Apocrypha and the "intertestimental gap" between OT and NT

[Andrewn]

What you see though that there are questions raised about the canonicity of Psalm 151 and Prayer of Manasseh, which were often included in codexes and scrolls of the Psalms. The Prayer was also sometimes included with the Books of Chronicles. Rome did not accept them as canonical in the long run for whatever reason, where the Eastern Churches did. Probably because the Eastern Churches held onto using the Septuagint in their services, where the Latin Church eventually moved to the Vulgate. Don't know the answer to that. 3rd Maccabees I'm not really sure why it became accepted in the East.

It is not that additional books became accepted in the East but rather that they became unaccepted in the West. Until the 4th century most Christians used the LXX as the basis for the OT. Saint Jerome did not want to include the Deuterocanonical books in the translation. Jerome lived in Palestine and was aware of the Hebrew canon that had developed.

His contemporary Saint Augustine arguing from tradition, wanted them included in new vulgate translation. After conferring with Pope Damasus and realizing most people sided with Augustine, Jerome included the Deuterocanonical books in his translation. Jerome's vulgate was widely regarded and used in the Western world. The Septuagint along with Greek texts was widely used in the Eastern Church.

The EO accept the Catholic Deuterocanonical books + the following:

• I Esdras
• The Prayer of Manasseh
• Psalm 151
• III Maccabees
• IV Maccabees

The Coptic Church of Egypt accepts only the Catholic Deuterocanonical books + the Prayer of Manasseh. It does not accept the rest.

The Ethiopian Church OT is quite unique. It includes all the EO canon + the following:

Jubilees
Enoch
Ezra Sutuel (2 Esdras)
4 Baruch
Josippon

 

[The Liturgist]

It depends upon when the specific Patriarchate left communion with Rome. Ethiopian Church for example had very little interaction it seems with the rest of the Church and thus we see the largest variation from the rest. Then you had the Nestorian and Monophysite Churches leaving in the 5 and 6th centuries, and then the Eastern Orthodox churches in the 11th century. All their canons for the most part agree with Rome's because this was ruled upon in the 4th and 5th centuries. The Councils of Carthage seemed to decree the canon based upon the Synod of Hippo, which was based upon the ruling of the Synod of Rome under Pope Damasus.

What you see though that there are questions raised about the canonicity of Psalm 151 and Prayer of Manasseh, which were often included in codexes and scrolls of the Psalms. The Prayer was also sometimes included with the Books of Chronicles. Rome did not accept them as canonical in the long run for whatever reason, where the Eastern Churches did. Probably because the Eastern Churches held onto using the Septuagint in their services, where the Latin Church eventually moved to the Vulgate. Don't know the answer to that.

3rd Maccabees I'm not really sure why it became accepted in the East.

But that being said, if you study the Orthodox view of biblical canonicity, it is a lot more complicated than how we view it in the West. So you do have that.

A few minor nitpicks:

1. According to Pope Benedict XVI’s assesment when he was Cardinal a the Assyrian nor the Ancient Church of the East are Nestorians, but rather adherents of the legitimate quasi-Chalcedonian Christology of Mar Babai. They do venerate him, but not to a great extent; for example, the most common patron saint for Assyrian churches is St. Mary, and I know of none named for Nestorius, and furthermore they take offense at being called Nestorian, and are tolerant of Mary being referred to as Theotokos. There are a handful of people on the Internet like the dude who runs Nestorian.org who make false claims about the church, or perhaps describe it as how they want it to be, but they have the same authority as Sedevacantists concerning the Roman Catholic Church, or the people who run orthodoxchurch.info concerning anything other than the Old Calendarist Orthodox Churches.
   
2. The Miaphysite churches constitute the Oriental Orthodox communion, and have historically been inextremely close contact, aside from a schism that lasted for about 300 years between the Syriac Orthodox and the Armemian Apostolic churches, which I think may have been contemporaneous with the periods of Byzantinzation and Latinization of the Armenian liturgy. However, the Armenian church remained in communion with the Coptic Orthodox Church, which was at the time the only other Oriental Orthodox church.
   
