In my limited training, I have gleaned the following information that I trust is factual or held as a fact by those who taught me it:
At some point before the birth of Christ the Old Testament was considered complete or closed by the Jewish pharisaic or rabbinic groups. With a few very small exceptions, the vast majority of these books are of the Hebrew tongue. This Old Testament was not the Septuagint because that body of translation includes the apocrypha. The apocrypha are spurious writings that I understand are not of Hebraic tongue or Jewish authorship. Additionally, the apocryphal books were rejected by the Protestant Reformers because they are not considered divinely inspired. The pseudepigraphica are almost not worth mention because even the catholic church rejected these as inspired works.
As I have been instructed and studied, the New Testament was written and circulated as gospels and epistles (letters) among the saints during mostly the first century, culminating with the Revelation (or Apocalypse) of Jesus Christ to John completed sometime near the end of the first century. The exact time of writing is debated and I choose not to dwell upon it.
Now, can we say that we (the church, believers, saints) had the closed canon of God-breathed scripture at the moment John put down the quill on the Isle of Patmos? Or must we wait until the 325 AD council of Nicaea, requested by Constantine? At this council, allegedly 300 plus bishops gathered to determine which books were inspired and should be included as canon and to reject those writings not found to stand up to the test of canonicity. Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe the test included the requirement of apostolic authority. Authorship needed to be apostolic or of one who had directly witnessed Jesus’ ministry and been chosen by Jesus. Perhaps someone can enlighten me as to how Luke fulfilled this requirement. He was a direct witness and definitely a follower, a disciple of Jesus, perhaps that is enough. Paul qualifies because he was an “apostle born out of due time” and he witnessed Jesus on the road to Damascus as well as some “boot camp training” in the desert of Arabia that we cannot speak about in great detail.
Does anyone know if the original NT autographs were already non-extant by the time of the council meeting of 325? My guess is that they were already lost by this time, although, the church possessed faithful copies of the inerrant originals.
Now, enlighten me if I err. Is not the closed canon of scripture the collection of 66 books that we call the Bible. This collection does not include the apocrypha, much less the pseudepigraphica. When did this specific collection receive the distinction of closed canon?
Or should my point of view be that the Lord new far in advance what works would be considered His once-delivered message to the saints and He provided divine guidance to the body of men who had been ordained to answer the question of which writings transferred this predeterminate council of God to the hearts of men?
I would highly recommend that you get a hold of James White's new book "Sola Scriptura." He is easy to read and he covers a lot of the information you are asking about with thoroughness.
Fred
"Ah, sitting - the great leveler of men. From the mightest of pharaohs to the lowest of peasants, who doesn't enjoy a good sit?" M. Burns
Actually, the title is Scripture Alone, but with either title it would still be a wonderful book <img src="/forum/images/graemlins/giggle.gif" alt="" />
True godliness is a sincere feeling which loves God as Father as much as it fears and reverences Him as Lord, embraces His righteousness, and dreads offending Him worse than death~ Calvin
What was I thinking? Yes, "scripture alone." I read it so fast when I got it, that I must have missed the title. Thinking about other good reads on this subject there are a couple of excellent works from the boys over at Bob Jones University. The books are basically a collection of articles written by a group of Baptist pastors detailing the history of composition and canonicity and preservation of our Bible. The one key theme in the two works is to provide a documented rebuttal to KJV onlyism that infects many independent fundy churches in America.
The first one is called From the Mind of God to the Mind of Man and the second one is called God's Word in our Hands. The first one highlights inspiration, inerrancy and canonicity the second one the preservation of textual witnesses and translational issues. There is an excellent audio series given by pastor Mark Minnick that follows the first book to some degree. Both books are available from their website or from Amazon:
I have a copy of E. J. Young's Thy Word is Truth, but I haven't read it yet. I hear it is very good!
True godliness is a sincere feeling which loves God as Father as much as it fears and reverences Him as Lord, embraces His righteousness, and dreads offending Him worse than death~ Calvin
Or must we wait until the 325 AD council of Nicaea, requested by Constantine? At this council, allegedly 300 plus bishops gathered to determine which books were inspired and should be included as canon and to reject those writings not found to stand up to the test of canonicity.
