How Tradition Gave Us the Bible

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.

At least you admit that you're a Baptist. That's more than many can handle. Perhaps you can ponder these things about the Baptist faith:

Does the Bible Explicitly Mandate Immersion Baptism?

No. Nowhere does the Bible specifically say that one must be baptized by full immersion. The only Scriptural mandates about the form of baptism are that baptism with Water is necessary, and that baptism is to be conferred in the Triune name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Interestingly, when the Lord gave the apostles specific instructions on how to perform baptisms (Matt. 28:19), He said nothing at all about the necessity of full immersion versus pouring or sprinkling. Obviously, then, the question of immersion versus infusion is an optional and relatively unimportant matter to the Lord.

Now we shall ask ourselves if the Baptist arguments for immersion baptism are founded on faulty inferences alone, or are they based on explicit proof-texts?

But Doesn't the Word 'Baptizo' Always Mean "to Immerse"?

Baptists claim that the only meaning of the word 'baptizo' in the original langauge is "to immerse" (e.g., the Southern Baptist tract "Baptizing them in the Name," Nashville, LifeWay Press, 1999). This is simply untrue.

According to the Liddell-Scott-Jones lexicon of Greek, the verb 'baptizo' can mean, "to immerse," but it can just as readily mean, "to dip," or even "to draw wine by dipping a cup in the bowl". One who is baptized, in the passive sense of the verb, can be drowned, drunk with wine, deeply in debt, or just in trouble. In Biblical Greek, the verb 'baptizo' can mean "to purify by washing," as when Naaman, at Elisha's direction, "went down and washed ['ebaptisato'] himself seven times in the Jordan" (2 Kgs. 5:14 [Reg. IV 5:14], Septuagint Greek Old Testament). It can also signify a ritual cleansing of eating and cooking utensils (Mark 7:4, 'baptismous'), and other ritual washings established under the Old Covenant (see Hebrews 9:10, 'baptismois').

Most significantly, however, we have in the New Testament a crystal clear use of the verb 'baptizo' in a context that signifies only a partial washing of the body, as opposed to full immersion. In Luke 11:38 the verb 'baptizo' refers to a ritual washing of one's hands before eating: Jesus went to dine with a Pharisee and "the Pharisee was astonished to see that he had not first washed ['ebaptisthe'] before dinner." With this Biblical proof-text as our guide, we can readily see that in the New Testament the verb 'baptizo' signifies a ritual cleansing without any necessary reference to the idea of full immersion.

You haven't even begun to master the subject you attempt to tackle here. For starters, you complain that, when the Greek Scriptures were translated into the Latin Vulgate, it was a version "which common men could not read for themselves. So men had to rely soley upon the priest to interpret the scriptures for them, which is by the way against the word itself." You do not seem to be aware of the fact that "Vulgate" Latin IS the common-man version of that language. To the extent that common men could read at all, it was a *help*, not a hindrance, to every man in the western Roman EMpire that the Scriptures were so translated. To the extent that many common people were illiterate, yes, the priest DID have to read the Scriptures to them, but there was no "translation" necessary here, as the words were in the plain language of the people in the west, whom St. Jerome had in mind when he undertook the translation project in the first place.

Second, speaking of St. Jerome, your post seems to conflate his efforts with the rise of Constantine and the legitimation of Christianity in the Roman Empire. This is incorrect. St. Jerome translated the Vulgate between 380 and 405 AD. Constantine's Edict of Milan, legalizing Christianity, was promulgated in 313, well before St. Jerome was even born.

Third, the Jews did NOT canonize the Old Testament Scriptures until their Counci of Jamnia (sometimes written Javneh) in the 90's AD. This is not only NOT "long before the Catholic Church existed" as you say, but, indeed, the Council was held in large measure to counter early Christian (Catholic) claims about Scripture and salvation history. To the extent that this council was not convened until 60 years after the birth of the Church at Pentecost, and 20 years after the destruction of the Temple and the sacrificial priesthood of the Jews, one wonders why any Christian - Catholic or otherwise - would invest it with any kind of authority, as the Apostles and their successors had superseded Jewish authority long since. That the early Protestants retroactively invested this council with such legitimacy *precisely* to justify their alteration of the settled Christian OT and NT canon is most telling.

