of the Old Testament, undisputed among the Hebrews;' and again,'the acknowledged Scriptures of the Old Testament;' and, lastly, 'the Holy Scriptures of the Old Testament.' In his Chronicle he distinctly separates the Books of Maccabees from the 'Divine Scriptures;' and elsewhere mentions Ecclesiasticus and Wisdom as 'controverted' books.
(Eusebius on the Canon of Scripture)
●
Cyril of Jerusalem (d. circa. 385 AD) exhorts his readers “Of these read the two and twenty books, but
have nothing to do with the apocryphal writings. Study earnestly these only which we read openly in the Church. Far wiser and more pious than thyself were the Apostles, and the bishops of old time, the presidents of the Church who handed down these books. Being therefore a child of the Church, trench thou not upon its statutes. And of the Old Testament, as we have said, study the two and twenty books, which, if thou art desirous of learning, strive to remember by name, as I recite them.”
(Cyril of Jerusalem on the Canon of Scripture)
His lists supports the canon adopted by the Protestants, combining books after the Hebrew canon and excludes the apocrypha, though he sometimes used them, as per the standard practice by which the apocrypha was printed in Protestant Bibles, and includes Baruch as part of Jeremiah.
● Likewise
Rufinus:
38.But it should also be known that there are other books which are called not "canonical" but "ecclesiastical" by the ancients: 5 that is, the Wisdom attributed to Solomon, and another Wisdom attributed to the son of Sirach, which the Latins called by the title Ecclesiasticus, designating not the author of the book but its character. To the same class belong the book of Tobit and the book of Judith, and the books of Maccabees.
With the New Testament there is the book which is called the Shepherd of Hermas, and that which is called The Two Ways 6 and the Judgment of Peter.7 They were willing to have all these r
ead in the churches but not brought forward for the confirmation of doctrine. The other writings they named "
apocrypha,"8
which they would not have read in the churches.
These are what the fathers have handed down to us, which, as I said, I have thought it opportune to set forth in this place, for the instruction of those who are being taught the first elements of the Church and of the Faith, that they may know from what fountains of the Word of God they should draw for drinking.
(Rufinus of Aquileia on the Canon of Scripture)
●Summing up most of the above, the Catholic Encyclopedia states,
At Jerusalem there was a renascence, perhaps a survival, of Jewish ideas, the tendency there being distinctly unfavourable to the
deuteros. St.
Cyril of that see, while vindicating for the Church the right to fix the Canon,
places them among the apocrypha and forbids all books to be read privately which are not read in the churches. In Antioch and Syria the attitude was more favourable. St.
Epiphanius shows hesitation about the rank of the deuteros; he esteemed them, but they
had not the same place as the Hebrew books in his regard. The historian
Eusebius attests the widespread doubts in his time; he classes them as
antilegomena, or
disputed writings, and, like
Athanasius, places them in a
class intermediate between the books received by all and the apocrypha. The 59th (or 60th) canon of the provincial
Council of Laodicea (the authenticity of which however is contested) gives a catalogue of the Scriptures entirely i
n accord with the ideas of St. Cyril of Jerusalem. On the other hand, the
Oriental versions and
Greek manuscripts of the period are more
liberal; the extant ones have all the deuterocanonicals and, in some cases, certain apocrypha.
The influence of Origen's and Athanasius's
restricted canon naturally spread to the West. St.
Hilary of Poitiers and
Rufinus followed their footsteps,
excluding the deuteros from canonical rank in theory, but admitting them in practice. The latter styles them "
ecclesiastical" books, but in authority unequal to the other Scriptures. St.
Jerome cast his weighty suffrage on the side unfavourable to the disputed books...
(Catholic Encyclopedia, Canon of the Old Testament, eph. mine)
● The Catholic Encyclopedia also states as regards the Middle Ages,
In the Latin Church, all through the Middle Ages [5th century to the 15th century] we find
evidence of hesitation about the character of the deuterocanonicals.
There is a current friendly to them, another one distinctly unfavourable to their authority and sacredness, while wavering between the two are a number of writers whose veneration for these books is tempered by some perplexity as to their exact standing, and among those we note St. Thomas Aquinas.
Few are found to unequivocally acknowledge their canonicity. The prevailing attitude of Western medieval authors is substantially that of the Greek Fathers. The chief cause of this phenomenon in the West is to be sought in the influence, direct and indirect, of St. Jerome's depreciating Prologus
(CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Canon of the Old Testament)
Five separate synods of the Church, first in 382, 393x2(Hippo and Carthage), 392 Carthage and again in 419AD, ALL ratify an identical list
None of which were ecumenical=infallible, thus not representing all the churches, and to be consistent with the Maryson poster who dismisses non-infallible statements, then these are not determinitive of the canon either. Webster finds,
“The seventh Ecumenical Council officially accepted the Trullan Canons as part of the sixth Ecumenical Council. The importance of this is underscored by canon II of Trullo which officially authorized the decrees of Carthage, thereby elevating them to a place of ecumenical authority. However, the Council also sanctioned were the canons of Athanasius and Amphilochius that had to do with the canon and both of these fathers rejected the major books of the Apocrypha. In addition, the Council sanctioned the Apostolical canons which, in canon eighty-five, gave a list of canonical books which included 3 Maccabees, a book never accepted as canonical in the West.101 Furthermore, the Apostolical canons were condemned and rejected as apocryphal in the decrees of Popes Gelasius and Hormisdas.102 Thus indicating that the approval given was not specific but general.”