This caught my eye because my father-in-law (who doesn't believe in the Bible as the Word of God) about 3 years ago said this same thing to me about the Council of Nicea. And I questioned this myself thinking that it just didn't sound right that the NT canon was put together just at one council. It just didn't sound right. Well this started me on my own reading of exactly some of the questions you have. I read these books: "The Canon of Scripture" by F.F. Bruce and "The Canon of the New Testament" by Bruce M. Metzger. (You can order them through Amazon) I recommend these to you because they will tell you exactly how the NT (and OT in Bruce's book) canon came together. And they both specifically discuss the issue of the canon being closed and when it was closed. It was very eye opening to me and alas my feelings were right that the canon did not just come together at the council. In fact the first council to lay down any limits to canon was the coundil of Hippo in 393. And in reading these books and other research I have yet to find that the NT canon was chosen at the Council of Nicea in 325. Where is this coming from??
Could you tell me where you got that information from - that the canon was chosen at the Council of Nicea??? I am really curious. Do you have a quote from somewhere?? What book or source did this come from??
One of the highly recommended books in regard to the doctrine of Scripture, is B.B. Warfield's The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible (P&R Publishing). As to the specific question concerning the formation of the Canon, from that book, you can read what Warfield wrote here: The Formation of the Canon of the New Testament.
Pilgrim suggested I read the following source which I quote from:
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from B.B. Warfield's "The Formation of the Canon of the New Testament": The Canon of the New Testament was completed when the last authoritative book was given to any church by the apostles, and that was when John wrote the Apocalypse, about A.D. 98.
So Warfield agrees with my first question that I proposed that scriptural Canon as we now have it was complete upon John's writing of the book of the Apocalypse (the Revelation of Jesus Christ to John). This occured around A.D. 98 according to Warfield.
Now as to the council of Nicaea of 325. It has catholic documentation or perhaps more correctly, is a meeting that was called by the Roman emporer, Constantine. You can read a reference to the 325 meeting at this site and please excuse that fact that it has overtones of Roman catholicism, I surely do not endorse any Roman catholic dogma:
If you click on the link to the Arian heresy, you will discover that this guy, Arian apparently taught against the divinity of Jesus Christ. It was reportedly in reaction to this heresy (apparently a form of gnosticism) that Constantine, the Roman emporer requested the meeting of a council in 325 AD in Nicaea of Bythinia to counter this devisive doctrine. It might have been a secondary purpose for the bishops who gathered to decide and establish an "official" (according to Roman catholicism) accepted canon for the New Testament books.
It looks like we don't need to put a lot of stock in this meeting as it was an "after the fact" event. According to Warfield, whose work I quoted from above, the New Testaments books were added gradually to Scripture and they became part of the accepted "canon" the moment they were received by the churches (hearers).
Their reception was mixed with faith in the hearers. So there was really no need to convene a council or require that a panel of mortal men with humanly assigned authority decide what constituted "canon". This would be an insult to the Spirit of grace who had dictated these words by inspiration to the apostles and their friends.
Warfield also mentions as I did, that Luke did not have this so called 'apostolic authority' because he was not an apostle. However, his gospel is accepted by believers just as the other three gospels are accepted as divinely inspired works.
So, let's see what others say to my recent "instruction" as I learn precept upon precept.
The Lord bless!
Last edited by believingThomas; Mon Nov 01, 20042:38 PM.
Could you tell me where you got that information from - that the canon was chosen at the Council of Nicea??? I am really curious. Do you have a quote from somewhere?? What book or source did this come from??
My suspicions of this being myth were confirmed when I stumbled on this article today by James White. He was having the below conversation with some Mormons. The Mormons conversation is exactly what my father-in-law told me a couple of years ago. This is just plain wrong information about this Council of Nicea and I've heard it and read it just too many times like it is "fact". Apparently James White has heard it too many times too.
Quote from James White's article:
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The conversation intensified quickly. "You can't really trust the Bible," my Latter-day Saints acquaintance said, "because you really don't know what books belong in it. You see, a bunch of men got together and decided the canon of Scripture at the Council of Nicea, picking some books, rejecting others." A few others were listening in on the conversation at the South Gate of the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City. It was the LDS General Conference, and I again heard the Council of Nicea presented as that point in history where something "went wrong," where some group of unnamed, faceless men "decided" for me what I was supposed to believe. I quickly corrected him about Nicea -- nothing was decided, or even said, about the canon of Scripture at that council.1
One of the highly recommended books in regard to the doctrine of Scripture, is B.B. Warfield's The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible (P&R Publishing). As to the specific question concerning the formation of the Canon, from that book, you can read what Warfield wrote here: The Formation of the Canon of the New Testament.
