Tag: Bible: Canon

This is a follow-up to my post about the recent publication entitled A New New Testament.  One of the justifications its editors offer for adding books to the New Testament is this:

Both now and for the past 400 years Catholics and Protestants don’t agree on what is in the Bible, and neither do Episcopalians and Lutherans. Internationally the eastern Orthodox, Ethiopian, and Syriac Bibles all contain different books than the western Catholic and Protestant Bibles.

Now it is true that the Bibles of these various communities contain some different books.  However, we need to make some important observations about this:

1.  None of these Bibles differ when it comes to the New Testament.  All Christians communities agree universally about what books belong to the New Testament.  So these differences do not provide any justification for changing the New Testament canon.

2. The current differences are rather about certain Old Testament books that were added to the biblical canon at the end of the Fourth Century in the Western church, but not in the Eastern church.  No other books have been considered for inclusion since then by any of the communities the editors of A New New Testament mention.  So it’s somewhat misleading to cite these communities in support of adding books to the biblical canon, particularly so many centuries later.

3.  Since these books were added, and especially since the 1500s, the trend in newly-formed communities in the West—Anglican/Episcopal, Lutheran, and other Protestant—has been towards rejecting these books as canonical.  Only the Roman Catholic Church still considers them fully canonical.  In other words, the percentage of Christians who consider these books Scriptural, even in the West, has been steadily decreasing in recent centuries.  One could posit that the church is actually moving towards a consensus about the canon that would exclude these disputed books.  So the appeal to disagreement among various communities about “what is in the Bible” as grounds for adding to the canon is not really valid.

4.  All of this said, there is still ample precedent for putting different books in Bibles, as the examples below will show.  Nevertheless, this does not provide justification for adding more books to the canon of inspired Scripture.  But that is precisely what the committee of scholars behind A New New Testament wants to do.  As the publisher’s web site explains,  “Hal Taussig called together a council of scholars and spiritual leaders to discuss and reconsider which books belong in the New Testament. . . . They voted on which should be added” to the “previously bound books” (that is, the ones previously bound together in the canon).  As I said in my earlier post, it would have been much better to call the publication An Anthology of Early Christian Literature or even An Expanded New Testament, showing that books were being added to a published volume, but not making a claim that they should be accepted as inspired Scripture on a par with the canonical books.

Here are the details about which additional books appear in the Bibles of specific Christian communities. (I am indebted to this article for leads to much of this information.)

The issue is whether followers of Jesus should consider canonical certain books that were written in Greek within the Jewish community in the centuries before Christ.  These books, sometimes known as the Apocrypha, are missing from the Hebrew Bible but they were included in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament that was most popular among early Christians.

The Roman Catholic Church, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, includes the following apocryphal books in its Bible because it considers them fully canonical: Tobias, Judith, Baruch, Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), Wisdom of Solomon, First and Second Maccabees, and the additions to Esther and Daniel found in the Septuagint.  These books were affirmed as canonical by regional councils at Hipppo in 393 and Carthage in 397, pending eventual ratification by Rome.  Around this same time Jerome included them in the Vulgate, his Latin translation of the Bible.

However, Catholic theologians describe these books as deuterocanonical, meaning that they belong to a second group of books “whose Scriptural character was contested in some quarters,” as opposed to the protocanonical books, the collection of “sacred writings which have been always received by Christendom without dispute.”  To the extent that a Catholic considered the consensus of Christendom significant, this distinction would have some bearing on the authority attached to these books.

Nevertheless, in 1546 the Council of Trent, largely in response to the way Martin Luther had separated out the apocryphal books and placed them between the testaments in his German translation of Bible, decreed that these books were as fully canonical as the others—finally validating the decision of the Council of Carthage over a thousand years later.  The Council of Trent also decreed that the Vulgate was the authoritative text of Scripture.

