The Protestant scholar JND Kelly runs tight little rings around Webster as a scholar, and he disagrees with you.
Besides, I posted the canon list of Florence immediately above. There's an actual "fact" for you, as distinct from Webster's voluminous distortions.
I would like to hear your opinion on why the Armenians (split from Rome 453) and the Ethiopians (split in 453, but practically contact was severed earlier and not restored until modern times), and the Greeks (split from Rome in 1054) ALL accept ALL of the books in the Catholic Bible as canonical (as well as some others).
Here is a nice chart that lays it all out in one place.
“The Protestant scholar JND Kelly runs tight little rings around Webster as a scholar, and he disagrees with you.”
Isn’t Kelly an Anglo-Catholic? And he doesn’t trump Jerome, Pope Gregory, Cardinal Cajetan, and your own Catholic websites on Trent.
Instead of bluffing, stick to what the facts actually are and address them. I care not for bland assertions.
Nice xhart — thanks for the link.
... Towards the close of the second century, when as a result of controversy with the Jews it became known that they were now united in repudiating the deutero-canonical books, hesitations began to creep in; Melito of Sardes (fl. 170), for example, satisfied himself, after a visit to Palestine, that the Hebrew canon was the authoritative one. Origen, it is true, made extensive use of the Apocrypha (as indeed of other truly apocryphal works), but his familiarity as a scholar with the Hebrew Bible made him conscious that there was a problem to be faced. A suggestion he advanced was that, when disputing with Jews, Christians should confine themselves to such books as they recognized; but he added with caution that the further extension of such a self-denying ordinance would necessitate the destruction of the copies of the Scriptures currently read in the churches.It was in the fourth century, particularly where the scholarly standards of Alexandrian Christianity were influential, that these doubts began to make their mark officially. The view which now commend itself fairly generally in the Eastern church, as represented by Athanasius, Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory of Nazianzus and Epiphanius, was that the deutero-canonical books should be relegated to a subordinate position outside the canon proper. Cyril was quite uncompromising; books not in the public canon were not to be studied even in private. Athanasius displayed greater flexibility, ruling that they might be used by catechumens for the purpose of instruction. Yet it should be noted (a) that no such scruples seem to have troubled adherents of the Antiochene School, such as John Chrysostom and Theodoret; and (b) that even those Eastern writers who took the strict line with the canon when it was formally under discussion were profuse in their citations from the Apocrypha on other occasions. This official reserve, however, persisted for long in the East. As late as the eighth century we find John Damascene maintaining the Hebrew canon of twenty-two books and excluding Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus, although he was ready to acknowledge their admirable qualities.
The West, as a whole, was inclined to form a much more favourable estimate of the Apocrypha. Churchmen with Eastern contacts, as was to be expected, might be disposed to push them into the background. Thus Hilary, though in fact citing all of them as inspired, preferred to identify the Old Testament proper with the twenty-two books (as he reckoned them) extant in the Hebrew; while Rufinus described Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Tobit, Judith and 1 and 2 Maccabees as ‘not canonical, but ecclesiastical’, i.e. to be read by Christians but not added as authoritative for doctrine. Jerome, conscious of the difficulty of arguing with Jews on the basis of books they spurned and anyhow regarding the Hebrew original as authoritative, was adamant that anything not found in it was ‘to be classed among the apocrypha’, not in the canon; later he grudgingly conceded that the Church read some of these books for edification, but not to support doctrine. For the great majority, however, the deutero-canonical writings ranked as Scripture in the fullest sense ... (Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, revised edition [HarperSan Francisco, 1978], pp. 54-55; bold emphasis added)
We need not rely upon Kelly, alone. It is best to gather from many. The historians are in (as far as I can tell) near unanimous agreement ---- that the history of the canon is not exactly, as GPH said, as "Roman revisionist history" purports it to be.