Warfield writes,
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But from the time of Irenæus down, the church at large had the whole Canon as we now possess it. And though a section of the church may not yet have been satisfied of the apostolicity of a certain book or of certain books; and though afterwards doubts may have arisen in sections of the church as to the apostolicity of certain books (as e. g. of Revelation): yet in no case was it more than a respectable minority of the church which was slow in receiving, or which came afterward to doubt, the credentials of any of the books that then as now constituted the Canon of the New Testament accepted by the church at large.
The canon of the New Testament was never universally accepted by the Early Church. Doubts were expressed regarding Hebrews, 2 Peter, 2,3 John, James, Jude, and Revelations. These books could be read in the churches but could not be used independently to formulate doctrine. Francis Pieper writes in Christian Dogmatics, Vol. 1,
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For the Scriptures of the New Testament we have the historical witness of the Early Church (ecclesia primitiva). Its witness is unanimous as to the Four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the thirteen Epistles of Paul, the First Epistle of John, and the First Epistle of Peter (homologoumena). But as to the canonicity of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Second Epistle of Peter, the Second and Third Epistles of John, the Epistle of James, the Epistle of Jude, and the Apocalypse, doubts, more or less strongly expressed, were entertained (antilegomena). Eusebius in his Church History lists the homologoumena and the antilegomena.The historical fact that the Early Church differentiated between the homologoumena and the antilegomena cannot be changed by a resolution of the later Church. Luther, too, abides by this judgment of the primitive Church; he says, appealing to Eusebius (Church History III, 25), that in ancient times the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Epistles of James and Jude, and the Apocalypse “had a different reputation.” He finds much excellent instruction in the antilegomena, grants that the offensive passages may be explained acceptably by “glosses,” and will keep no one from appraising them as he sees fit. But he will not class them with the “right certain chief books of the New Testament.” As for himself, he will let the doubt entertained by the Early Church remain. Chemnitz denounced the action of the Roman Catholic Church in declaring the Apocrypha of the Old Testament and the antilegomena of the New Testament a part of the canon of Scripture by a mere decree and in anathematizing all those who refused to accept the canon fixed in the Vulgate, as anti-Christian.
I'm not sure about other protestant denominations but Lutherans continued to have reservations regarding the antilegomena books well into the 17th century. Pieper quotes C. F. Walther, one of founders of the Missouri Synod,
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For our dear fathers in the faith, with hardly an exception till after the time of the Formula of Concord, regarded and declared all or at least some of the antilegomena as not belonging to the canon; and they did that not from hastiness or levity toward the Word of God, but, on the contrary, because they were very conscientious with regard to the Word of God. Luther’s opinions on the antilegomena are not a “blot” on our Church, but they rather bear witness how careful our Church once was in determining the standard and norm of our faith and life. The summary decrees of the Papists and the Reformed that all the antilegomena must be received as canonical by all Christians on pain of losing their salvation are so little a testimony for the high regard of these denominations for the Word of God that they rather demonstrate how easy it is for those to add something to the canon who hold that the Scriptures are to be interpreted either, in a blind collier’s faith, according to the whim of the Church (that is, of the Pope) or according to the principles of reason. It will therefore not be improper to submit here the testimony of our fathers, particularly of the 16th and the first half of the 17th century; not that we personally hold these opinions, but in order to show that doubts as to the canonicity of the disputed books were held also by men whose orthodoxy no Lutheran would dare to deny, and thus to clear a man like Luther of the suspicion that he had brazenly, in his subjective pleasure, passed judgment on books which had been received into the New Testament Canon.