3. The Ethiopian Tewahedo Orthodox Church was, until the 20th century, an autonomous but not autocephalous part of the Coptic Orthodox Church, whose Patriarch, or Abune, was appointed by the Holy Synod of the Coptic Orthodox Church and the Coptic Pope of Alexandria, and in this manner the Coptic Church maintained theological supervision, and the doctrine of the Ethiopian church is the same as that of the Coptic Church. Its liturgy was famously organized in the early Fourth century by the Seven Syrian Saints, who were Greek and/or Syeiac speaking Fathers, probably bilingual; the Ethiopian Church has 14 anaphoras (Eucharistic Prayers), which is the second highest number of any church (not counting the 13 disused Armenian anaphoras, an indeterminate number of disused Coptic Anaphoras, and dozens of disused anaphoras of the Maronite Catholic Church, many of which correspond to Syriac Orthodox anaphoras but one of which, The Third Anaphora of St. Peter (Sharar) follows the East Syriac pattern, like three liturgies of the Assyrians, such as that of Saints Addai and Mari, which is also used by the Chaldean Catholics and Syro-Malabar Catholics) after the 86 of the Syriac Orthodox Church (of which only 16 are in English translations and are used in the Middle East; in the Eastern US I met a hieromonk (monastic priest) who said at his parish, only four are in use, because only those four had good-equality Syriac, Arabic and English translations, but their goal (this is also a goal of the Copts) is to phase out Arabic in the Diaspora; this is not a consideration for the Ethiopians as they worship primarily in Ge’ez), not counting the 13 disused Anaphoras of the Armenian church. The most frequently used Anaphora in the Ethiopian church is the Anaphora of the Apostles, which is an unabbreviated version (e.g. consisting of more than the bishop or celebrant’s parts) of the Anaphora of the Apostolic Tradition of St. Hippolytus, which was adapted, albeit from the abbreviated Hippolytan text, into Eucharistic Prayer no. 2 in the Novus Ordo Missae, and as a result of the influence of the Pauline Missal or Ordinary Form, as it is also known, through groups like the International Consultation on English in the Liturgy, also became the basis for Eucharistic Prayer B in Rite II of the 1979 Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer (and its 1994 traditional language derivative the Anglican Service Book), and other Anaphorae, or Eucharistic Prayers as they are now called, in the Lutheran Book of Worship, the Book of Common Worship of the Presbyterian Church USA, the United Methodist Book of Worship, the Alternative Service Book and its successor, Common Worship, in the Church of England, and most other recent Protestant liturgical publications, being even more popular that Eucharistic Prayer 4 (which was intended for ecumenical use, but was modified, like Eucharistic Prayer 2, by the Episcopalians, when adapting it as Rite II Eucharistic Prayer D), and because of its brevity, which resulted in adapting it from Hippolytus under the misguided assumption that the additional parts for the choir, deacon, etc, in the Ethiopian version, are mere accretions, has become the most widely celebrated service of Holy Communion in the World, displacing the Roman Canon. Ironically, almost no one is aware of the Ethiopian use of this prayer.
4. Indeed, the Ethiopian Church is the only church we know that actually used the Anaphora of the Apostles; although transcribed in Latin by St. Hippolytus, one of two claimants to the papacy in the early third century, who reconciled with his legitimate colleague before both were martyred, follows an Antiochene liturgical form which is radically different from the Roman Missal, which we know from the writings of St. Ambrose of Milan was in use and had been in use in Rome and Milan for some time in the late 4th century; ironically, despite only recently being (apparently) revived in tne West (for it may have never actually been used for anything other than a didactic reference as to what a liturgy should contain, based on the liturgical rite of Antioch, which since the fifth century has positively been the most commonly used liturgical rite by the different apostolic churches, with every church except the Coptic, and to a diminished extent, Greek churches Alexandria and Egypt, and the Church of the East, and the Western churches until 1969 when the Novus Ordo Missae (including Eucharistic Prayer 2, that prayer hitherto used only in Ethiopia which on account of an arguably flawed recension had great brevity, making it the most commonly used Anaphora in the Roman Rite, displacing the Roman Canon and the adaptations of the Byzantine and Egyptian forms of the Anaphora of St. Basil, which are Prayers 3 and 4) replaced the Vetus Ordo, the Traditional Latin Rites of Rome, Milan, Toledo, and the Roman uses of Braga, Lyons, Cologne, and some of the religious orders like the Dominicans Carthusians, Norbertines, Carmelites and Norbertines), the liturgy is also one of those with the longest continual use in the world. Indeed, the only ones we know for sure have been in use for a longer period of time than the Anaphora of the Apostles was in use in Ethiopia, are, as hinted it above, those known to be in use before the Antiochian Rite liturgies, namely, the East Syriac Rite Divine Liturgy of St. Addai and Mari, in use in more or less its present form in Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia and India since the 2nd century, by what became the Church of the East, and also at one time used as far East as China, Mongolia, Tibet and possibly Japan, before the genocide of the Muslim warlord Tamerlane, the Hitler of the 12th century who alas unlie Hitler, and as far south as Socotra, an Indian Ocean island a short distance off the coast of Yemen in which the Christian community was wiped out by their Muslim neighbors in the late middle ages, (a warning, as if one were needed, that the supposed protections afforded by Islam to the “People of the Book” are not worth the paper they are nominally printed on), and the Alexandrian Rite the Divine Liturgy known as that of St. Mark in Greek but as St. Cyril in Coptic, which has been in continuous use in the Church of Alexandria (kept alive by the Copts as the main Lenten liturgy even when the Alexandrian Greeks relegated it to an extremely secondary status), and also translated into the Ethiopian Rite and the West Syriac Rite, where it is known as the Anaphora of St. Cyril, albeit re-arranged into the Antiochene order of worship.
5. Thus the liturgy the Ethiopian liturgy consists of 14 Anaphoras based on the Antiochene/West Syriac Rite, a Synaxis or Liturgy of the Word based on the Synagogue Service of the Ethiopian Jews, but with the Eucharist instead of animal sacrifices, and a Divine Office adopted primarily from the Coptic monastic tradition (which developed in the years immediately following the conversion of most Ethiopians from Judaism in the fourth century), each service composed or translated into Ge’ez, the ancient Semitic language language which is the precursor of contemporary vernacular Ethiopian and Eritrean languages, the most important of which is Amharic (not to be confused with Aramaic; unlike Syriac, Ge’ez and Ahharic are not dialects of Aramaic; Coptic, for that matter, is not even Semitic, but Afro-Asiatic, a descendant of ancient Egyptian and Demotic Egyptian, written in a Hellenic alphabet with many Greek loan words along with a few of Aramaic and Hebraic origin relating to Christianity, like Alleluia, and other Semitic Ethiopian and Eritrean vernacular languages.
   
