Replies

I should point out that the canon of Scripture was actually fixed by the disciplinary session of the Sixth Ecumenical Council in 692 (called by Western scholars variously the Trullan Synod or Quinisext Council — though both Orthodox and Latin hierarchs, at least before the Latin Schism referred to its canons as those of the Sixth Ecumenical Council). One of its canons explicitly gave the canons of the Synod of Carthage of 419 universal force throughout the Church.

There is the fact, very uncomfortable for protestant defenders of the short canon, that it is not only the Latins, whom they like to vilify as “adding” books to the Bible, but the Orthodox and Monophysites (Copts, Armenians Ethiopians, Syrian Jacobites) and the Nestorians (Assyrian Church of the East), that is all Christian confessions still extant and dating from before the 16th century, include in their canon of Scripture all or most of the books the protestants reject under the name “the Apocrypha”.

You can quibble about 4th Maccabees and 2nd Esdras, maybe they don’t belong, but all of us in the East think that all of you in the West (Latin and protestant alike) are missing the 151st Psalm and the Prayer of Manasseh, and most of us think you should all have 3rd Maccabees in your Bibles — the Copts and Ethiopians stand with you Westerners on that one and against the Armenians and the Jacobites.

I would observe that this unanimity exists despite the fact that the Assyrians have been out of communion with the rest of us since 431, the Copts, Ethiopians and Jacobites since 451, the Armenians since 506.