"We are travellers…not yet in our native land" – St. Augustine
If you live around Escondido, you might like to know that John Paul The Great Catholic University is having a free lecture series on the Early Church Fathers and Sacred Scripture, every Thursday for the next six weeks:
Since I’m going to be discussing the question of the canon with some Jehovah Witnesses this weekend, I thought I’d post a few of the important dates which I often need to look up when talking about the setting of the canon of Scripture:
AD 170
The Muratorian fragment describes a New Testament canon which includes all of today’s books, with the exception of Hebrews, James, and 3rd John.
AD 180
Melito of Sardis provides a list of Old Testament books, including Wisdom but excluding Esther.
AD 367
Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria lists in his 39th Festal Letter the canon. His Old Testament canon generally excludes the deutercanon, but includes Baruch and excludes Esther. He includes the entire New Testament canon.
AD 382
The Synod of Rome lists the 73 books of the Catholic Canon.
AD 393
The Council of Hippo lists the Catholic Canon. As with the other local councils, the pronouncements of the council were sent to Rome to be ratified by the Pope.
AD 397
The Council of Carthage confirms the pronouncements of Council of Hippo.
AD 405
Bishop of Toulouse requests a list of all the books of Scripture from the Bishop of Rome. Pope Innocent I sends him the list of 73.
Jerome completes the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible.
AD 419
The Second Council of Carthage confirms the Catholic canon.
AD 1441
The Council of Florence also lists the 73 book canon.
AD 1563
The Council of Trent also lists the current day Catholic canon.
For a detailed list of books used in the Early Church, please check out this post from Shameless Popery.
In today’s Quick Apology post I wanted to turn to the subject of history…
When speaking about the Catholic approach to Scripture, some Protestants will make the following accusation:
“The Catholic Church used to chain up Bibles!”
The statement is absolutely true; it was not uncommon prior to the Reformation for Bibles to be chained up. When I am told this in a discussion I concede the point, but I then ask the person speaking if they know why this was done…
It is not uncommon to receive as a response, “They chained them up to stop people reading the Bible!”. While the initial statement was true, this explanation as to why Bibles were chained is completely incorrect. In fact, Bibles were chained for completely the opposite reason. Bibles were chained up so that more people had access to the Scriptures!*
You see, prior to the Fifteen Century and the invention of the movable type printing press, Bibles were hand-written. This was an colossal undertaking and therefore extremely costly. This meant that Bibles were expensive items liable to be stolen by thieves. Therefore, in an attempt to provide people with access to the Scriptures, it was common for a Bible to be made available in or around a church building, but to prevent theft, it was chained to a heavy object. If you had a Bible worth tens of thousands of dollars, would you want to leave it unsecured and unattended in a public building?!
If you visit a post office or a bank, you will often see pens chained to immovable services. Do these institutions chain these pens because they don’t want you to use them? Of course not! They want you to use the pens, but they want to make sure nobody steals them! Why? Because if they are stolen then other people won’t have the opportunity to use the pens. It is the same logic at work concerning the chaining of Bibles.
* It is probably worth pointing out that literacy rates were also extremely low even until the 19th Century. It is for this reason that the most common way of learning the Bible throughout Christian history has been the hearing the Scriptures proclaimed at the Eucharistic liturgy.
As a Catholic, I often hear from Protestants the exclamation of “But that’s not in the Bible!” during our discussion of Catholic doctrine and practice. Now, while I think that Catholicism can be more than adequately defended from the Bible, during these conversations I always feel that it’s necessary to point out some general issues with this objection. In today’s post I would like to outline the three main problems that can be highlighted…
If you’ve ever spoken to Jehovah Witnesses, you’ve inevitably run up against the interesting translation choices of their translation of the Bible, the New World Translation (NWT). Douglas from Soul Device discusses how to dialogue with Jehovah Witnesses using this translation…
So far this year I haven’t posted any updates regarding my new year resolutions. Well, I’m pleased to report that things are going pretty well…
Resolution #1: Read the entire Bible
I have been sticking with my Bible study reading plan and I’m actually a little ahead of schedule. I’ve finished the entire Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), Matthew’s Gospel, Acts of the Apostles and I’m nearing the end of the Psalms. On the subject of Bible reading plans, Meg Hunter-Kilmer recently posted an article about an alternative reading plan, which I might tackle next year.
Resolution #2: Get back into martial arts
I have now been doing Kung Fu (Choi Li Fut) for three and a half months. I’ve already got my first three stripes and I should be taking my Yellow Sash test sometime in May, after the Kung Fu tournament this weekend.
Resolution #3: Run a marathon
Out of my three resolutions, this is the only one which is a little shaky. I have been building my fitness back up. As well as Kung Fu, I have returned to playing Ultimate Frisbee each week (far more enjoyable than just running sprints) 🙂 I have also been having some intensive massage therapy to sort out some of my muscle issues in my right side. I hope to start actually going out for runs sometime next month.