6. When in the 20th century, Emperor Haile Selassie requested the Ethiopian church become autocephalous (completely self governing), the Coptic Orthodox Pope of Alexandria wrote a Tomos of Autocephaly, approved by the Coptic Holy Synod, which is the first time this had happened in Oriental Orthodoxy for some time (I believe the Nubian Orthodox Church was granted autocephaly by the Copts, but could be wrong). Later, in 1994, after Eritrean autocephaly, Pope Shenouda granted autocephaly to the Eritrean Tewahedo Orthodox Church, which caused a schism with the Ethiopians, which has since healed. Other than that, there has been continual contact between the Ethiopians and the Copts.
7. The Oriental Orthodox do not uniformly embrace one canon, and this has never caused friction between them or in the 20th century, in ecumenical dialogues with the West, and with the Eastern Orthodox, which in the case of the Coptic Orthodox Church and the Syriac Orthodox Church, have been very successful, with the formal entering into a close relationship with the Greek Orthodox Church of Alexandria and All Africa, which facilitates intermarriage and limited intercommunion on that basis, and a more extensive agrement between the Syriac and Anriochian Orthodox churches wherein the Syriacs and Antiochians will communicate each others clergy in the Middle East, allow for intermarried couples to attend whichever church is convenient, and which prohibit each church from converting members of the other.
8. The Coptic Church could have imposed its canon, which as I believe you noted is very close to the Greek Orthodox canon, on the Ethiopian Orthodox church, and probably still could, given the steady stream of Ethiopian pilgrims to Coptic monasteries (the only discord between the churches involves access to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which became contentious as a result of Ethiopian autocephaly and the Status Quo. However, everything is contentious when it comes to the Holy Sepulchre, where ecumenism breaks down owing to a toxic situation created by the schisms, well-intentioned but ill-conceived plans by the Muslim rulers and their less corrupt, more scrupulous British successors, who were also largely convinced by the pious General Gordon of Khartoum, whose death in Khartoum along with that of all Egyptians and all Sudanese who rejected the claims of Muhammed Ahmed to be the Mahdi comes close to martyrdom, and might be one (more analysis is needed), that a site on the city wall known as Gordon’s Calvary was the Holy Sepulchre; while a beautiful place, ideal for Protestant Paschal services and re-enactments, since it is surrounded by a lush garden, since the Protestants have no chapel at the actual Holy Sepulcure, it has been debunked as being built within the past few hundred years, and being used as a storehouse and possibly a jail cell. At any rate, the Coptic Orthodox Church does not care about the Ethiopian canon; they could likewise have made adopting Coptic liturgy or the Coptic canon of Scripture a precondition of either Ethiopian or Eritrean autocephaly, but instead did neither. The reason for this is most likely, as my friends @dzheremi and @Pavel Mosko can likely attest, that the doctrine of the Ethiopian church is the same as the Coptic church, and the Ethiopians are some of the most zealous apologists for Oriental Orthodoxy (some Ethiopian monks insist Chalcedonians are Nestorians, although far more Chalcedonians insist Oriental Orthodox are monophysites or even Eutychians), and among the most pious Christians in the world, standing in church for 24 hours on end during Pascha and parish feast days. Ethiopians
9. The Old Testament canon of the Ethiopian Church was inherited from the Beta Israel, like the liturgical synaxis, but it is not permitted to distort the doctrine of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox churches.
10. The Armenian Apostolic Church includes 3 Corinthians in the New Testament of its Bible, but does not read it in church. Among many theologians and hierarchs of the Eastern churches, Canonicity is defined as whether or not a book is read in the lectionary or not, with other books printed in the Bible for edification but not read liturgically, for example, the Didascalia in the Ethiopic Broad Canon, not considered protocanon or even deuterocanon, but either as non-canonical or as something that I would call tritocanon. Likewise, St. Athanasius commended the Didache and the Shepherd of Hermas for the instruction of catechumens but precluded them from being read in the church, and thus they are not recognized as part of the Athanasian canon.
11. Many of the variants you mention between the canon of the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern churches also apply to the Eastern Catholic churches. As far as I am aware, the Bibles of the Greek Catholic Church and the Ukrainian Catholic Church are the same as the Greek Orthodox Church and the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, and other Church Slavonic churches such as the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. And in Russia, Eastern Ukraine and Crimea, to my knowledge, the most popular personal Bible in vernacular Russian is the Synodal Bible, published in the 19th century, which uses the Masoretic Text for much of its Old Testament translation, while remaining compatible with the Church Slavonic Bible used liturgically by Byzantine Catholics and Slavic Orthodox alike.

 

[The Liturgist]

It is not that additional books became accepted in the East but rather that they became unaccepted in the West. Until the 4th century most Christians used the LXX as the basis for the OT. Saint Jerome did not want to include the Deuterocanonical books in the translation. Jerome lived in Palestine and was aware of the Hebrew canon that had developed.

His contemporary Saint Augustine arguing from tradition, wanted them included in new vulgate translation. After conferring with Pope Damasus and realizing most people sided with Augustine, Jerome included the Deuterocanonical books in his translation. Jerome's vulgate was widely regarded and used in the Western world. The Septuagint along with Greek texts was widely used in the Eastern Church.

The EO accept the Catholic Deuterocanonical books + the following:

• I Esdras
• The Prayer of Manasseh
• Psalm 151
• III Maccabees
• IV Maccabees

The Coptic Church of Egypt accepts only the Catholic Deuterocanonical books + the Prayer of Manasseh. It does not accept the rest.

The Ethiopian Church OT is quite unique. It includes all the EO canon + the following:

Jubilees
Enoch
Ezra Sutuel (2 Esdras)
4 Baruch
Josippon

Or at least it was, until the Eritrean church separated from it. And of course the Beta Israel (Ethiopic Jews) use it. I think the Ethiopian Rite Catholics in Ethiopia and Eritrea also use it.

 

[The Liturgist]

It is not that additional books became accepted in the East but rather that they became unaccepted in the West. Until the 4th century most Christians used the LXX as the basis for the OT. Saint Jerome did not want to include the Deuterocanonical books in the translation. Jerome lived in Palestine and was aware of the Hebrew canon that had developed.

His contemporary Saint Augustine arguing from tradition, wanted them included in new vulgate translation. After conferring with Pope Damasus and realizing most people sided with Augustine, Jerome included the Deuterocanonical books in his translation. Jerome's vulgate was widely regarded and used in the Western world. The Septuagint along with Greek texts was widely used in the Eastern Church.

The EO accept the Catholic Deuterocanonical books + the following:

• I Esdras
• The Prayer of Manasseh
• Psalm 151
• III Maccabees
• IV Maccabees

The Coptic Church of Egypt accepts only the Catholic Deuterocanonical books + the Prayer of Manasseh. It does not accept the rest.