(Untitled Document)
"(the East does add more to it around the turn of millennium I believe) "
This may help;
Triablogue: Eastern Orthodox Acceptance Of The Hebrew Canon
In producing the Latin translation (Vulgate) Saint Jerome felt compelled to explain the inclusion of the seven books in his prologue to the Bible. Unfortunately the language of that prologue appears to have created much confusion regarding what degree of inspiration those OT books might have relative to the rest of the OT.
What confusion? It as well understood that he rejected the deuteros as Scripture proper, even if he was later induced to include them in his Vulgate (which was not a uniform publication). Some think Jerome later defended the apocrypha based on comments about Daniel, but which is countered
here.
Jerome wrote in his Prologue to the Books of the Kings,
“This preface to the Scriptures may serve as a helmeted [i.e. defensive] introduction to all the books which we turn from Hebrew into Latin, so that we may be assured that what is outside of them must be placed aside among the Apocryphal writings. Wisdom, therefore, which generally bears the name of Solomon, and the book of Jesus the Son of Sirach, and Judith, and Tobias, and the Shepherd [of Hermes?] are not in the canon. The first book of Maccabees is found in Hebrew, but the second is Greek, as can be proved from the very style.
In his preface to Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs he also states,
“As, then, the Church reads Judith, Tobit, and the books of Maccabees, but does not admit them among the canonical Scriptures, so let it read these two volumes for the edification of the people,
not to give authority to doctrines of the Church.”
(Shaff, Henry Wace, A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, p. 492)
J. N. D. Kelly finds,
"Jerome, conscious of the difficulty of arguing with Jews on the basis of books they spurned and anyhow regarding the Hebrew original as authoritative, was adamant that anything not found in it was ‘to be classed among the apocrypha’, not in the canon; later he grudgingly conceded that the Church read some of these books for edification, but not to support doctrine."
Kelly, [J. N. D. (1960). Early Christian Doctrines. San Francisco, USA: Harper. p. 55.
The Catholic Encyclopedia states,
Obviously, the inferior rank to which the deuteros were relegated by authorities like Origen, Athanasius, and Jerome, was due to too rigid a conception of canonicity, one demanding that a book, to be entitled to this supreme dignity, must be received by all, must have the sanction of Jewish antiquity, and must moreover be adapted not only to edification, but also to the "confirmation of the doctrine of the Church", to borrow Jerome's phrase.
(Catholic Encyclopedia, Canon of the Old Testament; CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Canon of the Old Testament)
In his famous ‘Prologus Galeatus’, or Preface to his translation of Samuel and Kings, he declares that everything not Hebrew should be classed with the apocrypha, and explicitly says that Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Tobias,and Judith are not in the Canon. These books, he adds, are read in the churches for the edification of the people, and not for the confirmation of revealed doctrine” (Catholic Encyclopedia, Canon of the Old Testament)
The distinction then is that while “good,” they were not for doctrinal use. As the above source states regarding St. Athanasius, “Following the precedent of Origen and the Alexandrian tradition, the saintly doctor recognized no other formal canon of the Old Testament than the Hebrew one; but also, faithful to the same tradition, he practically admitted the deutero books to a Scriptural dignity, as is evident from his general usage.
An excerpt from the Prologue to the Glossa ordinaria (an assembly of “glosses,” that of brief notations of the meaning of a word or wording in the margins of the Vulgate Bible) expresses this distinction:
The canonical books have been brought about through the dictation of the Holy Spirit. It is not known, however, at which time or by which authors the non-canonical or apocryphal books were produced. Since, nevertheless, they are very good and useful, and nothing is found in them which contradicts the canonical books, the church reads them and permits them to be read by the faithful for devotion and edification. Their authority, however, is not considered adequate for proving those things which come into doubt or contention,or for confirming the authority of ecclesiastical dogma, as blessed Jerome states in his prologue to Judith and to the books of Solomon. But the canonical books are of such authority that whatever is contained therein is held to be true firmly and indisputably, and likewise that which is clearly demonstrated from them. (note 124, written in AD 1498, and also found in a work attributed to Walafrid Strabo in the tenth century...
Untitled Document)
This question was not only a matter of controversy between Catholics and Protestants: it was also the subject of a lively discussion even between Catholic theologians. St Jerome, that great authority in all scriptural questions, had accepted the Jewish canon of the Old Testament. The books of Judith, Esther, Tobias, Machabees, Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus, which the majority of the Fathers, on the authority of the Septuagint, treated as canonical, Jerome described as apocryphal, that is, as not included in the canon though suitable for the edification of the faithful… — Jedin,, History of the Council of Trent, pgs 55,56
Following Jerome, Cajetan also relegated the deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament to a secondary place where they could serve piety but not the teaching of revealed doctrine.
— Jared Wicks tr., Cajetan Responds: A Reader in Reformation Controversy (Washington: The Catholic University Press of America, 1978). See also Cardinal Cajetan, "Commentary on all the Authentic Historical Books of the Old Testament," Bruce Metzger, An Introduction to the Apocrypha (New York: Oxford, 1957), p. 180.)
Part one of two since this forum's software is flaky on formatting, adding BB quotes and changing formatting on its own! And jumping to the top if you cut any word.
