Posted on 02/06/2006 1:02:10 PM PST by 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.
I think Constantine a great Christian saint? You've got me confused with somebody else. No evidence? I beg to differ. The whole concept gods becoming human is pretty much all the evidence I need.
The numbers are irrelevant (and more like 60-40 to 75-25%)
Very generous number.
, for God made Jew and Gentile into one Body in the Messiah.
No, the vast majority of Jews won't join you in the body of trinitariansim. But no prob, we're all God's children.
And who else should I credit Trinitarianism to?
Surely not those you've listed below. They'd never heard the word "trinity". That's a concept you adopted from proto-orthodox and orthodoxy. You also accept their canonization but then reject most other things these same people attempt to give you. Such as the perpetual virginity of Mary, papal authority, apostolic succession. Your approach is rather smorgessboardlike.
Yeshua was Jewish. So were Kefa (Peter), Yochanan (John), Ya'akov (James--both of them), Y'hudah (Jude), Sha'ul (Paul), etc. All of those who penned the Bible, with the possible exceptions of Job and Luke, were Jewish.
Just go ahead and call them by their trinitarian given names. Orthodoxy says its ok.
I think ya'll are sincere in and don't necessarily know any better with your Messianic Judaism approach but hopefully someday you'll realize how insulting it is for Jews.
Please excuse a simple-minded question, but: WHAT centuries-long attack?
If you look at authoritative teachings of the Church --- Ecumenical Council documnts, encyclicals, catechisms, statements from Synods of Bishops --- you will not find any attack on Scriptures.
Explanation or documentation, please?
I disagree. In the Unam Sanctam thread, you yourself said: "I have gone to great pains to make it clear that I claim no denomination. I am a Christian who attends church because of the command to be aligned with other believers my beliefs my be viewed by as protestant beliefs, but my faith and values are not defined by you nor other men. My faith relies solely upon Christ, his grace, and his sacrifice. I have resigned my salvation to Christ as well as the control of my life. I have resigned myself to follow his commands, as well as to search and digest his word, this is how I understand his word." That is a pretty individualistic approach to me. Your stance would work if you had a direct pipeline to God to get His judgment on your daily learning, but I imagine you don't have that. In the meantime, the very fact that NO early Christian adopted this mindset as a basic rule of life should be most instructive to you.
I commend you again for your zeal for learning. But, as someone pointed out on that same thread, your self-study has led you to become an unwitting Nestorian. Mary IS the Mother of God. When you deny her that title, there are, among other things, soteriological consequences.
Be careful of the implications of your statement. By saying that Mary is *not* the Mother of God, you deny the entirely "mainstream" Christian doctrine of the hypostatic union. Jesus did not merely indwell a human body, and therefore was both a human person and a divine person. Nor did He have His human and divine natures comingled in such a way as to constitute one nature, a la monophysitism. He was a divine Person with both a human and a divine nature. Since His natures do, in fact, exist distinctly, yet inseparably, in one hypostasis, within the divine Person, Mary, giving birth to a divine Person, IS the Mother of God.
No Catholic or Orthodox or historically literate Protestant is going to offer a different understanding of Christ than that He was a divine Person with distinct human and divine natures. He was not merely a human person. To deny this is to be either a Monophysite (He had only a divine nature) or a Nestorian (He was both a human person and a divine person).
A main problem with Nestorianism is, if Jesus was two persons, which one was offered on the cross? If merely the human person suffered and died, then how could that death be sufficiently perfect to be a sacrifice for all men? Monophysitism is different but has a similar result: if Jesus had only a divine nature, then how could the Eternal Word really "become" a man, and how then could Jesus' sacrifice really be efficacious when He merely "took over" human flesh as a mere shell to put on the cross? Either, way, the God-Man Jesus did not die on the cross for our sins as the Church has held from the beginning.
As the Council of Ephesus stated in 431: Jesus is a divine Person with two distinct yet inseparable natures: human and divine. As such, Mary is the Theotokos, the God-bearer, or the Mother of God.
All of this is the result of your refusal to even read the early Church councils, simply because they are "not Scripture." If you are already a Nestorian as a consequence, what else do you believe that is not mainline, orthodox Christian belief? You see, my friend, you have demonstrated major gaps in basic understanding of Church history, doctrine and cultural surroundings (remember your assertion that Vulgate Latin needed to be translated for the common people) just in the last day, all because your only source of Christian information seems restricted to the Bible and a few myopic, agenda-driven websites.
If you cannot or will not attempt to grasp that the Church was given to us by Christ as a sure guide, "the Pillar and Bulwark of the Truth" (1Timothy 3:15), intended as such throughout the age (Matthew 28:20), and that, throughout that time, it is authorized to clarify teaching through, among other means, ecumenical councils and its magisterial authority, then there is little more to be said. The discussion of invincible ignorance in that Unam Sanctam thread you were on will, I hope, apply to your situation. Only God can know. But I hope the prayers of your Catholic brethren here on FR will someday lead you to explore the fullness of the Faith, and render "I.I." a moot point in your case. Godspeed.
bookmark
"Ignatius was a Bishop. Endowed with the Holy Spirit, He was not inerrant, but he certainly had a closer understanding of the Savior than you or I."
Doubtless.
But he was not have had a closer understanding of the Savior than John!
And we HAVE John's own words.
"Catholics do not pray to saints."
Catholics DO pray to saints.
(Infact sometimes that pray to saints and ask tose saints to pray to other saints for them.)
"You are rather obtuse."
Thanks!
"God surely did not use some semi literate southerner to give us the Bible. He worked throught the Curch He Created to give us the Bible."