The Ethiopian Church OT is quite unique. It includes all the EO canon + the following:

Jubilees
Enoch
Ezra Sutuel (2 Esdras)
4 Baruch
Josippon

Or at least it was, until the Eritrean church separated from it. And of course the Beta Israel (Ethiopic Jews) use it. I think the Ethiopian Rite Catholics in Ethiopia and Eritrea also use it.

 

[The Liturgist]

By the way, Beta Isreal is Ge’ez for House of Isreal; compare Bet and Beth and other Semitic words for House. I feel obliged to disclose this lest someone read this and assume the term is a slight against Ethiopian Jewry; the Beta Israel, or Falashas as they are also known, are discriminated against in Israel by some people, due to a combination of ethnic differences and substantial differences in religious practice, indeed, as I have mentioned before, the Chief Rabbinate wanted to ceremonially recircumcize the males of the Beta Israel and force them to worship according to Rabbinical Jewish norms (the Beta Israel still perform sacrifices and have priests and levites), at the time of their rescue by the IDF, Mossad, the CIA and USAF from the Derg Communists who killed Emperor Haile Selassie and caused ethnic strife, famines and poverty that Ethiopia is still suffering from. Karaite Jews also suffer discrimination, with their butchers not allowed to call themselves kosher due to differences in interpretation of kashrut, not even a compromise like “Kariate Kosher” and “Rabinnical Kosher” (Karaites do not have Rabbis or use the Talmud; they are kind of Sola Scriptura, although interpret Torah using a logical method, the Karaite Kalaam, and have a standard interpretation that all adhere to, for example, Karaite Judaism, like Samaritanism, is patrilineal rather than matrilineal).

 

[Erose]

It is not that additional books became accepted in the East but rather that they became unaccepted in the West. Until the 4th century most Christians used the LXX as the basis for the OT. Saint Jerome did not want to include the Deuterocanonical books in the translation. Jerome lived in Palestine and was aware of the Hebrew canon that had developed.

This is something that bewilders me concerning St. Jerome. There seems to be this belief that St. Jerome had far more influence when it came to the Canon than what he really did. People forget that St. Jerome was a priest, not a bishop. He was commissioned by Pope St. Damasus at least initially, to revise the Old Latin New Testament to the Greek, and them maybe the Psalter. Anyway, St. Jerome may have argued with the Pope and others on the validity of the Hebrew Scriptures, but St. Jerome did not decide the canon, that was what the Synods of Rome and then Hippo and then Carthage did.

His contemporary Saint Augustine arguing from tradition, wanted them included in new vulgate translation. After conferring with Pope Damasus and realizing most people sided with Augustine, Jerome included the Deuterocanonical books in his translation. Jerome's vulgate was widely regarded and used in the Western world. The Septuagint along with Greek texts was widely used in the Eastern Church.

The history of the Vulgate is quite complex, and really not as clean as folks want to believe, including Catholics. But Jerome's Vulgate had very little to do with determining the Canon accepted by the Church.

The EO

accept the Catholic Deuterocanonical books + the following:

• I Esdras
• The Prayer of Manasseh
• Psalm 151
• III Maccabees
• IV Maccabees

• https://orthodoxwiki.org/index.php?title=IV_Maccabees&action=edit&redlink=1

When researching this one will learn that the EO view of Biblical canonicity is much more complicated than how we view it in the West. And when you start looking at the Oriental, Assyrian and Ethiopian it really gets complicated.

Anyway it just isn't as clean cut as what we do in the West. Main reason is that there are different levels of Canonicity, and as far as I can tell pretty much every Patriarchate determines that through their Sacred Tradition concerning the Bible. Again it is not as clear cut.

The Coptic Church

of Egypt accepts only the Catholic Deuterocanonical books + the Prayer of Manasseh. It does not accept the rest.

I don't know about the PoM. Couldn't find info to confirm that, but they also have the 151 Psalm.

 

[Pavel Mosko]

When researching this one will learn that the EO view of Biblical canonicity is much more complicated than how we view it in the West. And when you start looking at the Oriental, Assyrian and Ethiopian it really gets complicated.

From all this stuff, I just say to people... usually Protestants that the Canon is not monolithic (tends to be a topic on Sola Scriptura type arguments when people accuse you of "not being biblical" etc. Well their definitely is a process to it at least, we have a NT canon that is almost monolithic (if not for being aware of the Assyrian Church of the East that is).


Different churches believers tend to make different canons based on the books they are comfortable with and have on hand. The canons get longer as people tend to warm up to some of the newer books. And this is entirely proper as far as issues like Spiritual discernment goes and the nature of Churches being confessing or creedal bodies.


Historically you got a number of examples of this
when you look at the original Canon of the NT for the 1st Churches that Constantine commissioned the shortest NT Canon, really kind of showed the Canon of saint Vincent of Lerins in effect on the notion of consensus because different groups had issues with some of those later book of the NT Canon.


And of course the Peshitta Syriac New Testament is yet another example of this.


And you got similar things going on in Israel with the Hellenized Sadducees, verses groups of Pharisees and their acceptance of the Law, the Prophets and the Writings, vs. the Essenes that had a really long list of books as far as the Deuterocanonicals and then some.

And of course the Hellenistic Jews in Egypt, and the Ethiopians even more examples to the trend.



By the way, I also like remind certain Protestants, especially Baptists of the Liturgical and Dogmatic reasons for having a canon in the first place! They tend to read it like a statement of "this is inspired by God" when it is more like a software white list to prevent certain doctrinal malware books, like those pesky Gnostic texts from being read in church!


Not to mention, much of the issues of "Canonacy" only comes with the invention of the Codex (the 1st thing like a modern book). When you are on the individual scroll per book operating system things can be much more informal, and ad hoc.

