How Tradition Gave Us the Bible

Assoc of Students at Catholic Colleges ^ | Mark Shea

[NYer]

It's still a jolt for some people to realize this, but the Bible did not fall down out of the sky, leather-bound and gold-monogrammed with the words of Christ in red, in 95 AD.  Rather the canon of Christian Scripture slowly developed over a period of about 1500 years.  That does not mean, of course, that Scripture was being written for 1500 years after the life of Christ.  Rather, it means that it took the Church some fifteen centuries to formally and definitively state which books out of the great mass of early Christian and pseudo-Christian books constituted the Bible.

The process of defining the canon of Scripture is an example of what the Church calls "development of doctrine".  This is a different thing than "innovation of doctrine".  Doctrine develops as a baby develops into a man, not as a baby grows extra noses, eyes, and hands.  An innovation of doctrine would be if the Church declared something flatly contrary to all previous teaching ("Pope John Paul Ringo I Declares the Doctrine of the Trinity to No Longer Be the Teaching of the Church:  Bishop Celebrate by Playing Tiddly Winks with So-Called 'Blessed Sacrament'").  It is against such flat reversals of Christian teaching that the promise of the Spirit to guard the apostolic Tradition stands.  And, in fact, there has never ever been a time when the Church has reversed its dogmatic teaching.  (Prudential and disciplinary changes are another matter.  The Church is not eternally wedded to, for instance, unmarried priests, as the wife of St. Peter can tell you.)

But though innovations in doctrine are not possible, developments of doctrine occur all the time and these tend to apply old teaching to new situations or to more completely articulate ancient teaching that has not been fully fleshed out.  So, for example, in our own day the Church teaches against the evils of embryonic stem cell research even though the New Testament has nothing to say on the matter.  Yet nobody in his five wits claims that the present Church "invented" opposition to embryonic stem cell research from thin air.  We all understand that the Church, by the very nature of its Tradition, has said "You shall not kill" for 2,000 years.  It merely took the folly of modern embryonic stem cell research to cause the Church to apply its Tradition to this concrete situation and declare what it has always believed.

Very well then, as with attacks on sacred human life in the 21st century, so with attacks on Sacred Tradition in the previous twenty.  Jesus establishes the Tradition that he has not come to abolish the Law and the Prophets but to fulfill them (Mt 5:17).   But when Tradition bumps into the theories of early Jewish Christians that all Gentiles must be circumcised in order to become Christians, the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15) is still necessary to authoritatively flesh that Tradition out.  Moreover, the Council settles the question by calling the Bible, not to the judge's bench, but to the witness stand.  Scripture bears witness to the call of the Gentiles, but the final judgment depends on the authority of Christ speaking through his apostles and elders whose inspired declaration is not "The Bible says..." but "It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us..." (Acts 15:28).

In all this, the Church, as ever, inseparably unites Scripture as the light and Sacred Tradition as the lens through which it is focused.  In this way the mustard seed of the Kingdom continues to grow in that light, getting more mustardy, not less.

How then did Tradition develop with respect to the canon of Scripture?

In some cases, the Church in both east and west has a clear memory of just who wrote a given book and could remind the faithful of this.  So, for instance, when a second century heretic named Marcion proposed to delete the Old Testament as the product of an evil god and canonize the letters of Paul (but with all those nasty Old Testament quotes snipped out), and a similarly edited gospel of Luke (sanitized of contact with Judaism for your protection), the Church responded with local bishops (in areas affected by Marcion's heresy) proposing the first canons of Scripture. 

Note that the Church seldom defines its teaching (and is in fact disinclined to define it) till some challenge to the Faith (in this case, Marcion) forces it to do so.  When Marcion tries to take away from the Tradition of Scripture by deleting Matthew, Mark and John and other undesirable books, the Church applies the basic measuring rod of Tradition and says, "This does not agree with the Tradition that was handed down to us, which remembers that Matthew wrote Matthew, Mark wrote Mark and John wrote John.

