Missing pages from one's bible

disciple Clint said:

Well not initially Luther for example wanted to remove several book of the N.T. not doubt there are still some churches who have exceptions.

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Yeah, but he finally and all Protestants accepted the Catholic New Testament Canon.

It is funny how most Protestants don't even know why their founding fathers did what they did, especially when it comes to Scripture.

disciple Clint said:

Imagine for a moment The Catholic Church rejecting tradition, How would they then justify all of the tradition the Catholic Church follows and defends endlessly

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What a fantastical argument.

Xeno.of.athens said:

The Catholic Church does not reject Tradition and the tradition that is nearest to an Old Testament canon is the books in the LXX as it was received by the Catholic Church.

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Not all the writings found in most manuscripts of the LXX were accepted as canon. For example 3rd and 4th Maccabees, 3rd and 4th Esdras (now referred to 1st and 2nd since the renaming of Ezra and Nehemiah), Ps 151, Prayer of Manasseh, and the Psalms of Solomon.

The writings chosen had more to do with what was allowed to be read in the Liturgy, than it did with anything else. Keep in mind though that the writings had to be considered divinely inspired to be read in the liturgy in the West, especially in the 3rd and 4th centuries. There is some question though about this during the time of heavy persecution by the Romans. There was just more important things to deal with than something like what was and was not divinely inspired and canonicity. These Catholics were trying to survive to the next day.

IMO what was and was not allowed to be read in the liturgy is why other Patriarchates have included other writings, although they may have a lesser authority than the ones decided at Rome and Hippo, which is one of the synods of Carthage, and was later ratified in the East that the Trullo Council. Now in the East vs the West the idea of Canonicity and Divinely Inspired is much more complicated than in the West. So keep that in mind.

The Ethiopians would be a different matter altogether. They took the Bible of the Ethiopian Jews as their OT for example, which would make sense, especially since they were a pretty isolated group early on.

Erose said:

Yeah, but he finally and all Protestants accepted the Catholic New Testament Canon.

It is funny how most Protestants don't even know why their founding fathers did what they did, especially when it comes to Scripture.

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Well strictly speaking the New Testament canon is of Orthodox origins, since it originated with Pope St. Athanasius of Alexandria* in his 39th Paschal Encyclical, and was later picked up by the Roman church and most other churches, the three exceptions being the Church of the East, which never added the books not a part of the original Peshitta, which were added to the Syriac Orthodox Peshitta by Mar Philoxenus of Mabbug, although these days their official position is they recognize them as canon but do not read them liturgically, and then the Armenians have 3 Corinthians, and some Ethiopian bibles, those with the “Broad Canon” have the Didascalia (a book of church order probably dating to the late first century, similar to the Didache) at the end of the New Testament (to my knowledge this is the only difference between the Broad and Narrow Canons, with both having Jubilees, Enoch, etc in the Old Testament).

* In the fourth century, only the Bishop of Alexandria was styled Pope; this would not be adopted in Rome until the sixth century. Furthermore, in this era the churches of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem were autocephalous, with Rome being primus inter pares but not primus sine paribus as it is now in relation to the Eastern Catholic churches, as attested to by Canons 6 and 7 of the Council of Nicaea, and also the failure of the Roman legates at Nicaea to get the Council to mandate clerical celibacy, which has always been limited to the Church of Rome. The Church of Rome in that era, between Archbishop Victor and Archbishop Leo I was also the most conservative, never having a heretical bishop until the infamous Pope Honorius I, who advocated Monothelitism, which is officially regarded as a heresy by the Roman Catholic Church, which participated in the Sixth Ecumenical Council.

However, Pope St. Gregory I Dialogos, deservedly called The Great , along with Archbishop St. Celestine, who allied himself with Pope St. Cyril of Alexandria, were, along with Pope St. Athanasius of Alexandria, Patriarch St. Ignatius of Antioch and Patriarch St. John Chrysostom of Constantinople, the best leaders of the autocephalous Early Churches. Jerusalem also had Patriarch St. Cyril, who was good, and there was Archbishop Cyprian of Carthage, also very good. However, most of the other bishops and archbishops we venerate from the Patristic era were not the rulers of autocephalous churches, for example, St. Basil of Caesarea, St. Gregory the Theologian, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Serapion of Thmuis, St. Ambrose of Milan, St. Irenaeus of Lyons, St. Polycarp of Smyrna, St. Epiphanius of Salamis, and the beloved St. Augustine of Hippo, were members of the Holy Synods of the autocephalous churches of Constantinople, Alexandria, Rome, Antioch, and Cyprus.