 

[Erose]

From all this stuff, I just say to people... usually Protestants that the Canon is not monolithic (tends to be a topic on Sola Scriptura type arguments when people accuse you of "not being biblical" etc. Well their definitely is a process to it at least, we have a NT canon that is almost monolithic (if not for being aware of the Assyrian Church of the East that is).


Different churches, believers tend to make different canons based on the books they are comfortable with and have on hand. The canons get longer as people tend to warm up to some of the newer books. And this is entirely proper as far as issues like Spiritual discernment goes and the nature of Churches being confessing or creedal bodies.


Historically you got a number of examples of this
when you look at the original Canon of the NT for the 1st Churches that Constantine commissioned the shortest NT Canon, really kind of showed the Canon of saint Vincent of Lerins in effect on the notion of consensus because different groups had issues with some of those later book of the NT Canon.


And of course the Peshitta Syriac New Testament is yet another example of this.


And you got similar things going on in Israel with the Hellenized Sadducees, verses groups of Pharisees and their acceptance of the Law, the Prophets and the Writings, vs. the Essenes that had a really long list of books as far as the Deuterocanonicals and then some.

And of course the Hellenistic Jews in Egypt, and the Ethiopians even more examples to the trend.

In my opinion, and I would like to emphasize "in my opinion", my thinking is that canonicity has a lot more to do with what writings were used in the Liturgy, than what were fully doctrinally orthodox. Of course writings wouldn't be used in the Liturgy, if they weren't view as being orthodox.

But there is a reason why, let's say, the Prayer of Manasseh is in many of the Ancient Patriarchates canons, where it isn't in my Patriarchate's canon; and it has absolutely nothing to do with the orthodoxy of that Prayer. We don't use the Prayer of Manasseh in our Liturgies. But from my understanding in many or all (not sure) Eastern and Oriental Patriarchates it is used.

 

[Pavel Mosko]

In my opinion, and I would like to emphasize "in my opinion", my thinking is that canonicity has a lot more to do with what writings were used in the Liturgy, than what were fully doctrinally orthodox. Of course writings wouldn't be used in the Liturgy, if they weren't view as being orthodox.

Yeah I was sort of getting to that as I was editing in comments based on things, not to mention the Codex and I was going to work in some Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi stuff about worship being a statement of Faith and what you are talking about.


I seem to recall Patrick Madrid and Robert Sungenis being helpful on this stuff (I got their big book on Sola Scriptura).

 

[Erose]

A few minor nitpicks:

1. According to Pope Benedict XVI’s assesment when he was Cardinal a the Assyrian nor the Ancient Church of the East are Nestorians, but rather adherents of the legitimate quasi-Chalcedonian Christology of Mar Babai. They do venerate him, but not to a great extent; for example, the most common patron saint for Assyrian churches is St. Mary, and I know of none named for Nestorius, and furthermore they take offense at being called Nestorian, and are tolerant of Mary being referred to as Theotokos. There are a handful of people on the Internet like the dude who runs Nestorian.org who make false claims about the church, or perhaps describe it as how they want it to be, but they have the same authority as Sedevacantists concerning the Roman Catholic Church, or the people who run orthodoxchurch.info concerning anything other than the Old Calendarist Orthodox Churches.
   
2. The Miaphysite churches constitute the Oriental Orthodox communion, and have historically been inextremely close contact, aside from a schism that lasted for about 300 years between the Syriac Orthodox and the Armemian Apostolic churches, which I think may have been contemporaneous with the periods of Byzantinzation and Latinization of the Armenian liturgy. However, the Armenian church remained in communion with the Coptic Orthodox Church, which was at the time the only other Oriental Orthodox church.
   
