To try to apply the word or concept 'canon' back onto the Jewish understanding of scripture at all is somewhat anachronistic. They had a clear idea that some writings were scripture, and that some writings were not scripture, but trying to make definitive lists of which is and which is not is somewhat of a later Christian idea. Arguably we should use the word 'canon' only for the New Testament and stop pretending that the Old is defined in anything like the same way.The deuterocanon was in the Septuagint, yes, however that doesn't indicate its books were considered canon.
The article you provided appeals to specific ECFs. Who do you believe compiled the canon you have today?
Citations of ECFs, not appealing to their authority, but noting their differences.
I agree with Ebia that to speak about the canonization of the Old Testament at all is anachronistic. Whether a book of the Old Testament was considered scriptural depends not on the authority of men to canonize a book is scripture, but on God's revelation that the book is scripture. Because the only criterion for scripturality is God's choice to inspire a book of scripture, God can be the only "compiler" of any list of scripture. In the case of the OT works in question, neither Christ nor the apostles ever quote the deuterocanon, which indicates to us that they adhered to the contemporary Jewish understanding that the deuterocanon is not scripture.
It was not until the Council of Trent that any dogmatic proclamation was made regarding which books were canonical for the Roman Catholic Church.
That's fine, but that's not a catholic/universal tradition. It was done by council. Trent, to be precise.You keep speaking to the variations of the ECFs on Scripture as if that damns the Catholic understanding. But as a Catholic we have ways to sort that out, just like the Apostles and elders did in Acts 15 when there was not unanimity on the issue of circumcision.
We all agree the books of the New Testament were more or less universally recieved. If you start with a belief that an authoritative list requires an authoritative body to write it up, you get a Roman understanding of the Canon. But you can just as easily argue from a universal reception that God made the books intrinsically identifiable, which is a Reformed view of the New Testament Canon.And properly speaking, it is of course the Spirit operating through Christ's ministers, not men instead of God, and there we agree. No one is saying we should follow "man's" list of what goes in the Bible instead of God's. The Bible assembled by the early Church IS God's list.
However, I do not understand how a Protestant can argue in favor of or against any book being in Scripture without appealing to a specific person or persons somewhere in history as having been given God's revelation as to what's in Scripture. And on what basis does a Protestant accept one person's list of books over another? The only answer I typically get is this generic "well the early Church generally rejected the Deuterocanon", which begs for names, or councils or some evidence, of which I see very little. As well, that answer gives the "early Church" authority.
Dubious allusions, and certainly no clear paraphrase (if there can be such a thing). But on the matter of canonical books being unquoted, by the time of the first century, the various books had already been split down the middle into scripture and apocrypha. The problem is not that one or two apocryphal books are uncited in the New Testament, the problem is they are wholesale absent.And of course you know that the Deuterocanon has some very strong allusions to it in the NT, some of which is even a paraphrase of a Deutero. And of course you know that neither Christ nor the apostles ever quote Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Obadiah, Zephaniah, Judges, 1 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Lamentations and Nahum. And they DO quote from Enoch and the Assumption of Moses which aren't Scripture. In other words, quotation does not make or break a book's status as Scripture.
Sorry? Where's your evidence for this well defined divide existing in the first century?But on the matter of canonical books being unquoted, by the time of the first century, the various books had already been split down the middle into scripture and apocrypha.
God made the books intrinsically identifiable
Unless I'm misreading it, your argument assumes that they were each cut and dried, well defined lists by the 1st century and its an all or nothing affair, but that's precisely what you are being asked to show and your comment from Josephus seems to contradict.Second Temple period literature contains references to the Torah and Neviim (the Law and the Prophets, a phrase even appearing in the New Testament) which are used contextually to refer to a specific set of books. Since we know that no later than about 200 A.D. the Hebrew Bible was finalized under the title "the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings," or the Tanakh, this earlier "canon" (for lack of a better term) should be viewed as growing into the later canon. We know the Tanakh never contained the deuterocanon. This presents us with two possible reconstructions of history: "the law and the prophets" contained the deuterocanon but lost them for no apparent reason, or they never contained the deuterocanon. The latter is more reasonable.
