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What my post confirms is that people have opinions; surely this is not a revelation to anybody. Saints Jerome and Athanasius had opinions that were not the teaching of the Catholic Church of their time nor are their opinions congruent with the teaching of the Catholic Church of our times. Opinions can be fascinating to read but when looking for what the Church teaches it is not individual's opinions that count.
We have fragments of Greek manuscripts, but truthfully the "LXX" applies properly only to that translation of the Torah. The later family that Origen brought together as the LXX is more a term of art for more or less anonymous translations than an actual unified work. It's not about undermining physical evidence, but avoiding revisionist conceptions that presume a unified corpus for which there is very little evidence. There's some things to recommend the apocrypha, as well as reasons to dispute it. And I don't particularly care to discredit it as canonical, as I take a silent position on it and can take it or leave it. My rejection is of Trent's authority to make a universal declaration, not necessarily the books themselves.
They have always been Holy Scripture, always been the Word of God. Bibles contained those books for over a thousand years until the Protestants dropped the books to create their own version of the Bible.
The Masoretic Text, as the name shows, was put together by the Masoretes, a group of Jewish scholars who were around in the second half of the first millennium AD. It absolutely does not predate the Septuagint.
Florence is an ecumenical council. Hippo/Carthage/Rome were large local/regional councils. These councils are Catholic Church councils, Protestants, Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox may or may not take them to heart. You may take them in whatever way suits you.
Torah is a rabbinic Jewish designation, as far as I know it is directly applicable only to the five books attributed to Moses. Tanakh is the Rabbinic Jewish designation for the Masoretic Text based Jewish "bible". The LXX predates the Masoretic Text by around 1,100 years give or take a little.
While there are some more "independent" people who have argued for the inclusion of Enoch in the canon (there are at least two people I have seen on Christian Forums--neither of them Catholic or Orthodox--argue for their inclusion), as far as I am aware the only notable groups to regard Enoch as canonical are the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and the Eritrean Orthodox Church, both Oriental Orthodox Churches. Neither the Catholic Church nor the Eastern Orthodox Church (which to be clear, is distinct from the Oriental Orthodox Church) accepts it as canonical.
Do you think "what the Catholic church teaches" comes from some kind of supercomputer rather than from "people who have opinions"? Surely a a conciliar statement comes from "people who have opinions". How else is it produced?
I think you made a typo, the Masoretes worked to produce the Masoretic text in the second half of the first Millennium AD.
I think church councils do not offer individual's opinions; they offer considered judgements of the group of conciliar bishops and their secretaries who attended the council and they discussed and debated the matters upon which they wrote a judgement.
The early fourth century councils (e.g. Laodicea, Hippo, Carthage) were regional councils that did not entirely agree. There are doubts about whether Florence had full conciliar authority. Hugh of St. Victor did not regard the Apocrypha as canonical. It is evident that there were disagreements over the canon in the 4th century within the Catholic church.
Yes, and the LXX properly only applies to a translation of those 5 books done around 250 BC. The appelation was applied retroactively to a loose collection of largely anonymous translations and was a corpus mixtum. I made no mention of the Masoretic text, and the Jewish canon pre-dates the Masoretes being settled sometime between the Hasmodian dynasty and 150 AD. Even in Greek the jews held to the smaller canon of the OT with Hellenistic jews using the Aquila. The LXX itself is a term of art when it is applied to books outside of the 5 books of Moses, and is of varied quality in both content and translationally, not really coalescing until the codices of the 4th and 5th century. At any rate, the Jewish canon was recognized universally and the books we're discussing were somewhere between antilegomena(disputed by some) and apocrypha(accepted by some). These books in no way are clearly Scripture, either in quality or in historic attestation.
Oh, I see they are "considered judgments" not opinions. Do you think Jerome and Athanasius "considered" their opinions, or not?
In my opinion it comes down to criteria. The reason why Enoch and several other books and epistles aren't included in the compotation called the Bible in the Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches, is because they simply didn't meet established criteria to be considered canon. But they're still in existence and anyone is free to read them. Especially now when all of it is so easily available on the internet. There are a lot of Christians who don't believe that Revelation is canon, and the Eastern Orthodox church doesn't use it in their liturgy. I've heard that Esther barely made it into the canon for all Christian churches, simply because it barely meets the criteria for what is deemed to qualify as canon.
