How We Got the Bible · Page 5 of 6
One Bible, different canons
The one real difference between Christian Bibles, stated fairly from each side, and where Contend stands.
Open a Catholic Bible and a Protestant Bible side by side and the New Testaments match book for book. The difference is in the Old. The Catholic Old Testament has seven more books: Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, and the first and second books of Maccabees, and it has longer forms of Esther and Daniel. Orthodox Bibles include the same books, with some variation between Orthodox churches. These are the deuterocanonical books, the 'second canon', and the argument about them is ancient: it did not begin at the Reformation.
In the Catholic Church's own terms
The Catholic position is not carelessness about the canon. It is a claim about where the canon was received. These books stood in the Greek Scriptures the early church used, they were read in its worship, and the North African councils at Hippo and Carthage listed them among the canonical Scriptures to be read in church. When the Reformers set them aside, the Council of Trent answered in its fourth session, on 8 April 1546: it listed the books of both Testaments by name, these books among them, received them as sacred and canonical, and attached an anathema to refusing them. On that view, the list is the church's inheritance from the centuries when the canon was being recognized, not a late addition to it.
The Protestant answer
The Protestant answer looks to the Hebrew canon and to the earliest Christian scholarship. The Jewish people, whose books these are, did not receive the deuterocanonical books in their canon: Josephus's twenty-two do not include them. Jerome, who translated the whole Bible into Latin, in the Vulgate completed about AD 404, knew the difference and said so: these were books of the church, to be read for instruction, not books of the canon, and not the ground on which doctrine stands. Roger Beckwith's study shows the earliest Christian evidence running the same way, before the books' use widened in later centuries. The churches of the Reformation followed Jerome's distinction: the Old Testament is the Hebrew canon, and the extra books, printed in many Protestant Bibles as an appendix between the Testaments, are read with profit without being made Scripture.
Where Contend stands
Contend Academy's Statement of Faith, article 1, confesses 'the Bible, consisting of the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments'. That is where this site stands, and it does not stand there mocking anyone. The deuterocanonical books are real ancient Jewish and Christian literature: 1 Maccabees is a serious history of the years between the Testaments, and the Wisdom of Solomon has been loved by Christians of every tradition. Contend teaches them as that, history and wisdom worth reading, and does not teach them as Scripture. The difference with our Catholic and Orthodox neighbours is a difference about which books carry the authority of God, and it is conducted here the way it should be everywhere: from the sources, in the open, without heat.
Sources
- Council of Trent, Fourth Session (1546)
- Councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397), Canon 24
- Roger T. Beckwith, The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church (1985)
- Josephus, Against Apion 1.8
Review status: in-theological-review. Every Contend page passes a human theological review against the Statement of Faith before it is published as approved teaching. This section is in that queue.