This actually sent something of a mixed message about the Apocrypha, however, because Jerome’s prologues were always included in the Vulgate, and in his prologue to the book of Kings, in which he surveyed the entire Old Testament, Jerome specified that the books that had been translated from Greek, rather than from Hebrew, are “set aside among the apocrypha” (inter apocrifa seponendum) and “are not in the canon” (non sunt in canone).  He made similar comments in the prologues to several of the apocryphal books themselves.

So while the Roman Catholic Church’s embrace of these books is explicit, its position on them is not without internal tensions.

Eastern Orthodox Bibles include all the books in the Catholic Apocrypha, plus 2 Esdras, 3 Esdras, 3 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh, and Psalm 151.  Greek Orthodox Bibles also contain 4 Maccabees, in an appendix. However, all these apocryphal books are classified as Anagignoskomena (“worthy to be read”), meaning that they are read during services of worship, but that they are not as authoritative as the other books. Orthodox theologians sometimes call the apocryphal books deuterocanonical to indicate their secondary authority, using this term differently from Catholics, for whom it describes how these books were received after first being disputed.

The Coptic (Ethiopian) Church traditionally considered all of the books in the Catholic Apocrypha canonical, along with 3 Maccabees, the Letter of Jeremiah, and  Psalm 151.  However, according to the Coptic Encyclopedia, “At the beginning of the twentieth century and by order of Cyril V (1874-1927)” all the apocryphal books were “removed from the canon,” although they are still “normally included in the Coptic versions of the Bible.”

Anglican or Episcopal Bibles typically include the Apocrypha, and the Book of Common Prayer prescribes readings from it.  However, the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England specify that the canonical books are those “of whose authority was never any doubt in the Church” (that is, only the protocanonical ones, and not the deuterocanonical ones, in the Catholic sense of those terms).  As for the apocryphal books, these “the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine.”

Lutheran Bibles also typically include the Apocrypha, but not mixed in among the Old Testament books; rather, as noted above, they are in a separate section between the testaments.  Martin Luther wrote in his preface to this section that they were “books which are not held equal to the Holy Scriptures, and yet are profitable and good to read.” (Das sind Bücher so nicht der heiligen Schrift gleichgehalten: und doch nützlich und gut zu lesen sind.)

Other Protestant Bibles contain the same Old Testament books as the Hebrew Bible.

So once again, the only differences between Christian communities when it comes to the biblical canon have to do with books that were added by the Catholic church to the Old Testament in the Fourth Century.  The trend in the following centuries has been away from accepting these books.  This hardly provides a precedent for adding books to the New Testament today.

Two notes about the New Testament itself:

The publishers of A New New Testament probably refer to the Syriac Church for the following reason.  Tatian, a second-century Christian writer and theologian, created a harmony of the four gospels called the Diatessaron.  Because Tatian’s influence was felt strongly in Syria, the oldest Syriac Bibles include the Diatessaron in place of the four gospels themselves.  But by the middle of the Fifth Century, the separate gospels had been reintroduced in Syriac Bibles, displacing the Diatessaron.  There is therefore, as noted above, no difference among contemporary Christians about the New Testament canon.  And the very fact that Tatian created a harmony of the four canonical gospels shows that the church accepted these, and no others, as inspired Scripture.  This example, therefore, hardly makes a case for adding any new gospels.

The editors of A New New Testament also claim that Martin Luther himself tried to remove some books from the New Testament, and successfully did so from what he called the Old Testament.  We’ve just seen  that Luther actually removed the Apocrypha, which had always been disputed by the Eastern church, from the Old Testament, and put it in a section between the testaments.

As for the New Testament, in the earliest editions of his German Bible,  Luther moved Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation, which he said were inferior books, to the back. But he soon reconsidered this opinion, restored these books to their original places, and wrote more appreciative prefaces to them.  In addition, as this site explains, “In all the editions of Luther’s Bible translation after 1522, the Reformer dropped the paragraphs at the end of his general Preface to the New Testament which made value judgments among the various biblical books.”

So it’s not really fair to Luther to say that he tried to remove some books from the New Testament when he only entertained this idea briefly, then reconsidered, and even retracted his earlier negative comments about books such as James.