However, in terms of their contribution to the music of the church, St. Ignatius, St. Ambrose and St. Gregory the Great were the most important, because the great martyr of Antioch invented antiphony, the catechist of St. Augustine imported it to Milan resulting in it displacing monotone except from the Low Mass, which was sung in monotone for most of the first millennium before being said almost silently, as is now the custom in the traditional Latin Mass, and also St. Ambrose and St. Augustine cowrote the hymn Te Deum Laudamus, one of a handful of hymns of the early church I regard as credal, and finally St. Gregory the Great gave us Gregorian Chant, inspired by the eight mode Byzantine Chant. Personally I prefer Gregorian, Ambrosian and Mozarabic Chant to most performances of Byzantine Chant, with only the Bulgarians singing it in a way that I enjoy. West Syriac Chant also uses eight modes which are arranged differently than the eight Gregorian modes.

So what I would say based on my previous post is that while the Greek Orthodox of Alexandria and the Coptic Orthodox of Alexandria, the two successors of the unified Church of Alexandria presided over by Pope St. Athanasius deserve at least equal credit with Rome, if not more, for the 27 book New Testament canon, since it was compiled by St. Athanasius, who was also the driving force at Nicaea and the biographer of St. Anthony the Great, and thus to a large extent the popularizer of Monasticism (St. Pachomius, one of the Desert Fathers following in the footsteps of St. Anthony, wrote the first Cenobitic Rule, which inspired those of St. Benedict and St. Columba), what Rome really did for the Church was liturgy.

Specifically, there was an interaction between Rome and the Greek and Syrian churches which laid the foundations for innovations in church music such as polyphony and tonality, and produced exquisite music in its own right, and also Rome gave us two of the most beautiful liturgical families, the Gallican liturgies, of which the Ambrosian Rite is still used by millions of Catholics in the region of Milan, and the Mozarabic Rite is preserved in the Cathedral of Toledo and in a nearby monastery, although I wish the Beneventan and Gallican Rites would be revived (enough data exists to do this) and all four made accessible in North America, and the Roman Rite, which is the basis for most Protestant liturgies, but which also exists in several beautiful uses in addition to the Tridentine Mass, such as the Dominican, Carthusian, Carmelite, Norbertine, Lyonnaise, and Bacarense, and the sadly disused uses of Sarum, York, Hereford, Durham and Cologne, among others.

Indeed the Dominican Rite was the first liturgy to be standardized across Western Europe in the way that liturgies were standardized over large territories in the Eastern church using the Cathedral*, Studite-Sabaite monastic, Sabaite-Studite monastic, and Violakis Typikons (Ordos, also called @ word that translates to Directory in Armenian), and laid the groundwork for the later implementation of the Tridentine liturgy.

*Unfortunately the Cathedral Typikon, used at Hagia Sophia, Thessalonica, Athens and a few other places has been disused since the fourth century, although the texts and music survive. Actually the Roman Church has done a better job preserving historic liturgies than the Orthodox, perhaps because it was not subjected to Turkocratia.

The Liturgist said:

Well strictly speaking the New Testament canon is of Orthodox origins, since it originated with Pope St. Athanasius of Alexandria* in his 39th Paschal Encyclical, and was later picked up by the Roman church and most other churches, the three exceptions being the Church of the East, which never added the books not a part of the original Peshitta, which were added to the Syriac Orthodox Peshitta by Mar Philoxenus of Mabbug, although these days their official position is they recognize them as canon but do not read them liturgically, and then the Armenians have 3 Corinthians, and some Ethiopian bibles, those with the “Broad Canon” have the Didascalia (a book of church order probably dating to the late first century, similar to the Didache) at the end of the New Testament (to my knowledge this is the only difference between the Broad and Narrow Canons, with both having Jubilees, Enoch, etc in the Old Testament).

