roger_pearse at yahoo.co.uk (Roger Pearse) wrote:
>Bob LeChevalier <lojbab at lojban.org> wrote in message news:<3c9fjuo2tbtioiehk55sdphv3c9lvc0v1a at 4ax.com>...
>> The Nicean Council made the final decision in what was already more or less
>> determined - which writings pertaining to Christ would be considered part of
>> the canon, and what order would be canonical. If the Council made any
>> translation of the Bible it would have been into Latin or possible Greek, but
>> the oldest surviving text of the entire Bible is the Vulgate, which I believe
>> came from a century after the Nicean Council.
>>Actually the idea that Nicaea made some decisions about the bible is a
>net-legend. I got suspicious a while ago, and thought I'd look up
>every contemporary writer who mentions the council and see what they
>said. None of them say this, and in fact the content of scripture
>seems to have been something agreed between the two sides, since the
>Arians complained that the homoousion wasn't in the New Testament.
>All the refs at http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/nicaea.html.>>The canon of scripture seems to have just growed.
Indeed, I just followed some leads on that site, and it seems that the canon
was most definitely NOT finalized at Niceae
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04080c.htm
describes the Alexandrine Codex which is believed to date from late 4th
century to mid-5th century, and it has considerable differences from the
modern canon. The Vatican Codex from the 4th century is missing some pages,
and has had some replaced at a later date, and it likewise has some
differences from modern scripture.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03274a.htm
indicates that the earliest definite reference to the quadriform gospel was
in Irenaeus (182 AD), though scholars are generally agreed that the
quadriform gospel was probably canonical as early as 140 AD (which means that
for the first hundred years of the early church even the basic Gospel was
still somewhat up in the air).
During the period from roughly 180 to 360AD, there was a lot of debate about
the details of the canon, and books were ranked in groups by degrees of
canonicity.
The present canon of the Catholic church (from which most other versions of
the Bible are derived) was set by the Damasan catalogue, which came from a
synod summoned by Pope Damasus in 382 AD, though Jerome, the primary reporter
of that synod apparently made extensive use of the deuterocanonical books in
translating the Bible into Latin, and said nothing to explicitly include or
exclude them. The decree of the Damasan synod was not finalized until the
6th century. In the east, the list of canonical books was in sufficient
doubt that councils in 393, 397, and 419 issued catalogues of scriptural
books. Pope Innocent I sent a list of canonical books to Gaul in 405, where
the issue was apparently still in question. The last major question of
Catholic canonicity mentioned in the article was Synod of Toledo of 633 which
indicated many questioning the canonicity of the Apocalypse (Revelations).
Thus it appears that the canon of scripture in its modern sense took a good
400 years to settle down, and Catholic theologians apparently have multiple
theories as to what determined what books made it into the canon.
The actual text of the various books apparently was even more dependent on
the specific translator, so it might indeed be the case that King James does
not conform exactly to any single other-language version of the Bible. The
article on the canon mentioned above indicates that Luther rejected Hebrews,
James, Jude and the Apocalypse as being part of the canon. The Council of
Trent fixed the modern Catholic canonical text from 1545 to 1563; there were
many debates about the canonicity of portions of several books. It was not
until 1700 that the Lutherans and other Protestants fully agreed as to the
canonicity of the modern books of the Bible, though German bibles apparently
have the questioned books at the end, rather than in the order used in the
KJV.
It all sounds considerably messier than the simplicity of the stone tablets
purportedly given to Moses. God apparently decided that being
straightforward in putting out His Word in undeniable solid form was not
satisfactory, so He decided to be obscure and rely on "inspiration", with
even more checkered results. This does not fit my image of an omniscient and
all-powerful God, with the result that I cannot take the importance of the
specific words of the canon quite as seriously as most Christians do.
Christianity remains ultimately a matter of faith, and not words on a page.
lojbab