Matthew also issued among the Hebrews a written Gospel in their own language, while Peter and Paul were evangelizing in Rome and laying the foundation of the Church.  After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, also handed down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter.  Luke also, the companion of Paul, set down in a book the Gospel preached by him.  Afterwards, John, the disciple of the Lord who reclined at his bosom also published a Gospel, while he was residing at Ephesus in Asia. (Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, 3, 1, 1)

In other words, there is, we might say, a Standard of Roots (based on Sacred Tradition) by which the Church weighs her canon.  So when various other heretics, instead of trying to subtract from the generally received collection of holy books, instead try to add the Gospel of Thomas or any one of a zillion other ersatz works to the Church's written Tradition, the Church can point to the fact that, whatever the name on the label says, the contents do not square with the Tradition of the Church, so it must be a fake.  In other words, there is also a Standard of Fruits.  It is this dual standard of Roots and Fruits by which the Church discerns the canon -- a dual standard which is wholly based on Sacred Tradition.  The Church said, in essence, "Does the book have a widespread and ancient tradition concerning its apostolic origin and/or approval?  Check.  Does the book square with the Tradition we all learned from the apostles and the bishops they gave us?  Check.  Then it is to be used in public worship and is to be regarded as the word of God."

It was on this basis the early Church also vetoed some books and accepted others -- including the still-contested-by-some-Protestants deuterocanonical books of Tobit, Wisdom, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Sirach and Baruch as well as some pieces of Daniel and Esther.  For the churches founded by the apostles could trace the use of the Septuagint version of the Old Testament in public worship (a Greek translation of the Old Testament which includes all these books) back to the apostles. In fact, many of the citations of Old Testament Scripture by the New Testament writers are, in fact, citations of the Septuagint (see, for example, Mark 7:6-7, Hebrews 10:5-7).  Therefore, the Body of Christ living after the apostles simply retained the apostles' practice of using the Septuagint on the thoroughly traditional grounds, "If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for us."  In contrast, the churches had no apostolic tradition handed down concerning the use of, say, the works of the Cretan poet Epimenides (whom Paul quotes in Acts 17), therefore they did not regard his works as Scripture, even though Paul quotes him.  It was by their roots and fruits that the Church's books were judged, and it was by the standard of Sacred Tradition that these roots and fruits were known.

These Root and Fruit standards are even more clearly at work in the canonization of the New Testament, especially in the case of Hebrews. There was, in fact, a certain amount of controversy in the early Church over the canonicity of this book (as well as of books like 2 Peter, Jude, and Revelation).  Some Fathers, especially in the west, rejected Hebrews (in no small part because of its lack of a signature).  Yet the Church eventually accepted it.  How?  It was judged apostolic because, in the end, the Church discerned that it met the Roots and Fruits measure when stacked up against Sacred Tradition.

The Body of Christ had long believed that Hebrews said the same thing as the Church's Sacred Tradition handed down by the bishops.  Thus, even Fathers (like Irenaeus) who rejected it from their canon of inspired Scripture still regarded it as a good book.  That is, it had always met the Fruits standard.  How then did it meet the Roots standard?  In a nutshell, despite the lack of attestation in the text of Hebrews itself, there was an ancient tradition in the Church (beginning in the East, where the book was apparently first sent) that the book originated from the pen of St. Paul. That tradition, which was at first better attested in the east than in the west (instantaneous mass communication being still some years in the future) accounts for the slowness of western Fathers (such as Irenaeus) to accept the book.  But the deep-rootedness of the tradition of Pauline authorship in the East eventually persuaded the whole Church.  In short, as with the question of circumcision in the book of Acts, the status of Hebrews was not immediately clear even to the honest and faithful (such as Irenaeus).  However, the Church in council, trusting in the guidance of Holy Spirit, eventually came to consensus and canonized the book on exactly the same basis that the Council of Jerusalem promulgated its authoritative decree:  "It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us..."