3. The Ethiopian Tewahedo Orthodox Church was, until the 20th century, an autonomous but not autocephalous part of the Coptic Orthodox Church, whose Patriarch, or Abune, was appointed by the Holy Synod of the Coptic Orthodox Church and the Coptic Pope of Alexandria, and in this manner the Coptic Church maintained theological supervision, and the doctrine of the Ethiopian church is the same as that of the Coptic Church. Its liturgy was famously organized in the early Fourth century by the Seven Syrian Saints, who were Greek and/or Syeiac speaking Fathers, probably bilingual; the Ethiopian Church has 14 anaphoras (Eucharistic Prayers), which is the second highest number of any church (not counting the 13 disused Armenian anaphoras, an indeterminate number of disused Coptic Anaphoras, and dozens of disused anaphoras of the Maronite Catholic Church, many of which correspond to Syriac Orthodox anaphoras but one of which, The Third Anaphora of St. Peter (Sharar) follows the East Syriac pattern, like three liturgies of the Assyrians, such as that of Saints Addai and Mari, which is also used by the Chaldean Catholics and Syro-Malabar Catholics) after the 86 of the Syriac Orthodox Church (of which only 16 are in English translations and are used in the Middle East; in the Eastern US I met a hieromonk (monastic priest) who said at his parish, only four are in use, because only those four had good-equality Syriac, Arabic and English translations, but their goal (this is also a goal of the Copts) is to phase out Arabic in the Diaspora; this is not a consideration for the Ethiopians as they worship primarily in Ge’ez), not counting the 13 disused Anaphoras of the Armenian church. The most frequently used Anaphora in the Ethiopian church is the Anaphora of the Apostles, which is an unabbreviated version (e.g. consisting of more than the bishop or celebrant’s parts) of the Anaphora of the Apostolic Tradition of St. Hippolytus, which was adapted, albeit from the abbreviated Hippolytan text, into Eucharistic Prayer no. 2 in the Novus Ordo Missae, and as a result of the influence of the Pauline Missal or Ordinary Form, as it is also known, through groups like the International Consultation on English in the Liturgy, also became the basis for Eucharistic Prayer B in Rite II of the 1979 Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer (and its 1994 traditional language derivative the Anglican Service Book), and other Anaphorae, or Eucharistic Prayers as they are now called, in the Lutheran Book of Worship, the Book of Common Worship of the Presbyterian Church USA, the United Methodist Book of Worship, the Alternative Service Book and its successor, Common Worship, in the Church of England, and most other recent Protestant liturgical publications, being even more popular that Eucharistic Prayer 4 (which was intended for ecumenical use, but was modified, like Eucharistic Prayer 2, by the Episcopalians, when adapting it as Rite II Eucharistic Prayer D), and because of its brevity, which resulted in adapting it from Hippolytus under the misguided assumption that the additional parts for the choir, deacon, etc, in the Ethiopian version, are mere accretions, has become the most widely celebrated service of Holy Communion in the World, displacing the Roman Canon. Ironically, almost no one is aware of the Ethiopian use of this prayer.
4. Indeed, the Ethiopian Church is the only church we know that actually used the Anaphora of the Apostles; although transcribed in Latin by St. Hippolytus, one of two claimants to the papacy in the early third century, who reconciled with his legitimate colleague before both were martyred, follows an Antiochene liturgical form which is radically different from the Roman Missal, which we know from the writings of St. Ambrose of Milan was in use and had been in use in Rome and Milan for some time in the late 4th century; ironically, despite only recently being (apparently) revived in tne West (for it may have never actually been used for anything other than a didactic reference as to what a liturgy should contain, based on the liturgical rite of Antioch, which since the fifth century has positively been the most commonly used liturgical rite by the different apostolic churches, with every church except the Coptic, and to a diminished extent, Greek churches Alexandria and Egypt, and the Church of the East, and the Western churches until 1969 when the Novus Ordo Missae (including Eucharistic Prayer 2, that prayer hitherto used only in Ethiopia which on account of an arguably flawed recension had great brevity, making it the most commonly used Anaphora in the Roman Rite, displacing the Roman Canon and the adaptations of the Byzantine and Egyptian forms of the Anaphora of St. Basil, which are Prayers 3 and 4) replaced the Vetus Ordo, the Traditional Latin Rites of Rome, Milan, Toledo, and the Roman uses of Braga, Lyons, Cologne, and some of the religious orders like the Dominicans Carthusians, Norbertines, Carmelites and Norbertines), the liturgy is also one of those with the longest continual use in the world. Indeed, the only ones we know for sure have been in use for a longer period of time than the Anaphora of the Apostles was in use in Ethiopia, are, as hinted it above, those known to be in use before the Antiochian Rite liturgies, namely, the East Syriac Rite Divine Liturgy of St. Addai and Mari, in use in more or less its present form in Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia and India since the 2nd century, by what became the Church of the East, and also at one time used as far East as China, Mongolia, Tibet and possibly Japan, before the genocide of the Muslim warlord Tamerlane, the Hitler of the 12th century who alas unlie Hitler, and as far south as Socotra, an Indian Ocean island a short distance off the coast of Yemen in which the Christian community was wiped out by their Muslim neighbors in the late middle ages, (a warning, as if one were needed, that the supposed protections afforded by Islam to the “People of the Book” are not worth the paper they are nominally printed on), and the Alexandrian Rite the Divine Liturgy known as that of St. Mark in Greek but as St. Cyril in Coptic, which has been in continuous use in the Church of Alexandria (kept alive by the Copts as the main Lenten liturgy even when the Alexandrian Greeks relegated it to an extremely secondary status), and also translated into the Ethiopian Rite and the West Syriac Rite, where it is known as the Anaphora of St. Cyril, albeit re-arranged into the Antiochene order of worship.
5. Thus the liturgy the Ethiopian liturgy consists of 14 Anaphoras based on the Antiochene/West Syriac Rite, a Synaxis or Liturgy of the Word based on the Synagogue Service of the Ethiopian Jews, but with the Eucharist instead of animal sacrifices, and a Divine Office adopted primarily from the Coptic monastic tradition (which developed in the years immediately following the conversion of most Ethiopians from Judaism in the fourth century), each service composed or translated into Ge’ez, the ancient Semitic language language which is the precursor of contemporary vernacular Ethiopian and Eritrean languages, the most important of which is Amharic (not to be confused with Aramaic; unlike Syriac, Ge’ez and Ahharic are not dialects of Aramaic; Coptic, for that matter, is not even Semitic, but Afro-Asiatic, a descendant of ancient Egyptian and Demotic Egyptian, written in a Hellenic alphabet with many Greek loan words along with a few of Aramaic and Hebraic origin relating to Christianity, like Alleluia, and other Semitic Ethiopian and Eritrean vernacular languages.
   