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No the canon didn’t originate with St. Athanasius. He never claimed that rather he said: Word, delivered to the Fathers; it seemed good to me also, having been urged thereto by true brethren, and having learned from the beginning, to set before you the books included in the Canon, and handed down, and accredited as divine;

St. Athanasius is a Catholic Bishop, and never ever was not in communion with Rome, even when due to heretics taking over his Patriarchate, led his Patriarchate out of communion.

St. Athanasius obviously believed in the authority of Rome, and to say otherwise doesn’t look at his history, and his relationship with Rome.

Besides back then you had the Catholic Church which was the orthodox faith, and outside of that were the heterodox Christian’s.

So my point stands as accurate.

Xeno.of.athens said:

There are 24, and all of them are Catholic and all of them have the same 73 book canon. All of them have the Catechism of the Catholic Church. All of them are in communion with the bishop of Rome.

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The East–West Schism is the break of communion since 1054 between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. Immediately following the beginning of the schism, it is estimated that Eastern Christianity comprised a slim majority of Christians worldwide, with the majority of remaining Christians being Western.Wikipedia

Xeno.of.athens said:

The Catholic Church does not reject Tradition and the tradition that is nearest to an Old Testament canon is the books in the LXX as it was received by the Catholic Church.

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“St. Jerome distinguished between canonical books and ecclesiastical books. The latter he judged were circulated by the Church as good spiritual reading but were not recognized as authoritative Scripture. The situation remained unclear in the ensuing centuries...For example, John of Damascus, Gregory the Great, Walafrid, Nicolas of Lyra and Tostado continued to doubt the canonicity of the deuterocanonical books. According to Catholic doctrine, the proximate criterion of the biblical canon is the infallible decision of the Church. This decision was not given until rather late in the history of the Church at the Council of Trent. The Council of Trent definitively settled the matter of the Old Testament Canon. That this had not been done previously is apparent from the uncertainty that persisted up to the time of Trent” (The New Catholic Encyclopedia, The Canon).


The practice of the Church up to the time of the Reformation was to follow the judgment of Jerome who rejected the Old Testament apocrypha on the grounds that these books were never part of the Jewish canon. These were permissible to be read in the churches for the purposes of edification but were never considered authoritative for establishing doctrine. The Protestants did nothing new when they rejected the apocrypha as authoritative Scripture. It was the Roman church that rejected this tradition and ‘canonized’ the ecclesiastical books.
St Jerome and the Canon

Erose said:

Yeah, but he finally and all Protestants accepted the Catholic New Testament Canon.

It is funny how most Protestants don't even know why their founding fathers did what they did, especially when it comes to Scripture.

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Some do, Many do not and there are so many denominations and independent churches that it is impossible to contemplate the number of differences in beliefs.

Xeno.of.athens said:

The schism was between Catholic and Orthodox churches. You posts use the terms Catholic and Eastern-Orthodox loosely, and it can be confusing.

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I am not confused and I have yet to find anyone in the Orthodox faith that is confused.

Xeno.of.athens said:

Yep, he had an opinion, and his opinion was never received as Catholic teaching on the extent and relative importance of the books in the canonical scriptures.

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Maybe you did not see this: The practice of the Church up to the time of the Reformation was to follow the judgment of Jerome who rejected the Old Testament apocrypha on the grounds that these books were never part of the Jewish canon. These were permissible to be read in the churches for the purposes of edification but were never considered authoritative for establishing doctrine. The Protestants did nothing new when they rejected the apocrypha as authoritative Scripture. It was the Roman church that rejected this tradition and ‘canonized’ the ecclesiastical books.
St Jerome and the Canon

Xeno.of.athens said:

That is not so. Saint Jerome was respected but the canonical books were those received in Rome by the Church there. That is why, despite Saint Jerome's misgivings, he was required to provide a Latin translation of all the 73 books received as canonical by the Catholic Church.

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That decision was not made until The Council of Trent, held between 1545 and 1563 in Trent.

Erose said:

What a fantastical argument.

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not at all, that is exactly what happened in The Council of Trent, held between 1545 and 1563 in Trent,