Conversely, those books which the Church did not canonize as part of the New Testament were rejected because, in the end, they did not meet both the Root and Fruit standards of the Church's Sacred Tradition.  Books like the Didache or the Shepherd of Hermas, while meeting the Fruit standard, were not judged to meet the Root standard since their authors were not held to be close enough to the apostolic circle -- a circle which was, in the end, drawn very narrowly by the Spirit-led Church and which therefore excluded even Clement since he, being "in the third place from the Apostles" was not as close to the apostles as Mark and Luke (who were regarded as recording the gospels of Peter and Paul, respectively). The Church, arch-conservative as ever, relied on Sacred Tradition, not to keep adding to the New Testament revelation but to keep it as lean and close to the apostles as possible.  This, of course, is why books which met neither the Root nor Fruit standards of Sacred Tradition, such as the Gospel of Thomas, were rejected by the Church without hesitation as completely spurious.

Not that this took place overnight.  The canon of Scripture did not assume its present shape till the end of the fourth century.  It was defined at the regional Councils of Carthage and Hippo and also by Pope Damasus and included the deuterocanonical books.  It is worth noting, however, that, because these decisions were regional, none of them were dogmatically binding on the whole Church, though they clearly reflected the Sacred Tradition of the Church (which is why the Vulgate or Latin Bible--which was The Bible for the Catholic Church in the West for the next 1200 years looks the same as the Catholic Bible today).  Once again, we are looking at Sacred Tradition which is not fully developed until a) the Reformation tries to subtract deuterocanonical books from Scripture and b) the Council of Trent in the mid-1500s finally makes that Tradition fixed and binding.  This is the origin of the myth that the Catholic Church "added" the deuterocanonical books to Scripture at Trent.  It is as historically accurate as the claim that the Catholic Church "added" opposition to embryonic stem cell research to its tradition during the pontificate of Pope John Paul II.

In summary then, the early Church canonized books because they were attested by apostolic tradition.  The books we have in our Bibles (and the ones we don't) were accepted or rejected according to whether they did or did not measure up to standards which were based entirely on Sacred Tradition and the divinely delegated authority of the Body of Christ.

[TexConfederate1861]

Until 1054 AD Christianity and the Catholic Faith were the same.

[AnAmericanMother]

Yippee! It does no harm to Holy Mother Church, who knows, maybe they'll learn something . . . I always learn something new on these threads.

. . . thanks, y'all.

[whispering out loud]

"But, you are right on one point. Then we will see face to face, and know as we are known. Until then, we should diligently apply ourselves to prayer and study."

We can agree on this. My only point on this thread, has been that neither the scriptures nor Christianity itself are exclusive to catholicism. I believe there is plenty of room in heaven for catholics and protestants alike, provided that they have surrendered their heart to Christ.

[TexConfederate1861]

I was refering to the completed canon.....

[Buggman]

You're missing the point...we're not bowing down to the statue, we're engaged in prayer.

Does the prayer possibly end with this?

HAIL, HOLY QUEEN, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope! To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve; to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy toward us, and after this our exile, show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus. O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary!

Pray for us, O Holy Mother of God.
That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

Let us pray. O GOD, whose only begotten Son, by His life, death, and resurrection, has purchased for us the rewards of eternal life, grant, we beseech Thee, that meditating upon these mysteries of the Most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we may imitate what they contain and obtain what they promise, through the same Christ Our Lord. Amen.

Not that it matters. Catholics pray while bowing to statues, a practice the Bible specifically prohibits--and all the distinctions in the world will not change that.

Do the members of whatever odd sect to which you belong not kneel when in prayer?

Yes. But not in the direction of a graven image. Heck, we have a genuine Torah scroll, a Holocaust survivor, in our synagogue. We believe that the Torah symbolically represents Yeshua, the Living Torah and Word of God. (I can explain the symbolism, but it's beside the point.) We still do not pray bowing to the Torah, nor to the Menorah, nor any other created thing.

