The Canon of the Bible

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Jan 18, 1906

The Canon of the Bible

(Continued)

The Canon of St. Augustine (353-430 A. D.)

CONTEMPORANEOUS with Jerome in Bethlehem, lived Augustine in North Africa. He was the Bishop of Hippo; and is renowned as thinker, theologian, administrator, controversialist, mystic, ecclesiastic, saint; at once the father of the papacy and the forerunner of Protestantism. In the three great Councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397 and 419), of which he was the leading spirit, he closed, as it were, the great debate of the previous generations on the subject of how large shall be the Bible. In his essay on “Christian Doctrine,” he catalogues the books of Scripture, which had been transmitted by the Fathers for public reading in the church, giving their number as forty-four, with which he says the authority of the Old Testament is closed. These probably correspond exactly to the present canon of Catholics.

But it is not to be supposed that Augustine made no distinction between the proto- and deutero-canonical books. On the contrary, he limited the term “canonical” in its strict sense to the books which were inspired and received by the Jews; and denied that in the support of doctrine the books of Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus were of unquestioned authority, though long custom had entitled them to respect. And when a passage from Second Maccabees was urged by his opponents in defense of suicide, he rejected their proof by showing that the book was not received into the Hebrew canon to which Christ bore witness.

At the third Council of Carthage (397), however, a decree was ratified, most probably with his approval, which, in effect, placed all the canonical and deutero-canonical books on the same level, and in the course of time they actually became considered by some as of equal authority. A few years later, another council at Carthage (419) took the additional step of voting that their

own decision concerning the canon should be confirmed by Boniface, the Bishop of Rome; accordingly, thereafter, the question of how large the Bible should be became a matter to be settled by authority rather than by criticism. This was the beginning of the papacy.

The Canon of the Western Church From the Fourth to the Sixteenth Century A. D.

The formal closing of the canon in the West seems to have been legally accomplished when Pope Gelasius (492-96) issued a decretal or list which included the Old Testament Apocrypha, and excluded the Gospel of Peter, the Shepherd of Hermas, the so-called Apostolic Constitutions, and other books of the New Testament Apocrypha. Yet, subsequent to even this official act of the papacy, the sentiment in the Western Church seems to have been divided, some following the strict canon of Jerome, while others the larger canon of Augustine, without noting his cautions and the distinctions he made between inspired and uninspired writings. For, during all this period of nearly twelve hundred years, there are few genuine catalogues which include the Apocrypha. Popular usage, however, was indiscriminate. Outside the Jews there was no sound Hebrew tradition. There was constantly a strong inclination to let Christian usage rather than scholarly theory determine the place of the Apocrypha in the canon. Nevertheless, down to the Council of Trent (1546), the apocryphal books possessed only inferior authority; and when men spoke of canonical Scripture in the strict sense, these were not included. In the Oriental churches, of course, through the influence of the LXX, the distinction between the canonical and uncanonical was obliterated much more rapidly.

The Canon of Luther and of the Early Reformers in the Sixteenth Century

The great Saxon Reformer marks an epoch in the history of the Bible canon. Shortly before the process of the full canonization of the Apocrypha was completed by the church, Luther translated the Scriptures into German, and did not hesitate to give the deutero-canonical books an intermediate position between the Old and New Testaments. He even went so far as to question the right of Esther to be in the canon; and as for the Epistle to the Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation in the New Testament, he placed them last, in order to indicate thereby that they were of inferior character. He denied their apostolic authority. The Lutheran Church, while it does not expressly define the limits of the canon, yet places the apocryphal writings by themselves as distinct and separate from Holy Scripture. This, indeed, was the attitude of all the early reformers, German and French. In the Zurich Bible of 1529, as in the Genevan Bible of 1560, the apocryphal books were placed apart with special headings by themselves.

Thus the early reformers did not entirely reject the apocryphal writings, for it was not an easy task to do so in view of the usage and traditions of centuries. They simply compromised, assigning the apocryphal books an intermediate position, as was practically done during the first centuries of the Christian church.

The Canon of Trent (1546) and of Modern Catholics

We have seen how the church, during the Middle Ages, vacillated between the strict canon of Jerome and the larger one of Augustine. The early reformers had now sided with those who stood by Jerome. Rome, therefore, felt compelled to settle the matter in an ecclesiastical and dogmatic manner; and she did so by demanding assent to her decree on the penalty of salvation. Only thus could she hope to stay the tide against her. Accordingly, the Council of Trent, more celebrated for its boldness than for its erudition, composed of only fifty-three prelates, after a prolonged discussion decreed at their fourth sitting (April 8, 1546) that the apocryphal books were equal, in authority and canonical value, to the other books of Sacred Scripture; and to make the decree effective they added: “If, however, any one receive not, as sacred and canonical, the said books entire with all their parts, and as they have been used to be read in the Catholic Church, and as they are contained in the old Latin Vulgate edition . . . let him be anathema.”

The decree was the logical outcome of the ever-accumulating, snowball tendency in the Western Church; but, at the same time, it was a huge mistake. It is vain to attempt to justify the action on the ground that “the Fathers simply wished to affirm solemnly against the errors of the time the ancient faith of the church;” that “the deutero-canonical books were never treated by the Christian church as mere human compositions;” and that, therefore, the council innovated nothing, but simply followed the decisions of the Council of Florence (1442); for Florence declared only concerning the inspiration of the deutero-canonical books. And even after the Council of Trent adjourned, two of its leading spirits, Catherinus and Sixtus of Sienna, and other Catholics, especially Bernard Lamy (d. 1714), openly refuted the decree of the council by saying, “Nevertheless, they are not of the same authority,” and a similar view was indorsed by Jahn (d. 1816). Not long after the decree was published, Martin Chemnitz also made the very sage remark, that “the later church could never by decree make certain that of which the early church upon historical evidence had remained uncertain.”

The historical effect of the decree upon the church is obvious. It closed definitely the field of Biblical study against all free research. Naturally, therefore, the Vatican Council reiterated the decree in 1870, and found it easy to take still another step in the wrong direction, canonizing tradition in the face of modern scientific investigation. But it should never be forgotten that neither the decree of Trent nor that of the Vatican was the result of fresh and thorough-going study.—Prof. George L. Robinson, Ph. D., in The Bible Record for October, 1905.

(To be concluded)