What you should have noticed by now is there are a lot of versions of the history of the canon.
I take it mostly as a tale of bibles.
For instance the Orthodox and Catholics both support the Apochryphal books, but even there, they aren't exactly the same.
For the Orthodox, you turn to the Septuagint for the answer. As you noticed in the thread, the Orthodox point to the use of the Septuagint in the New Testament. It's true, the Septuagint was used. However, it wasn't used exclusively, some New Testament quotes come from other versions than the Septuagint, and since the Orthodox continued right up to present to use the Septuagint as their Old Testament translation, you can see some of the quotes became more in agreement over time.
Anyway, the basic assumption is that the Septuagint in Jesus' time was like it is today and contained all the books and received the approval of Jesus as scripture. It's really quite a stretch and indeed as time goes on it's less supportable all the time.
It seems that the rational must have really become kind of a folk theory of scripture. We see for instance the Bishop of Constantinople, Athanasius, mentions what is and isn't scripture in his one
letter. He is quite adamant that the Jewish Old Testament is scripture and the Apochryphal books are not. He made one mistake, he didn't include Esther as scripture and inserted one of the Apochyrphal books in it's place, probably because he knew the correct number. Evidently he didn't go down to the local synagog to check.
In any case though, 2000 years of use of the Septuagint by the Orthodox pretty well assurred everything in it being considered scripture.
In the Catholic church, it's the tale of the Vulgate. Jerome translated the Vulgate. He started translating in 382 with a revision of the Gospels, finishing the Old Testament in 405. He too was adamant that the Jewish canon was the whole of Old Testament scripture. He states so in his
prefaces to the books. ( See the preface to Samuel and the Kings, as well as the prefaces of Tobit and Judith.) The Pope requested him to translate the Apochryphal books as well. He did some, but didn't do a very good job, many of the Apochryphal books are just taken from the Old Latin translations. The books don't quite match all the books in the Septuagint.
Those who say the canon was set in the late fourth century as the same as Catholics state today, seem to just ignore the fact that the person who translated their bible just a few years later seems completely unaware that the canon was set. The lists from that time are really kind of suspect and it just seems to difficult to grasp why Jerome seems so completely unaware of and indeed speaks what would be in direct contradiction to any set canon. Jerome used the term apochrpha for the noncanonical books.
Anyway, a little over a thousand years later in the Council of Trent, in a seriously split vote, the canon of the Catholic Church was set, and they did exactly what most Orthodox do, every book in their bible was considered scripture. Interesting isn't it that the protestants agree with Jerome and the Catholics who use his translation as the basis of the canon disagree with him?
When you study the early church fathers, there is really overwhelming support for the Jewish canon early, say before 400 A.D. The council of Jarnia story though appears not to be true. That was based on one man's hypothesis and is pretty well discredited now. It appears that Jarnia probably didn't even discuss canon much if at all and the canon was set before then, possibly long before then.'
Marv