God did not spend 2000 years beating the idea that bowing to statues was okay out of Israel just to reinstitute the practice after the Coming of the Messiah.

Do you not grasp the simple concept of intercessory prayer?

I understand it just fine. Do you not grasp the simple concept that this:

You shall not make to yourselves any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in the heavens above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow yourself down to them, nor serve them.

forbids this:

God tore 5/6ths of the kingdom away from the heirs of Solomon for his sin in putting graven images in the courts of God's Temple. Why don't you think He would be equally wroth at you putting up graven images in the courts of His Church?

[AnAmericanMother]

I think that that is agreed upon by everyone.

I'm sure, as C.S. Lewis said, when we get to heaven "there will be surprises."

[Buggman]

Of course, he neglects to mention that "Catholic" meant quite a different thing in Cyprian's time than it does today.

[whispering out loud]

please realize my friend that I have very few problems with Catholic Theology, some of these being too much emphasis upon Mary, and the "saints", as well as some of the requirements for works of atonement.

[phatus maximus]

Greetings...I see it is you who stole my eggo...sorry, really lame, but it popped in my head...

I have a question on your post...What, if any, Tradition, big T, cannot be found in scripture that is essential for salvation?

Respectfully in Christ.

I forgive you for stealing my eggo by the way ;-)

[Pyro7480]

Unless you have video showing that they are bowing TO the statue, that isn't a good example of a pic supporting your view. If there were a Bible in front of them instead of the statue, and knew nothing of the group, what conclusion would you draw? Possibly a similar one.

[Pyro7480]

as well as some of the requirements for works of atonement

Huh???

[whispering out loud]

paying penance, hail maries, ......

[TexConfederate1861]

Typical Protestant Ignorance.

They are not worshipping the stone figure. The are venerating the person it represents, in this case, The Mother of God.

By the way, God had the Hebrews put figures of winged Cherubim on the Ark of the Covenant.

[AnAmericanMother]

You can, I hope, grasp the difference between bowing down TO a "graven image", and WORSHIPPING it -- and kneeling in intercessory prayer?

There are many occasions on which people kneel or bow to honor others (including at Cotillion for heaven's sake.)

Worship is clearly reserved by Catholic teaching for God alone. The Virgin Mary, as the Queen Mother, is in a special position both in Hebrew tradition and in the Church. To her is given particular honor, or dulia. To other saints, we give honor merely.

If you'll read that lovely "Hail, Holy Queen" again, carefully, and not through the eyes of Catholic hatred, you'll see that we don't PRAY until we address God in the concluding section. Before that, we address the Blessed Virgin as a dear friend and adoptive mother who will pray FOR us (did you never call your spouse "my sweet life" or "my precious love"?) "The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much" -- James 5:16 -- how much more so the prayers of the Lady who was "full of grace" and carried God in her body for nine months, and had the signal honor of rearing and teaching him until his public ministry began.

[whispering out loud]

The scriptures say to repent of our sins, also to confess our sins. Nowhere do they say to pay for our sins, nor work to atone for them.

[TexConfederate1861]

On the contrary, I specified that there is a difference.
Check out the Orthodox Church....it is the closest to what existed then.

[TexConfederate1861]

On the contrary, I specified that there is a difference.
Check out the Orthodox Church....it is the closest to what existed then.

[Pyro7480]

If human justice requires that an offense done to another be repaired, how much more so does God's justice require that we repair the offense against God. That's the purpose of doing penances, whether voluntary, or given to a penitent after Confession.

[whispering out loud]

the scriptures didn't say don't worship graven images, it said do not make to yourself graven images. The cherub on the ark were a direct command from God, as a symbol on the ark. The statues of Mary are Idols set alone, "not commanded, nor part of a relic"

[Pyro7480]

The scriptures say to repent of our sins, also to confess our sins. Nowhere do they say to pay for our sins, nor work to atone for them.

You have heard of the account of what the people of Ninevah did after Jonah preached to them.