Canon of the Bible

The Original Documents we have of the Bible: Greek b Bible-Septuagint, Hebrew Bible-Masoretic Text, Death Sea Scrolls...

Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Bibles

Deutero-canonical and Apocrypha books
 

Canon of the Bible: The books that belong to the Bible

The Original Documents of the Bible:

1- The "New Testament":
        - All books written in Greek, with the quotations from the Old Testament taken from the Septuagint.
        - We have 4,500 manuscripts in Greek, 67 papyrus, 2,578 parchment, 1,600 lectionaries mainly in the Codex of the Vatican, London, Paris, Cambridge and Washington.

2- The "Old Testament":
    It was written mostly in Hebrew and Aramaic, some in Greek... and we don't have any of the "original documents"; what we have today mainly are the "Greek Bible" or "Septuagint", , the "Hebrew Bible" or Masoretic Text", and the "Dead Sea Scrolls":

           A- The "Greek Bible", the "Septuagint", The Septuagint Online
            From the 3rd century before Christ, it is the oldest document we have. It is the Greek translation made in Alexandria by a Group or 72 rabbis (6 from each one of the 12 tribes), and hence the name of "Septuagint" given to the translation. It has 46 books like the actual Catholic Bibles, and it was the common version of the Bible among the Jews during Christ and well after Christ ; the one used and quoted by the Evangelists and Apostles when they wrote the New Testament.
    - It was translated to Syriac, Coptic, and Latin in the 4th century (the "Vulgate" of St. Jerome).

           B- "Hebrew Bible", Masoretic Text", Hebrew - English Bible:
            Written in the 6th to 10th centuries after Christ, by a Group of scholars from Babylon and Palestine, introducing vowels and accent signs to the Hebrew. They, of course, used the Septuagint to produce it. It has 39 books, like the Protestant Bibles.

            C- The "Dead Sea Scrolls" Dead Sea Scrolls:
            They are very important, because they are in Hebrew, dating from the 3rd century "before Christ", when the oldest Hebrew Bible we had, the Masoretic, is from 700 "after Christ"... it pushed back the curtain 1,000 years! on the earliest Hebrew document we had.
           Every book of the Bible is represented. 7 scrolls are in Israel, but most of them are in Jordan, with a remarkable similarity to the ones we have in Greek and Hebrew. A most important discovery on the OT.!.   

How do we know what Books belong to the Bible?: The CANON of the Bible:

    Because the Church tells us so!, says St. Augustine, "if the Church won't tell me these Books are the Bible, I won't believe it".

    The "Canon" of the Bible is the list of the books of the Bible. People needs to know without error (i.e., infallibly) what the books of the Bible are, the Canon of the Bible..
     But God did not explicitly reveal what books are the inspired books of the Bible, title by title, to anyone... Jesus did not write the Bible, and he did not give us a list of the books of the Bible... In fact, all the books of the New Testament were not even written when Jesus died...

    But Jesus founded "his Church" (Matt.16:18-19), and he gave her the greatest power on earth: "whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven" (Matt.16:19, 18:18)... and he gave to his Church an order: Go and preach the Good News of Redemption, the Gospel, to the whole world... and one of the ways she is doing it, is by giving us the Bible... The Church of Christ is the one who gives us the Bible, the number of books of the Bible, the Canon... without the Church, there is no Bible.

    The Bible is the book of the Church; she is not the Church of the Bible. There was no canon of scripture in the early Church; there was no Bible. It was the Church--her leadership, faithful people--guided by the authority of the Spirit of Truth which discovered the books inspired by God in their writing... the one who gave us the list of the books of the Bible in the fourth century

    The Church, gave us the list of the Books that form the Bible:
    The Council of Laodicea, in 360, produced a list of books of the Old Testament similar to today's canon. This was one of the Church's earliest decisions on a Canon.
    Pope Damasus I in the Council of Rome, in 382, gave us the complete list of the books of the Bible, including the New Testament... and the same Bible was confirmed by Pope Paul III at the Ecumenical Council of Trent (1545).