Meantime, the early Church had already settled on the Alexandrian version of the Old Testament in Greek by the early second century (at the latest), and had also largely settled on the New Testament canon by that century's end, when canonical NT writings had circulated well throughout the Church. From 382 to 419, various regional councils in the Church promulgated the New Testament canon we both share, as well as the 46-book Old Testament canon Catholics still embrace. The 39-book OT canon you have is only justified by the Council of Jamnia's decisions, already noted, whose pronouncements are of no notice to Christians, as that Council no longer had authority. Indeed, if consistency were to reign here, you would, on the basis of that Council's decisions, jettison the ENTIRE New Testament, as it specifically rejected all the books cntained therein!

On another recent post, you frankly admitted that you are largely self-taught in the Christian faith. Nothing wrong with that! But the sources you have used on which to base your learning are highly deficient, even in the basics. I urge you to dig deeper.

"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)."

For readers, this is an oversimplification.

There were many translations of the Scriptures, already in the 3rd century. Tertullian testifies to a Latin translation of the whole Bible. St. Cyprian adhered to this early Latin version in all his works. Apparently, Africa adopted Latin in Liturgy and Scripture much earlier than did Rome.

Hippolytus of Rome compiled an early list of the New Testament, preserved in the Muratorian Fragment, the earliest known Christian Canon. The Muratorian Canon was compiled shortly after 155 AD in Rome.

By the late 4th century, there was much debate about the canonicity of certain texts and the excellence of others.

Amidst this crisis, a Spanish deacon becomes Bishop of Rome and calls the greatest linguist of his day to be his secretary, Jerome. Wishing to send missionaries to Europe armed with a translation of the Bible in the common tongue, Damasus commissions Jerome to create a new version of the Bible using the best original language texts of the day. Jerome begins his work on the Latin Vulgate.

Jerome's letters to Damasus testify to the debate regarding which texts to include in his new translation.

Damasus, wishing to settle the matter, calls a synod in Rome, at which Jerome is present, and issues a Decree. The Decree of Damasus is the first prescriptive Christian canon issued by an episcopal authority for the purpose of settling the debate for the entire Church.

The Decree is promulgated in 382 AD and received immediately in Africa at the Synods of Carthage and Hippo. The Canon used by the Catholic Church is that which was decreed by Pope Damasus I in 382 AD.

The Decree of Damasus may be found in, "The Faith of the Early Fathers, Vol. I," pg 406; Denzinger 179-180. For more on early versions of the Scriptures, Damasus & Jerome see, "Patrology," J. Quasten Vol. II pg 209ff & Vol. IV pg 273ff.

Firstly I do believe in baptism, but not as a necessity for salvation. I believe we are baptized as a show of faith after we accept Christ, put it is not part of the salvation process. Ephesians 2;8-9 it says not of works lest any man should boast, baptism is a physical action, IE work. That being said, I believe in immersion baptism not because of the literal word meaning, but the scriptural text. Where in the scripture was there any other kind of baptism? There wasn't, John the Baptist baptized in the river Jordan, not from the river Jordan. In Acts 8;26-40 Paul baptized the Ethiopian eunic, and even in the desert, the Bible says they went down into the water. My belief on this subject is based solely upon the content of the scriptures, not the meaning of the word baptism. Thank you for your concern, but you say baptist like it is some sort of problem. I presently serve in a baptist church, but I research the scriptures for myself I do not take another's word without researching it for myself first. My personal beliefs concerning the scriptures are my own, I spout no one Else's rhetoric, nor do I buy in full force to any denomination without careful research and consideration.

I forgot all catholics are authorities on the subject, so there is no point to start this argument again. you will say "without the Catholics there would be no Cannon of the scriptures" and then I'll say "that doesn't give you exclusive right nor authority over it" and you'll say" the church picked up the mantle from peter blah blah blah" And that's where I say, no, Christ first never passed the mantle exclusively to Peter, and even if he did, I see no scripture calling peter the first pope", that's where you say once again that not all things are exclusive to the bible , and then I say "the bible is all I need, If it wasn't revered as the Holy scriptures, then I have no interest in it. I do not need Catholic writings to figure out my life." and so on, and so on, blah blah, ..........

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