2.11 The Canon of Scripture

Since Jews and Christians derive their beliefs from the canon of scripture what is considered canonical has a large bearing on what is believed to be true, especially in the (sometimes not so minor) details. So you might expect the canon to be widely agreed and stable through time. But this is not the case, even though the protestant church today has an agreed set of scripture it took a long time coming.

Today the smallest canon is held by the Samaritan's and contains just the first five books of our Bible. While at the opposite end of the spectrum the Ethiopian Orthodox has the largest Bible canon containing 81 books, a whole 15 books more than Protestants, and they have extra chapters as well like Bel and the Dragon in Daniel as Daniel chapter 14.

We have already looked at a little of how the Jewish Bible came together when we looked at the Torah, and Daniel. So we have seen that it took a while before the Old Testament settled down so I want to look briefly at what happened after that.

The Septuagint

First off I want to think about the Septuagint. The traditional story of how it came into being says that Ptolemy II had seventy scholars independently translate the books of the Old Testament into Greek and that they all arrived at the exact same translation miraculously. Pretty amazing, and in my view highly unlikely. This was the version of the Bible that was circulating in the Roman empire at the time of early Christianity and was used by the early Christians. But it was not the same as our Old Testament today, it had extra books included such as 1 Esdras, Tobit, Judith, 1-4 Macccabees and The Wisdom of Sirach as well as additions to the Books we have today like parts of Esther, Psalm 151 and Daniel. This is the Bible that would have been familiar to early Christians.

Codex Sinaiticus

Once we get into New Testament territory things don't settle down. The earliest Christian codex that has been found is the Codex Sinaiticus, which dates to the mid fourth century. At this time the group in Egypt that produced this codex were still using the Septuagint, including the apocryphal parts, and a New Testament that included the Epistle of Barnabas and The Shepherd of Hermas. The codex also has thousands of corrections written into it making it one of the most corrected manuscripts we have.

To make the point about differences of theology by making use of different scriptures the Epistle of Barnabas is strongly anti-Jewish. As Christianity got going it became increasingly anti-Jewish, rejecting them as Jesus murderers. The Epistle of Barnabas makes the claim the Jews are not God's people and never were; God rejected them because they were worshipping idols while Moses received The Law on Mount Sinai. It says that the Jews went on to use The Law literally which was a mistake and claims it should have been read spiritually.

Codex Alexandrinus

We have another example of an early codex that has a different New Testament contents to the Codex Sinaiticus. The Codex Alexandrinus which dates from the fifth century includes 1 Clement and 2 Clement. Clement was the Bishop of Rome from 92 to 99 AD, making him an early Pope.

Other Early Documents

As well as the works considered above that were included in early codices there are numerous other books that didn't make the cut for various reasons. There are Gospels, Infancy Gospels, Jewish-Christian Gospels, and account of Jesus coming out from the tomb after the resurrection, Acts of the Apostles, Letters and Apocalypses.

Early Protestantism

Even up until Protestantism started the debate continued as to what was canonical and what wasn't. Martin Luther (1483 to 1586 AD) made an attempt to exclude Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation from the canon because he perceived them to go against his doctrines of sola gratia (grace alone) and sola fide (faith alone). 

The King James Version originally included the Apocrypha which, although not considered as authoritative as the rest of the Bible, was still used in Church till an act of Parliament in 1644 during the English Civil War made it a crime for it to be read there. Although the KJV was completed in 1611 it wasn't until 1666 that the first editions were bound without the Apocrypha.

No comments:

Post a Comment