In addition, Josephus writes that the Jews only accept twenty two books. The Tanakh later contains twenty four books by their system of counting. Various reconstructions of Josephus's list have been suggested because he does not list the books, but at minimum we must say it represents a highly selective canon, indicating first century Judaism had a notion that of the large number of books in circulation, only a few made the cut. And if that is the case, we must presume it represents more or less the same list of books that made the cut no more than 150 years later.
Mr. Polo said:Although Trent gave the strongest "dogmatic" language that took away any doubt that these books were those accepted by the Catholic Church, local councils throughout history were pretty consistent in including the Deuterocanons including from Carthage and Hippo in the 4th-5th centuries (some also include a Synod of Rome in the 4th century, although some consider that merely a decree by Damasus and not a synod) all the way until the ecumenical Council of Florence in 1442 (Session 11) before Luther was even alive which also asserted the Deuterocanon as Scripture. As you know, a dogmatic definition is often not made until there is a serious challenge to an already held doctrine. We saw this even in the early Church when Christ's Incarnation was challenged, or the Trinity, or Mary as Theotokos, etc...
In the Latin Church, all through the Middle Ages 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. The compilatory "Glossa Ordinaria" was widely read and highly esteemed as a treasury of sacred learning during the Middle Ages; it embodied the prefaces in which the Doctor of Bethlehem had written in terms derogatory to the deuteros, and thus perpetuated and diffused his unfriendly opinion.
second temple Judaism did not treat the deuterocanon on the same level as the non-apocryphal books
I do not regard the Council of Florence as Ecumenical since it occurred after the great schism. But I also do not believe that its decrees in regards to the canon of Scripture were regarded as infallible even by the Roman church. People continued to question the deuterocanonical books after the council and were regarded as orthodox. As the Catholic Encyclopedia says:
Unless I'm misreading it, your argument assumes that they were each cut and dried, well defined lists by the 1st century and its an all or nothing affair, but that's precisely what you are being asked to show and your comment from Josephus seems to contradict.
That they had a clear idea of scripture is clear, but it actually seems to have become only a tightly defined thing after and in response to the rise of Christianity and then Christians (and to some extent Jews) try to read that back their way of doing things onto an earlier age.
What we have is 40 odd books, many of which are quoted in the New Testament, and some others appear alluded to with varying degrees of confidence, and some not at all. You can't use an argument like "the deuterocanonical books are not referenced at all, therefore none of them are canonical, there are quotes from some of the 39 books, therefore they are all canonical", until after one has shown that each is a set containing the books you claim or your argument is circular.
the belief that the mind cannot determine truth through inquiry.
Okay, now I understand what you are saying much more clearly.The Jews at the time of Christ had distinguished between "scripture" and "not scripture." I think I can say from what you've written we agree here. I'm not saying the lists had been tightly defined yet, I'm saying the notion that there exists a distinction between scripture and non-scripture during the first century, and that the Hebrew "canon," "the Law and the Prophets," while not perfectly defined yet as the modern Hebrew Tanakh, cannot have contained the apocryphal books. If they did, they would have to fall out of use despite the same kind of constant exposure to them in the septuagint that finally caused Christians to accept them as canon, and moreover, for every book like Maccabees included in Josephus's canon, a book like Jeremiah would have to have been omitted to make just 22. This would in turn demand that certain books of the Hebrew canon were not considered scripture until after the second century. With the possible exception of Esther, I cannot think of any book for which an argument can be made that it became scripture in the second century.
Now Christ and the Apostles endorsed "The Law and the Prophets" and used the term interchangeably with "the scripture." While the fuzzy nature of exactly what that term means leaves us a few open questions, it does not allow us to add to it the deuterocanon.
In this case, the tradition of the canon is affirmed because no one has ever disputed the indisputed books
.as long as it is open to reform should it prove to be deformed