Unfortunately, this is one of those areas where Luther must receive a "black mark"; a failing grade. His approach to canonicity was far from acceptable as it was based upon his own personal "feelings"; feelings which expressed a great animosity toward the Roman Catholic Church and unfortunately influenced him negatively in this matter. Here is a short excerpt from the renown apologist, John Warwick Montgomery:
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Here, if anywhere, those arguing against Luther's biblical orthodoxy have a point. Though it is unfair to call him a subjectivist on the canonical question, there is no doubt that he developed a personal criterion of canonicity that took its place alongside of apostolicity and perhaps even swallowed it up. He unabashedly states this new criterion in his Preface to James: "All the genuine sacred books agree in this, that all of them preach and inculcate Christ. And that is the true test by which to judge all books, when we see whether or not they inculcate Christ.56 For all the Scriptures show us Christ (Rom. 3:21), and St. Paul will know nothing but Christ (I Cor. 2:2). Whatever does not teach Christ is not apostolic, even though St. Peter or St. Paul does the teaching. Again, whatever preaches Christ would be apostolic, even if Judas, Annas, Pilate, and Herod were doing it."
The dangers in such an approach to canonicity are legion, and they were fully recognized by Luther's own contemporaries - not only by his theological opponents but also by his colleagues and supporters. Thus, as early as 1520, Luther's Wittenberg University co-reformer Bodenstein von Carlstadt - hardly a traditionalist (his radically negative attitude to ecclesiastical adiaphora eventually caused his rupture with Luther) condemned Luther's rejection of James and argued that one must appeal either to known apostolic authorship or to universal historical acceptance (omnium consensus) as the test of a book's canonicity, not to internal doctrinal considerations.57 " In spite of certain deficiencies in Carlstadt's treatment, a 19th century student of the subject was certainly right in noting that unlike Luther on the Canon, "Dr. Bodenstein's reforming approach was based on history and not on feelings, on critical evaluation and not on piety." 58 As is well known, the church that carries Luther's name has never adopted his canonical judgments.
Though it is understandable that, passionate reforming spirit that he was, Luther would reintroduce the doctrine of salvation by grace through faith everywhere, it is unfortunate that he misused it as a canonical criterion. One must first establish the Canon and then set forth all that the canonical books teach: canonicity before doctrine. If one reverses the procedure, personal doctrinal emphasis, however commendatory, may turn into weapons by which genuine Scripture is rejected or down-played unnecessarily. Had Luther begun with a purely historical view of the Canon, he would have been forced to discover the entire compatibility between James and Paul; his misleading criterion of canonicity opened the floodgates to subjectivity - in spite of his best intentions - and short-circuited the kind of exegesis of James that would have revealed its harmony with Pauline teaching and its vital complementary place in the corpus of New Testament doctrine.
Do not be too hasty to cast off Montgomery's comments above, for in the article from which this section is taken, he makes a great defense of biblical inerrancy and brings Luther into the discussion to make his point, lauding Luther for his unwavering stand upon Holy Writ.
Do not be too hasty to cast off Montgomery's comments above, for in the article from which this section is taken, he makes a great defense of biblical inerrancy and brings Luther into the discussion to make his point, lauding Luther for his unwavering stand upon Holy Writ.
No, I thought it was an excellent article and quite balanced. Montgomery pointed out that Luther's view of the canonisity of the antilegomena books had a basis in the writings of the church fathers not just his own subjective opinion.
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Again and again in his Prefaces we find Luther arguing in this vein: "Up to this point we have had to do with the true and certain chief books of the New Testament. The four which follow have from ancient times had a different reputation." "This Epistle of St. James was rejected by the ancients." "Many of the fathers also rejected this book [Revelation: Luther's Preface of 1522] a long time ago." Here Luther appeals not to subjective considerations but objectively to the judgments of the early church, specifically to what Jerome says in his De viris illustribus, chap. 2. and to what Eusebius reports in his Ecclesiastical History, Bk. II, chap. 23 and Bk. III, chap. 25. The negative evaluations of antilegomena by certain church fathers were certainly unjustified, as history proved. but Luther had every right to raise the question in terms of the fathers, Unless one is going to make the fatal error of accepting the content of Scripture because the institutional church has declared it such (which necessarily subordinates Scripture to Church and brings the Protestant back to his Romanist vomit), there is no choice but to refer canonicity questions to the earliest judgments available historically concerning the apostolic authority of New Testament books. Christ promised to the apostolic company a unique and entirely reliable knowledge of His teachings through the special guidance of His Holy Spirit (John 14;26), so the issue of the apostolicity of New Testament writings has always been vital for the church. As a theologian, Luther had the right, even the responsibility, to raise this issue, and did not become a subjectivist by doing so.