No. He used poor middle eastern fishermen. (And a tax-collecter adn a doctor).
"You "biblical" Christians are funny.I love how you beleive that God wants you to constantly misinterpret and use His Word out of context."
Hmmm. Like purgatory, the immaculate conception, praying to saints, bowing before statues... stuff like that???
2 Thessalonians 2:14
"Therefore, brethren, stand fast; and hold the traditions which you have learned, whether by word, or by our epistle."
Comment?
Not sure what little "t" is versus big "T". "Tradition" is "tradition" which is formally recognized by the Magisterium as part of the deposit of faith.
This is one of the most absurd statements I've ever read on Free Republic. Did you post that with a straight face?
". . .we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses . . ." (Hebrews 12:1 - RSV)
What Catholics call the invocation or intercession of the saints means not so much praying to saints, as it does praying with them to God. The practice existed with development - from the beginning of the Christianity, and was only questioned at the time of the Protestant Revolt in the 16th century.
Dead Christians are unquestionably more alive and holy than we are, since they are with God (Rev 21:27), and they are aware of earthly events (Heb 12:1, 1 Cor 13:9-12). In Revelation 6:9-10, "the souls of them that were slain" pray for those on earth, using what is known as an "imprecatory prayer," as in Psalms 35:1, 59:1-17, 139:19, and Jer 12:20 against the wicked and on behalf of the righteous. In Revelation 5:8-9, the "24 elders," usually interpreted as representing the Church (perhaps the 12 tribes and 12 apostles), act as intercessory intermediaries, presenting the "prayers of saints."
Your explanation is insightful, and lucid and to the point!
Excellent Post!
Not true again John 20:31
You cited: "But these are written, that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God: and that believing, you may have life in his name."
This doesn't make any case whatsoever against oral tradition. Are you implying that ONLY the written inspired word is capable of making a believer of Christ? What about the SPOKEN inspired words of Christ? Since Jesus wrote nothing down, by your logic, doesn't that throw out the entire New Testament? Of course not. Likewise, there's nothing in this verse that removes the authority of the Hoy Spirit from Apostolic Tradition.
ACTS 1:8 “…[The Apostles] shall receive the power of the Holy Ghost coming upon you, and you shall be witnesses unto me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and Samaria, and even to the uttermost part of the earth.”
Comment?
The word "Trinity" never appears in the Bible. Thus, the Trinity is false doctrine.
Your turn.
80. The reading of Sacred Scripture is for all.
81. The sacred obscurity of the Word of God is no reason for the laity to dispense themselves from reading it.
82. The Lord's Day ought to be sanctified by Christians with readings of pious works and above all of the Holy Scriptures. It is harmful for a Christian to wish to withdraw from this reading.
83. It is an illusion to persuade oneself that knowledge of the mysteries of religion should not be communicated to women by the reading of Sacred Scriptures. Not from the simplicity of women, but from the proud knowledge of men has arisen the abuse of the Scriptures and have heresies been born.
84. To snatch away from the hands of Christians the New Testament, or to hold it closed against them by taking away from them the means of understanding it, is to close for them the mouth of Christ.
85. To forbid Christians to read Sacred Scripture, especially the Gospels, is to forbid the use of light to the sons of light, and to cause them to suffer a kind of excommunication.
Sadly, there is much more should you desire to see it....
Funny, "the Church of Peter" was being referenced well into the THIRD century...
The Lord says to Peter: "I say to you," he says, "that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell will not overcome it" [Matt. 16:18]. On him [Peter] he builds the Church, and to him he gives the command to feed the sheep [cf. John 21:17], and although he assigns a like power to all the apostles, yet he founded a single chair [cathedra], and he established by his own authority a source and an intrinsic reason for that unity. . . . IF SOMEONE [today] DOES NOT HOLD FAST TO THIS UNITY OF PETER, CAN HE IMAGINE THAT HE STILL HOLDS THE FAITH? IF HE DESERTS THE CHAIR OF PETER UPON WHOM THE CHURCH WAS BUILT, can he still be confident that he is in the Church? (The Unity of the Catholic Church 4, first edition [A.D. 251]).
I know, I know. Word must have traveled fast to North Africa since Cyprian already entitled his work as "The Unity of the Catholic Church".
Let's go back to St. Ignatius' letter to Smyrna. That's 110 A.D.:
"Wheresoever the bishop shall appear, there let the people be, even as where Jesus may be, there is the universal [katholike] Church."
Bible-waving Protestant clergymen wrongly burned people at the stake for being "witches".
Protestants base their faith on Scripture Alone.
Thus, this display of sanctioned Protestant injustice is proof that the Bible is not inspired by God.
Comment?
This was shortly after the tremendous damage done to the faithful by the Albigensian Heresy through the early 13th century. The Albigensian Heresy was the result of sacred scripture ending up in the hands of people who had no authority to interpret it.
Context is your friend.
Bible-waving Protestant clergymen wrongly burned people at the stake for being "witches".
My faith is not based on "Bible-waving Protestant clergymen" and either their sucess or failure to live up to their professed beliefs. My faith is based on the Bible and it's witness to the beautiful and flawless Savior, Jesus Christ. Through the Bible I have come to know Him.
"Comment?"
Your post was an attempt to deflect attention from my proof of the statement "I can see not other reason for the centuries-long attack."
I proved my statement. You don't like it so you shift attention to another topic.
I don't have a problem with you. In fact I think you're kind of a nice person. But you need to know the unblemished facts about what the organization you belong to has done in the past.
"Context is your friend."
On this topic it truly is my friend for there is no shortage of examples of the Catholic Church trying to keep the Bible out of the hands of the common people down through history.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.