6. When in the 20th century, Emperor Haile Selassie requested the Ethiopian church become autocephalous (completely self governing), the Coptic Orthodox Pope of Alexandria wrote a Tomos of Autocephaly, approved by the Coptic Holy Synod, which is the first time this had happened in Oriental Orthodoxy for some time (I believe the Nubian Orthodox Church was granted autocephaly by the Copts, but could be wrong). Later, in 1994, after Eritrean autocephaly, Pope Shenouda granted autocephaly to the Eritrean Tewahedo Orthodox Church, which caused a schism with the Ethiopians, which has since healed. Other than that, there has been continual contact between the Ethiopians and the Copts.
7. The Oriental Orthodox do not uniformly embrace one canon, and this has never caused friction between them or in the 20th century, in ecumenical dialogues with the West, and with the Eastern Orthodox, which in the case of the Coptic Orthodox Church and the Syriac Orthodox Church, have been very successful, with the formal entering into a close relationship with the Greek Orthodox Church of Alexandria and All Africa, which facilitates intermarriage and limited intercommunion on that basis, and a more extensive agrement between the Syriac and Anriochian Orthodox churches wherein the Syriacs and Antiochians will communicate each others clergy in the Middle East, allow for intermarried couples to attend whichever church is convenient, and which prohibit each church from converting members of the other.
8. The Coptic Church could have imposed its canon, which as I believe you noted is very close to the Greek Orthodox canon, on the Ethiopian Orthodox church, and probably still could, given the steady stream of Ethiopian pilgrims to Coptic monasteries (the only discord between the churches involves access to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which became contentious as a result of Ethiopian autocephaly and the Status Quo. However, everything is contentious when it comes to the Holy Sepulchre, where ecumenism breaks down owing to a toxic situation created by the schisms, well-intentioned but ill-conceived plans by the Muslim rulers and their less corrupt, more scrupulous British successors, who were also largely convinced by the pious General Gordon of Khartoum, whose death in Khartoum along with that of all Egyptians and all Sudanese who rejected the claims of Muhammed Ahmed to be the Mahdi comes close to martyrdom, and might be one (more analysis is needed), that a site on the city wall known as Gordon’s Calvary was the Holy Sepulchre; while a beautiful place, ideal for Protestant Paschal services and re-enactments, since it is surrounded by a lush garden, since the Protestants have no chapel at the actual Holy Sepulcure, it has been debunked as being built within the past few hundred years, and being used as a storehouse and possibly a jail cell. At any rate, the Coptic Orthodox Church does not care about the Ethiopian canon; they could likewise have made adopting Coptic liturgy or the Coptic canon of Scripture a precondition of either Ethiopian or Eritrean autocephaly, but instead did neither. The reason for this is most likely, as my friends @dzheremi and @Pavel Mosko can likely attest, that the doctrine of the Ethiopian church is the same as the Coptic church, and the Ethiopians are some of the most zealous apologists for Oriental Orthodoxy (some Ethiopian monks insist Chalcedonians are Nestorians, although far more Chalcedonians insist Oriental Orthodox are monophysites or even Eutychians), and among the most pious Christians in the world, standing in church for 24 hours on end during Pascha and parish feast days. Ethiopians
9. The Old Testament canon of the Ethiopian Church was inherited from the Beta Israel, like the liturgical synaxis, but it is not permitted to distort the doctrine of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox churches.
10. The Armenian Apostolic Church includes 3 Corinthians in the New Testament of its Bible, but does not read it in church. Among many theologians and hierarchs of the Eastern churches, Canonicity is defined as whether or not a book is read in the lectionary or not, with other books printed in the Bible for edification but not read liturgically, for example, the Didascalia in the Ethiopic Broad Canon, not considered protocanon or even deuterocanon, but either as non-canonical or as something that I would call tritocanon. Likewise, St. Athanasius commended the Didache and the Shepherd of Hermas for the instruction of catechumens but precluded them from being read in the church, and thus they are not recognized as part of the Athanasian canon.
11. Many of the variants you mention between the canon of the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern churches also apply to the Eastern Catholic churches. As far as I am aware, the Bibles of the Greek Catholic Church and the Ukrainian Catholic Church are the same as the Greek Orthodox Church and the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, and other Church Slavonic churches such as the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. And in Russia, Eastern Ukraine and Crimea, to my knowledge, the most popular personal Bible in vernacular Russian is the Synodal Bible, published in the 19th century, which uses the Masoretic Text for much of its Old Testament translation, while remaining compatible with the Church Slavonic Bible used liturgically by Byzantine Catholics and Slavic Orthodox alike.

That is not a few nitpicks.

 

[Andrewn]

I don't know about the PoM. Couldn't find info to confirm that, but they also have the 151 Psalm.

The following is a list of the Deuterocanonical books in the Coptic Church. It doesn't include Psa 151. You can click the link for the Prayer of Manaseah:

Comparative Theology Articles & Deuterocanonical Books – St. Bishoy Coptic Orthodox Church (Home)

When researching this one will learn that the EO view of Biblical canonicity is much more complicated than how we view it in the West.

I believe the Orthodox view is that the OT is subordinated to the New. IOW, it is not as infallible as the NT. This produces significant doctrinal differences when compared to Protestants who believe the OT is completely and literally infallible. For the Orthodox, liturgical prayers and writings of the saints may actually have more doctrinal weight than the OT. This is my impression.

 

[Andrewn]

at least, we have a NT canon that is almost monolithic (if not for being aware of the Assyrian Church of the East that is).

The Peshitta excludes 2 John, 3 John, 2 Peter, Jude, and Revelation. Some Armenian mss. include 3 Corinthians.

 

[Pavel Mosko]

The Peshitta excludes 2 John, 3 John, 2 Peter, Jude, and Revelation. Some Armenian mss. include 3 Corinthians.

Yep I still got my English translation Peshitta's although looking to maybe give away this one below from Lamsa (which I consider almost worthless) while retaining the Deluxe study one and the idioms book. Lamsa cheated though, he filled in the missing books using the Western Syriac canon since he probably realized that his American audience would want that. As time goes on, I have become less and less impressed with the Peshitta. There is a lot more legend there than fact from what I can tell. I am talking about Aramaic Primacy stuff. I believe in it a little but it is way, way over rated as this article really describes.

Problems With Peshitta Primacy

 

[JSRG]

The Peshitta excludes 2 John, 3 John, 2 Peter, Jude, and Revelation. Some Armenian mss. include 3 Corinthians.

I thought 2/3 John, 2 Peter, Jude, and Revelation, while originally absent, were added to the Peshitta later and are in modern printings? Was I wrong?

 

[Pavel Mosko]

I thought 2/3 John, 2 Peter, Jude, and Revelation, while originally absent, were added to the Peshitta later and are in modern printings? Was I wrong?

They are added by Lamsa, and were added to the West Syriac Peshitto long ago (ancient times), in fact Lamsa uses the English translations from the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch. I also notice some online Interlinears have the same thing too. But officially the Bible of the Assyrian Church of the East has those books missing. Even though I think they believe they are inspired and read them and cite them etc. e.g. You can find Assyrian Bible studies of the Book of Revelation online on Youtube, as well as similar stuff on church web sites.

 

[Andrewn]

You can find Assyrian Bible studies of the Book of Revelation online on Youtube, as well as similar stuff on church web sites.

