The issues are that no one challenged the canon Trent affirmed until Luther, and that Trent was “just reaffirming the Church's unaltered stance since 382,” and that Trent's canon was identical to that of prior conciliar affirmations.
I have said that that the Catholic Church has had a consistent list of books since 382. Can you dispute that?
This issue is not a consistent list, but one standardized official canon, which was not open to dispute. By saying “Church” “unaltered” and “consistent” you infer that an official finalized canon was established from 382, which besides the problem with the 382 date, and that Trent's canon was not exactly the same, (see below) — as it must be if an early claim to infallibility is made — Trent itself as well as the centuries after Hippo testify to continued disagreement within Roman Catholic scholarship regarding the canon, which (in contrast) ceased within Rome after Trent:
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Canon of the New Testament, (1917): “The Canon of the New Testament, like that of the Old, is the result of a development, of a process at once stimulated by disputes with doubters, both within and without the Church, and retarded by certain obscurities and natural hesitations, and which did not reach its final term until the dogmatic definition of the Tridentine Council.
“According to Catholic doctrine, the proximate criterion of the biblical canon is the infallible decision of the Church. This decision was not given until rather late in the history of the Church at the Council of Trent...The Council of Trent definitively settled the matter of the Old Testament Canon. That this had not been done previously is apparent from the uncertainty that persisted up to the time of Trent" (New Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. II, Bible, III (Canon), p. 390; Canon, Biblical, p. 29; Bible, III (Canon), p. 390).
"...an official, definitive list of inspired writings did not exist in the Catholic Church until the Council of Trent (Yves Congar, Tradition and Traditions" [New York: Macmillan, 1966], p. 38).
"For the first fifteen centuries of Christianity, no Christian"The Tridentine decrees from which the above list is extracted was the first infallible and effectually promulgated pronouncement on the Canon, addressed to the Church Universal. ” (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03267a.htm; cf. New Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. II, Bible, III (Canon), p. 390; cf. The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (Rockford: Tan, 1978), Fourth Session, Footnote #4, p. 17; )
"in the fifth century a more or less final consensus [on the New Testament canon] was reached and shared by East and West. It is worth noting that no ecumenical council in the ancient church ever ruled for the church as a whole on the question of the contents of the canon." (Harry Gamble, in Lee McDonald and James Sanders, edd., The Canon Debate [Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, 2002], p. 291)
The Catholic Study Bible, Oxford University Press, 1990, p. RG27: "The final definitive list of biblical books (including the seven additional Old Testament books) was only drawn up at the council of Trent in 1546." Church put forth a definitive list of biblical books. Most Christians had followed St. Augustine and included the 'Apocrypha' in the canon, but St. Jerome, who excluded them, had always had his defenders." (Joseph Lienhard, The Bible, The Church, And Authority [Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1995], p. 59)
“Here we close our commentaries on the historical books of the Old Testament. For the rest (that is, Judith, Tobit, and the books of Maccabees) are counted by St Jerome out of the canonical books, and are placed amongst the Apocrypha, along with Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus, as is plain from the Prologus Galeatus. Nor be thou disturbed, like a raw scholar, if thou shouldest find anywhere, either in the sacred councils or the sacred doctors, these books reckoned as canonical. For the words as well of councils as of doctors are to be reduced to the correction of Jerome. — 1532, Cajetan wrote his Commentary on All the Authentic Historical Books of the Old Testament (dedicated to Pope Clement VII ). More
Looking at your “links to over 1,000 words of carefully formatted material” show the first to be a Lutheran site (http://beggarsallreformation.blogspot.com), the second, obvious non-Catholic (tektonics.org), ditto the third (christiantruth.com)....
You missed New Catholic Encyclopedia (not a link but a ref) in your protestations, but now your objection is that of links to Protestant sites, even when they link to posted material? And when Catholics posts the like we are not to examine them if we want to verify what the poster says? And http://beggarsallreformation.blogspot.com, among others, offers historical research which you are unlikely to see at most Roman Catholic apologist sites (and often vice versa), and it interacts with challenges from Roman Catholics. And rather than just posting material origins unknown (which at least one Roman Catholic web apologist promotes), i provided sources, often with links as well. With Scriptural arguments this is rarely needed, but with historical research it often should be.
We are not in the Watchtower Society, although Catholics have been discouraged from reading or listening to teachings contrary to Rome's teachings,. objectively examining issues in order to ascertain if Rome was right in infallible decrees. "The intolerance of the Church toward error, the natural position of one who is the custodian of truth, her only reasonable attitude makes her forbid her children to read or to listen to heretical controversy, or to endeavor to discover religious truths by examining both sides of the question." “Holding to Catholic principles how can he do otherwise? How can he consistently seek after truth when he is convinced that he holds it? Who else can teach him religious truth when he believes that an infallible Church gives him God's word and interprets it in the true and only sense?” (John H. Stapleton, Explanation of Catholic Morals, Chapter xxiii. the consistent believer (1904); Nihil Obstat. Remy Lafort, Censor Librorum. Imprimatur, John M. Farley, Archbishop of New York )
Though I just looked quickly, I did not see anything that disputes the canon of 382 on down through the ages to Trent.
Perhaps looking quickly you missed this line and the “not” which hyperlink the whole line should have been: “while the canon of Trent is not exactly the same as that of Carthage and other councils.
