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To: mas cerveza por favor
Some books of NT scripture, such as the Didache, were eventually declared apocryphal and excluded from the canon. Who had authority to do this if not the Catholic Church. Was the Didache unjustly excluded?

If you could bring yourself to admit that what you keep referring to as the "Catholic Church" was, in reality, all the local assemblies of believers in Jesus Christ who followed the orthodox teachings they received either directly from Jesus Christ or his hand-selected Apostles and disciples, then we may agree on this point. As the article from Warfield expressed:

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. Whether the church of Ephesus, however, had a completed Canon when it received the Apocalypse, or not, would depend on whether there was any epistle, say that of Jude, which had not yet reached it with authenticating proof of its apostolicity. There is room for historical investigation here. Certainly the whole Canon was not universally received by the churches till somewhat later. The Latin church of the second and third centuries did not quite know what to do with the Epistle to the Hebrews. The Syrian churches for some centuries may have lacked the lesser of the Catholic Epistles and Revelation. 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. And in every case the principle on which a book was accepted, or doubts against it laid aside, was the historical tradition of apostolicity.

Let it, however, be clearly understood that it was not exactly apostolic authorship which in the estimation of the earliest churches, constituted a book a portion of the “canon.” Apostolic authorship was, indeed, early confounded with canonicity. It was doubt as to the apostolic authorship of Hebrews, in the West, and of James and Jude, apparently, which underlay the slowness of the inclusion of these books in the “canon” of certain churches. But from the beginning it was not so. The principle of canonicity was not apostolic authorship, but imposition by the apostles as “law.” Hence Tertullian’s name for the “canon” is “instrumentum”; and he speaks of the Old and New Instrument as we would of the Old and New Testament. That the apostles so imposed the Old Testament on the churches which they founded — as their “Instrument,” or “Law,” or “Canon” — can be denied by none. And in imposing new books on the same churches, by the same apostolical authority, they did not confine themselves to books of their own composition. It is the Gospel according to Luke, a man who was not an apostle, which Paul parallels in I Tim. v. 18 with Deuteronomy as equally “Scripture” with it in the first extant quotation of a New Testament book of as Scripture. The Gospels which constituted the first division of the New Books, — of “The Gospel and the Apostles,” — Justin tells us, were “written by the apostles and their companions.” The authority of the apostles, as by divine appointment founders of the church, was embodied in whatever books they imposed on the church as law, not merely in those they themselves had written.

The early churches, in short, received, as we receive, into their New Testament all the books historically evinced to them as given by the apostles to the churches as their code of law; and we must not mistake the historical evidences of the slow circulation and authentication of these books over the widely-extended church, for evidence of slowness of “canonization” of books by the authority or the taste of the church itself. (http://www.the-highway.com/ntcanon_Warfield.html

1,906 posted on 12/01/2011 3:41:27 PM PST by boatbums ( Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us. Titus 3:5)
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To: boatbums

Warfield is a bit dated. Don’t you think? Consider the source.

Evidence now shows that the Old Testament canon was not closed even among the Jews at the time the New Testament was written and that the Deuterocanonical books had influences on numerous passages.

http://st-takla.org/pub_Deuterocanon/Deuterocanon-Apocrypha_El-Asfar_El-Kanoneya_El-Tanya__0-index.html

And if you look at the Bible that was brought to Ethiopia in the 4th century, it shows a remarkably different canon. http://ethiopianorthodox.org/english/canonical/books.html

And as far as the Epistles of St. Ignatius are concerned, the ones I’ve cited are regarded by scholars as having been authentic.

The differences between the longer and shorter recensions are not unlike the different manuscript recensions we find among the early Biblical manuscripts.

That is they use different words to say just about the same thing. You can’t avoid copyist error.

Take the ending of Mark’s gospel for example, it doesn’t exist in some early manuscripts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_canon


1,909 posted on 12/01/2011 4:04:45 PM PST by rzman21
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To: boatbums
from the time of Irenæus down, the church at large had the whole Canon as we now possess it

This was more than 150 years after the founding of the Church. Even the various canons at this time contain books that would be declared apocryphal by St. Athanaius in 367, including the Apocalypse of Peter, the Acts of Paul, Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, and the Didache. The council of Rome fixated Athanaius' canon in 382.

Why to Protestants accept the canonical authority of the Alexandrian Bishop Athanaius and the 382 council of Rome?

1,917 posted on 12/01/2011 5:27:02 PM PST by mas cerveza por favor
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