“Many people, who do not give much attention to the holy scriptures, think that all the books contained in the Bible should be honored and adored with equal veneration, not knowing how to distinguish among the canonical and non-canonical books, the latter of which the Jews number among the apocrypha. Therefore they often appear ridiculous before the learned; and they are disturbed and scandalized when they hear that someone does not honor something read in the Bible with equal veneration as all the rest. Here, then, we distinguish and number distinctly first the canonical books and then the non-canonical, among which we further distinguish between the certain and the doubtful.
The canonical books have been brought about through the dictation of the Holy Spirit. It is not known, however, at which time or by which authors the non-canonical or apocryphal books were produced. Since, nevertheless, they are very good and useful, and nothing is found in them which contradicts the canonical books, the church reads them and permits them to be read by the faithful for devotion and edification. Their authority, however, is not considered adequate for proving those things which come into doubt or contention, or for confirming the authority of ecclesiastical dogma, as blessed Jerome states in his prologue to Judith and to the books of Solomon.
But the canonical books are of such authority that whatever is contained therein is held to be true firmly and indisputably, and likewise that which is clearly demonstrated from them. For just as in philosophy a truth is known through reduction to self-evident first principles, so too, in the writings handed down from holy teachers, the truth is known, as far as those things that must be held by faith, through reduction to the canonical scriptures that have been produced by divine revelation, which can contain nothing false.”
Care to know the source?
Ah, yes, the Glossa Ordinaria.
Had my discussion gone beyond Jerome, I would be totally remiss not to mention the Glossa Ordinaria,... but also the Council of Florence, of which you make no mention.
The Glossa was a compilation of works from various theologians, including Walafrid Strabo (who was once thought to be lead author by some early modern authors), who seems to be quite familiar with Jerome’s denigration of the deuterocanonicals in his prologue to the Books of Wisdom, but neither his apologia or his prologues to Judith or Tobit, or the assertion that the Council of Nicea established the books as Canonical. Based on monks being educated with this work, there actually was significant confusion: The Glossa didn’t differentiate among authors, and thus appeared to present Strabo’s statement as representative of Church scholarship.
But here again, we see the Protestant Apologists’ knack for proof-texting history. Contrary to Protestant analysis which asks, “how could such opinion be so widely spread if it were counter to the Catholic theology?,” Councils prior to Trent *did,* in fact, react with alarm to the accidental spreading of false theology.
During the Council of Florence, wherein representatives of the East and West concurred that there was no valid theological disagreement between the Eastern and Western churches (a conclusion sadly countered by Eastern political leaders once word got back to the East), a list of infalllible doctrines common to both churches was created. The Decretum Pro Jacobitis established a uniform set books of the bible, which all Christians were obliged to defend as doctrinally required. Normally, the East avoids such definitions, but there was the Strabo problem in the West, which made it necessary. Following the issue of the Decretum, the Strabo’s Glossa Ordinaria virtually disappeared from currency.
“B-b-b-but,” the protestant apologists say, “the Council of Florence didn’t use the word, ‘canon.’” Precisely: the word created confusion as to whether it referred to the Hebrew bible or the Christian bible, and the Eastern church rejected the notion of there being any authority separate from the bishops altogether. The fixation on “canon” implies a validity to the notion of sola scriptura which was altogether alien prior to Luther, apart from the mission of evangelizing Jews.
So, no, in discussing Jerome, I failed to mention the Glossa Ordinaria, or the Council of Florence, which was required to repudiate it.