    There are another 35 good books, dealing with themes of the Old and New Testament, and attributed to Enoch, Moses, Salomon, St. Paul, St. Thomas, St. James, St. Peter, Virgin Mary... and they are not in the Bible, because the Church says so!. Deutero-canonical and Apocrypha Books  

    - The Catholic and Orthodox Bibles have the 46 books of the Old Testament listed by the Councils of the Church, which are the same list as the Bible of the Jewish of Alexandria, who wrote the Septuagint, of the 3rd century before Christ, the version quoted by the Apostles when they wrote the Gospels and Epistles.
    - The Protestant Bibles have 39 books in the Old Testament, as the Hebrew Bible of the Jews from Palestine, of the 7th century after Christ.
    - The 27 books of the New Testament are accepted by Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants.

    Many Protestants do not realize that the New Testament they cherish was given to them by a Pope, the Spaniard holy and wise Pope St. Damasus, at the times of St. Jerome and St, Augustine, in the Council of Rome, they the same Books used in all Protestant Bibles.

     When Luther broke with the Pope, he kept the same New Testament as the one Pope Damasus I had given us... if the Pope is no good, then, the Bible is no good!.

    However, Martin Luther judged various books of the Bible, God's holy Word.

1- On the Old Testament:
- Of the Pentateuch he says: 'We have no wish either to see or hear Moses.... Job is merely the argument of a fable... Ecclesiastes ought to have been more complete. There is too much incoherent matter in it, Solomon did not, therefore, write this book... The book of Esther I toss into the Elbe. I am such an enemy to the book of Esther that I wish it did not exist, for it Judaizes too much and has in it a great deal of heathenish naughtiness . . . The history of Jonah is so monstrous that it is absolutely incredible . . .'

2 - The books of the New Testament fared no better;
    He rejected from the canon Hebrews, James, Jude and the Apocalypse. These he placed at the end of his translation, after the others, which he called 'the true and certain capital books of the New Testament.' . . . 'St. John is the only sympathetic, the only true Gospel and should undoubtedly be preferred to the others. In like manner the Epistles of St. Peter and St. Paul are superior to the first three Gospels.' The Epistle to the Hebrews did not suit him: 'It need not surprise one to find here bits of wood, hay, and straw.' The Epistle of James, Luther denounced as 'an epistle of straw.' 'I do not hold it to be his writing, and I cannot place it among the capital books.' He did this because it proclaimed the necessity of good works, contrary to his heresy. 'There are many things objectionable in this book,' he says of the Apocalypse, . . . 'I feel an aversion to it, and to me this is a sufficient reason for rejecting it' . . . See Luther vs. the Canon of the Bible

Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Bibles:

        A total of 73 books in the Catholic and Orthodox Bibles, and 66 in the Protestant Bibles.

    1- The Old Testament: It is he same as the Jewish Tanakh.
                - The Catholic Bibles have 46 books, as the Bible of the Jewish of Alexandria, who wrote the Septuagint, from the 3rd century before Christ,, , the version quoted by the Apostles in the Gospels and Epistles.
                - The Protestant Bibles have 39 books, as the Hebrew-Bible of the Jews from Palestine, Written in the 6th to 10th centuries after Christ,
                   They do not have:
                         - 4 Historic Books: Tobit, Judith, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees. (and Additions to Esther)
                         - 2 Wisdom Books: Wisdom of Solomon, and Ecclesiasticus of Ben Sirach.
                         - 1 Prophetic Book: Baruch. (and parts of Daniel: The Prayer of Azariah, the Song of the Three Young Men, Bel and the Dragon, and Susana).

   2- The New Testament: With 27 Books in all the Bibles.
        The "Four Gospels", are the heart of the Bible:
        The Old Testament prefigures and characterizes the Christ of the Gospels and His Church; and the books after the Gospels show the development and expansion of the Church of Christ, and clarify important points of the Gospels... every page of the Old Testament talks about Christ and his Church... so, if when you read any book of the Bible you don't see there Christ or his Church, you have missed the main message of that book, read it again after praying! (Lk.24:27,44, Jn.1:45, 5:39).    

