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To: The_Reader_David

Nice try; but wrong.

http://www.bible.ca/catholic-apocrypha.htm


15 posted on 01/27/2011 6:10:07 PM PST by SVTCobra03 (You can never have enough friends, horsepower or ammunition.)
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To: SVTCobra03

A protestant polemical site that perpetuates the myth that the Latins added the balance of the canon that the protestants slander as “the Apocrypha” hardly constitutes proof my position (which in this matter is the position of the Orthodox Church) is wrong.

The very fact that I am writing as an Orthodox Christian, who considers Trent to be a gathering of heretics completely void of authority, to tell you that First and Second Maccabees, Tobit, Baruch, the long versions of Daniel and Esther, and so on are canonical Scripture ought to give you pause.

Your site adduces a handful of Church Fathers to bolster your view. One can find as many or more early Fathers who rejected the canonicity of the Apocalypse of St. John (Book of Revelations, if you prefer) Sts. Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory the Theologian (called Gregory of Nazianzus in the West), Polycarp, and John Chrysostom spring readily to mind. It uses Christ-denying Jews (Josephus and the consciously anti-Christian Council of Jamnia) as sources of authority — hardly convincing.

Finally, it asserts without a shred of evidence that the canon was fixed prior to the Council of Carthage. When? How? By whom? Surely there would be a record of such an important event.

The earliest list of the New Testament canon we all agree on occurs in a letter of St. Athanasius in the 4th century. All earlier sources have missing books or extra books. How is that if the canon was fixed in the first century? Or is your site giving the Council of Jamnia, a bunch of rabbis who denied that Jesus is the Christ, authority to decide what books the Church reads? That was the only canon-fixing in the first century we have an actual record of. Letting Jews who deny Jesus decide our canon for us (as distinct from the Jews who awaited the Christ before his coming) seems to me to be a new judaizing heresy.

Carthage, of course, was a local council, and unless one accepts the Latins’ theory that a Papal assent to a council in his patriarchate gave it universal force — a theory I reject as an Orthodox Christian — its action did not gain universal force until its canons were incorporate by reference in the canons of the Sixth Ecumenical Council. (Some Orthodox will credit the Fourth Ecumenical Council, by virtue of a vague reference to “the ancient canons”, but I incline to the stricter view.)

Arguing that books every Christian tradition which predates the 16th century hold to be Scripture are not Scripture seems a bit of a tough argument to make. The website you link doesn’t manage to make the argument.


26 posted on 01/27/2011 7:56:22 PM PST by The_Reader_David (And when they behead your own people in the wars which are to come, then you will know. . .)
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