Last edited by speratus; Thu Dec 02, 200412:21 AM.
And like those few (the majority of the Church did not accept the view that some were antilegomena books) who questioned the accepted 27 canonical NT books, Luther was horribly wrong, as history and sound scholarship have shown. Two important and immutable truths should not be overlooked:
Those who questioned the antilegomena books were not horribly wrong based on the information commonly available before the 17th century. We should thank God for their ignorance. God used the reluctance of the early and reformation fathers to formulate doctrine solely on the basis of the antilegomena to preserve the catholic church from the misapplications of James and Revelations that currently plague the papist, EO, and most protestant churches.
Thanks for your information (according to James White’s assertion) that the Council of Nicea had nothing to do with canonicity. I do not have immediate access to books on theology and church history nor do I have a quick and ready repository of reliable information on the internet to draw from. I certainly understand that we cannot believe every thing we find on the “net”. There is plenty of propaganda and misinformation, even lies on the net that I trust fellow believers and of course, God’s word can steer us clear of.
I remember reading some of James White’s notes during a study that I did years back on the history of the Textus Receptus. I recall there was a huge, fiery debate over the issue of the body of Greek manuscripts that came to be called the Textus Recptus versus the Alexandrian (Alexandrinus A, Vaticanus B) and Sinaiticus (Aleph) texts.
For example, Sinaiticus was a Greek manuscript of the New Testament written in uncial letter form that was discovered by Konstantine Tischendorf in a monestary at the foot of Mt. Sinai I think around 1844. The document’s origin was reported to have dated to somewhere in the 4th century AD.
The miniscule manuscripts (majority text, textus receptus, Bezai ms., Byzantine, etc.) had a later date, memory tells me around 11th or 12th century circa.
Bruce Metzger worked on a panel of translators for some modern day translations, including the basis for the NIV. All this I am trying to reconstruct from memory so, feel free to check my information. These translators would often add footnotes to NT scripture text to the effect: “The most reliable and early mss. do not have this verse….”. They were referring to the manuscripts that include Tischendorf’s Sinaiticus as being the more reliable because they had an earlier copying.
Very little of this upsets me now because I have the assurance that God faithfully transmitted the originals (autographs) to the apostles by divine, inerrant inspiration. The above two “camps” of scripture agree amazingly so I view the uncial manuscripts as basically a “check” on the textus receptus that the KJV translators had back around 1611. They did not have the benefit (or curse as some have said) of the discovery made by Tischendorf.
The textus receptus was actually a name coined by the Elziver brothers (I think they were Dutch) when they published their Greek New Testament. The group of manuscripts including the Bezai associated with textus receptus stayed pretty much established from the time of Desiderius Erasmus who had published the first Greek NT in printed form for public consumption
I will summarize to say that the above hot debate was a real “buzz saw”. To a great extent, the debate was fueled by enthusiasts of a movement labled “KJV-onlyism”. Adherents of this view may actually have become an exclusive sect. They hold that the modern day translations such as NIV are not reliable because their basis is the older uncial manuscripts. They claim that in spite of these mss. being older, they are questionable due to their alleged Alexandrian origin. Alexandria historically has been associated with some heretical beliefs including Gnosticism and the so-called Arian heresy that denied Christ’s divinity. Alexandria was also a location of a library containing many secular works and may have been a center for translation of the uncial manuscripts above. The Vaticanus B and Sinaiticus aleph are claimed by some to be surviving works of a set of NT translations that were allegedly commissioned by the Roman emporer, Constantine. All these Roman empire associations are distasteful to adherents of the textus receptus and its associated KJV translation.
Sometime after Tischendorf’s discovery, two scholars known as Wescott and Hort asserted to the early dates of these manuscripts and attested to their superiority according to their opinion. I believe that Bruce Metzger and others rely heavily upon the work of these men. But their names are “fightin” words to the KJV-only adherents who consider them infamous. They consider the Byzantine line of translation (i.e. textus receptus, etc.) the “pure” one and not subject to alteration or bias for which they fault the Alexandrian line. These issues are all pointless because we do not have any extant autographs of the originally inspired writings. I do not need them (the autographs) for my faith any more than I need the discovery of the Ark on Mt Ararat to assure me that Noah was an early “sailor” ancestor of mine and a recipient of God’s grace.
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