This is interesting. I wonder which approach to interpretation they take?

 

[Pavel Mosko]

This is interesting. I wonder which approach to interpretation they take?

Well they got this one bishop who is really eccentric in the Ancient Assyrian Church of the East that has an entire series on the book on You-tube. He is eccentric because he likes to do thinks like wear an headdress the head covering that you find in OO churches, and fondly quote Roman Catholic saints and stories etc. If I didn't know better I would suspect he was really trying to promote ecumenical relations across jurisdictional lines.

If they are being true to form they will be covering it a lot with a historical grammatical method. Even though the above bishop will throw in lots of symbolic stuff as well. I seem to recall watching this bishop before years back when he came up in my suggested videos and watching everything I could of him in English because being a token Assyrian Church aka one that had their "Apostolic Lines", liturgy, etc. but nobody was ethnic or spoke or read Aramaic and East Syriac I did not really have much feel for what the Church really historically taught beyond reading certain classics like Mar Odisho's "The Pearl".

So he was interesting, but not really typical. I can tell because not only was he in the spliter body of a Church Communion that was small to begin with (ACE in total were already less than a million world wide for decades, probably half a million), but he had some kind of falling out with the ancient Assyrians in Australia, and he seems to almost be autocephalous (not to surprising since he is not a person to go out of his way to tow the party line on things, not to mention him doing things like wearing garb of his other Syriac brothers).


I notice the "local" Assyrians (where I use to be from in Silicon Valley) got Revelation or a study of it on their web site.

Assyrian Church of the East - Mar Yosip Parish


New Testament in Assyrian - Revelation

 

[The Liturgist]

From all this stuff, I just say to people... usually Protestants that the Canon is not monolithic (tends to be a topic on Sola Scriptura type arguments when people accuse you of "not being biblical" etc. Well their definitely is a process to it at least, we have a NT canon that is almost monolithic (if not for being aware of the Assyrian Church of the East that is).


Different churches believers tend to make different canons based on the books they are comfortable with and have on hand. The canons get longer as people tend to warm up to some of the newer books. And this is entirely proper as far as issues like Spiritual discernment goes and the nature of Churches being confessing or creedal bodies.


Historically you got a number of examples of this
when you look at the original Canon of the NT for the 1st Churches that Constantine commissioned the shortest NT Canon, really kind of showed the Canon of saint Vincent of Lerins in effect on the notion of consensus because different groups had issues with some of those later book of the NT Canon.


And of course the Peshitta Syriac New Testament is yet another example of this.


And you got similar things going on in Israel with the Hellenized Sadducees, verses groups of Pharisees and their acceptance of the Law, the Prophets and the Writings, vs. the Essenes that had a really long list of books as far as the Deuterocanonicals and then some.

And of course the Hellenistic Jews in Egypt, and the Ethiopians even more examples to the trend.



By the way, I also like remind certain Protestants, especially Baptists of the Liturgical and Dogmatic reasons for having a canon in the first place! They tend to read it like a statement of "this is inspired by God" when it is more like a software white list to prevent certain doctrinal malware books, like those pesky Gnostic texts from being read in church!


Not to mention, much of the issues of "Canonacy" only comes with the invention of the Codex (the 1st thing like a modern book). When you are on the individual scroll per book operating system things can be much more informal, and ad hoc.

You know the Assyrian Church does not reject the five books missing from the Peshitta as apocrypha, its just they were not in the original Peshitta and were never added to the lectionary, and some people assume they are nor canonical, and according to some definitions of a canon as the books read in the lectionary, they aren’t, but in terms of the church accepting them as valid texts, they are, officially. For example, my friend Fr. George has done Bible studies on Revelation and other books not in the canon.

The Syriac Orthodox did add the extra five books, but that was because St. Philoxenus of Mabbug translated them, and this also synchronized their canon with the Coptic canon. The Coptic lectionary, which the Syriac Orthodox lectionary in terms of the number of lessons in some respects resembles, is the only one where Revelation is read in full, on Holy Saturday (Easter Even, which the Copts call Bright Saturday, a term the Eastern Orthodox use for the following Saturday, for in Eastern Orthodoxy the week following Pascha is Bright Week). The Athonite monks do the same thing as the Copts, but in a less formal setting, at the same time of the day on Holy Saturday, but it is not considered part of the lectionary, oddly enough. Perhaps it should be and perhaps Eastern Orthodox parishes should implement this Athonite practice, since the reading is very popular in the Coptic churches, and it would give people something to do between the Vesperal Divine Liturgy in the morning and the Paschal Liturgy which is traditionally at midnight but now at some churches in some areas for safety reasons happens as early as 8 AM, maybe even earlier in some parishes.

However, the Armenian canon and the Ethiopian Broad Canon do feature minor variations: the Armenians have 3 Corinthians and the Broad Canon includes the Didascalia.

 

[The Liturgist]

That is not a few nitpicks.

Your post was generally correct though, and the points I raised are not well known. I mean, I did not expect you to know that, and I did not mean to come across as patronizing. I also did not want to appear to be disagreeing with your argument, which was substantially correct. You are someone I admire and respect. God bless you!

 

[The Liturgist]

They are added by Lamsa, and were added to the West Syriac Peshitto long ago (ancient times), in fact Lamsa uses the English translations from the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch. I also notice some online Interlinears have the same thing too. But officially the Bible of the Assyrian Church of the East has those books missing. Even though I think they believe they are inspired and read them and cite them etc. e.g. You can find Assyrian Bible studies of the Book of Revelation online on Youtube, as well as similar stuff on church web sites.

I am fairly certain the original Syriac Orthodox translation of those books was by St. Philoxenus of Mabbug, who also translated the rest, but in general, the West Syriac Peshitto, to my knowledge, is the Eastern Peshitta + the missing books, which were taken from the St. Philoxenus translation. Mor Philoxenus also composed a beautiful anaphora.