“The claim that Hippo & Carthage approved the same canonical list as Trent is wrong. Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) received the Septuagint version of 1 Esdras as canonical Scripture, which Innocent I approved. However, the Vulgate version of the canon that Trent approved was the first Esdras that Jerome designated for the OT Book of Ezra, not the 1 Esdras of the Septuagint that Hippo and Carthage ( along with Innocent I) received as canonical. Thus Trent rejected as canonical the version of 1 Esdras that Hippo & Carthage accepted as canonical. Trent rejected the apocryphal Septuagint version of 1 Esdras (as received by Hippo and Carthage) as canonical and called it 3 Esdras.” More
As for 382, first, the Council of Rome was not an ecumenical council but a local one, as was Carthage and Florence, as judged by Rome, thus their decrees were not infallible binding pronouncements for the universal church. The Catholic Encyclopedia states also, "only the decisions of ecumenical councils and the ex cathedra teaching of the pope have been treated as strictly definitive in the canonical sense, and the function of the magisterium ordinarium has been concerned with the effective promulgation and maintenance of what has been formally defined by the magisterium solemne or may be legitimately deduced from its definitions." http://www.bible-researcher.com/gelasius.html
Second, the claim about the Council of Rome (382) approving an infallble canon of Scripture depends upon the Decretum Gelasianum, which is disputed (among RC's themselves), based upon evidence that is was pseudepigraphical, being a sixth century compilation put together in northern Italy or southern France at the beginning of the 6th cent. More: http://www.tertullian.org/articles/burkitt_gelasianum.htm
So what if there was disagreement? I'll side with Augustine over your 15 links:
What do you mean “so what???” More notable Catholic than you did not side with Augustine. What about admitting you were wrong about Luther being the 1st challenger, and that the canon was not settled, and that Trent's was not exactly the same.
On to your sixth link (back to beggarsallreformation), more discussion at the Council (gee, isn't that what Councils do?)
What this one did was to show that your idea of an uncontested, settled canon was wrong, and if you had admitted that then it would have saved us both time and typing.
So I consider your dumping of links (not as careful as you claim, as there were duplicate links) to be serious overkill. If you can't include a quote in a post, If you can't include a quote in a post, I'm not going to spend hours reading links I probably would not agree with anyway.
The duplicates were in different sections, and served as verifications as well as for further information. And you do not have to read the links, but if you wanted to contest them you should have. What is “dumping is making misleading statements from memory on such a subject, and continuing to do so despite documented material showing the error, all of which i did spent hours writing, which is not for you alone.
By the way, to show you how much of a non-expert I am, I have never heard of Jedin!
Neither had i till recently, but that is what researching enables.
I will agree that my saying “nobody ever challenged it before Luther” is not technically correct;
I am glad at the end you at least see that.
I did not think that one through; most of the time my posts, infrequent as they are, have to be done quickly.
That is understandable. For my part it takes me a long time to write, while what could have been a discussion became a debate due to repeating of misleading claims. What can be said is that the Roman Catholic canon was largely settled early by the time of Carthage, but not disagreement by notable Catholics scholars until Trent settled the issue, nor was the canon of the latter exactly the same as the former. And that in Trent itself there was some debate about the apocrypha, and that Luther sided with some notable Catholic authorities in rejecting the it, yet he commented favorably upon 1 Maccabees as being able to be included. He questioned the apostolicity of Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation because the early church categorized these books as antilegomena. Yet Luther 's Bible contained the disputed books, though they were placed last in order, while his views on some of these books changed in later years.
Good night.
Pope St. Damasus I begins the 382 canon: "It is likewise decreed: Now, indeed, we must treat of the divine Scriptures: what the universal Catholic Church accepts and what she must shun. The list of the Old Testament begins..."
This also from the Catholic Encyclopedia you quote:
"Two documents of capital importance in the history of the canon constitute the first formal utterance of papal authority on the subject. The first is the so-called "Decretal of Gelasius", de recipiendis et non recipiendis libris, the essential part of which is now generally attributed to a synod convoked by Pope Damasus in the year 382. The other is the Canon of Innocent I, sent in 405 to a Gallican bishop in answer to an inquiry. Both contain all the deuterocanonicals, without any distinction, and are identical with the catalogue of Trent."
Whether the Church defines something as infallible is immaterial; it was the teaching of the Church. The Church rarely makes infallible definitions as it's ordinary definition is sufficient. When seriously challenged, infallible definitions are made, as at Trent.
As to scholars disagreeing, isn't that what scholars typically do? Again I am not a scholar, but I have had discussions with even Catholics about different scripture passages (one that comes to mind is the feeding of the 5,000- some claim it was not a miracle, Jesus merely induced everyone to share what they had); if people on a non-scholarly level cannot agree, I would not expect scholars to!
Regarding your mega posts, I wish I had the time to spend on them, but I do not. So I consider throwing a dozen or more links at someone, and expecting them to research and respond to them is a bit much. If you want to argue with scholars, FR is probably not the place to do it. I am not a scholar, nor do I have the time to be one. So basically mine is a protest against information overload!
I can appreciate the time you put into these posts, but as far as I'm concerned, it's largely wasted as I just do not have the time!
I come close to agreement with your last paragraph. To me it comes down to whose "experts" you believe.