Bibles:
 Bibles in several languages, commentaries, dictionary, concordance, encyclopedia, apocrypha and Deutero-canonical
Audio Bible

Deutero-canonical Books:

The word deuterocanonical comes from the Greek meaning 'belonging to the second canon' and indicates the dispute in the early church over the acceptance of these books as scriptural texts.

    Deuterocanonical is a term first coined in 1566 by Catholic theologian Sixtus of Sienna to describe scriptural texts of the Old Testament whose canonicity was definitively confirmed by the Council of Trent, but which had been omitted from some early canons, especially in the East. Their acceptance among early Christians was not universal, but regional councils in the West published official canons that included these books as early as the fourth and fifth centuries

The deuterocanonical scriptural texts are:

• Tobit
• Judith
• Rest of Esther (Vulgate Esther 10:4-16:24)
• Wisdom
• Ben Sira, also called Sirach or Ecclesiasticus
• Baruch, including the Letter of Jeremiah
• The Additions to Daniel
  - Song of the Three Children (Vulgate Daniel 3:24-90)
  - Story of Susanna (Vulgate Daniel 13)
  - The Idol Bel and the Dragon (Vulgate Daniel 14)
•     1 Maccabees
• 2 Maccabees

Apocrypha Books:

    Apocrypha refer to texts which are not included  in any Bible, they are left out of officially sanctioned versions ('canon') of the Bible. The term means 'things hidden away,' which implies secret or esoteric literature. However, none of these texts were ever considered secret.
Christian Apocrypha:
    There are 35 books not included in any Bible, attributed to persons in the Gospels, and dealing on Christian and Biblical themes:
    - 14 Gospels, by Thomas, James, Peter, Bartholomew, Mark...
    - 15 Acts, by Andrew, Peter, Matthew, John, Thomas, Paul...
    - 6 Revelations, by Paul, Thomas, John, Virgin, Stephen, Peter...
 

1- Apocryphal Gospels:

• The Infancy Gospel of Thomas: Greek Text A
   
• The Infancy Gospel of Thomas: Greek Text B
   
• The Infancy Gospel of Thomas: Latin Text
   
• A Compilation of the Thomas Texts (c. 5th Century)
   
• An Arabic Infancy Gospel
   
• The Gospel of James
   
• The Gospel of the Nativity of Mary
   
• The Gospel of Mary of Bethany (or Magdalene)
   
• The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew
   
• The Gospel of Nicodemos (The Acts of Pilate)
   
• The Gospel of Bartholomew
   
• The Gospel of Peter
   
• The Gospel of the Lord by Marcion
   
• The Secret Gospel of Mark

2- Apocryphal Acts:

• The Acts of Andrew
   
• The Acts and Martyrdom of Andrew
   
• The Acts of Andrew and Matthew
   
• The Acts of Barnabas
   
• The Acts of John
   
• The Acts of John the Theologian
   
• The Acts and Martyrdom of Matthew
   
• The Martyrdom of Matthew
   
• The Acts of Paul
   
• The Acts of Peter
   
• The Acts of Peter and Andrew
   
• The Acts of Peter and Paul
   
• The Acts of Philip
   
• The Acts of Thomas
   
• The Consummation of Thomas

3- Apocryphal Apocalyptic  Texts:

• The Revelation of John the Theologian
   
• The Revelation (or Vision) of Paul (from the Ante-Nicene Fathers)
  The Revelation of Paul (another version, source is not identified)
   
• The Apocalypse of Peter (from the Ante-Nicene Fathers Vol X.) Note that an entirely different text of this name is found in the Nag Hammadi Library.
  The Apocalypse of Peter (another translation, from The Apocryphal New Testament)
• The Revelation of Stephen
   
• The Apocalypse of Thomas
   
• The Apocalypse of the Virgin

4- Other Early Christian Writings, not included in any Bible:

• Didache.
• The Shepherd of Hermas
• The Epistles of Jesus Christ and Abgarus, King of Edessa.
• Ephraim of Syria`s The Pearl: Seven Hymns on the Faith.
• Ephraim of Syria`s Hymn Against Bar-Daisan.
• The Epistle of the Apostles.
• The Teachings of Addeus the Apostle.