IB World Religions 3.3.3. Collation and Development: the Canon and Its Authority Notes

3.3.3. Collation and Development: The Canon and Its Authority

What a canon is

1. The word canon comes from a Greek term for a measuring rod, and Christians use it for the fixed list of books received as Scripture. A book inside that list settles doctrine, while a book outside it may still be read with respect.
2. The first Christians began with no list of their own. They used the Jewish scriptures, most often in the Greek Septuagint, and read apostolic letters and Gospels alongside them as those writings circulated.
3. Collation is a different question from composition. The books were written first, and only afterwards were they weighed against each other and gathered into an agreed collection.
4. Three rough tests shaped that weighing: apostolic origin, agreement with the faith the churches already confessed, and steady public use across many regions rather than in one congregation only.
5. The third test did most of the work in practice. Churches recognized as Scripture the books they were already reading aloud when they gathered, so the settled canon largely ratified an existing habit.
6. Christians describe the outcome differently. Catholics and Orthodox teach that the Church recognized what the Holy Spirit had given her, while many Protestants hold that the books carried their own authority and the Church only acknowledged it.

How the list settled

1. Pressure to draw a line came from inside the movement. Around 144 the teacher Marcion rejected the Jewish scriptures and published a short collection of an edited Luke and ten letters of Paul, which pushed other churches to say what they did accept.
2. Lists began to appear in reply. The Muratorian Fragment, usually dated to the late second century, names most of the writings later received, and Irenaeus argued at the same period that there could be four Gospels and no more.
3. A handful of books stayed under discussion for generations. Writing in the early fourth century, Eusebius sorted them into those universally acknowledged and those still disputed, putting Hebrews, James, Jude, 2 Peter and Revelation in the second group.
4. The earliest surviving list that matches the New Testament as Christians now have it is the festal letter of Athanasius of Alexandria, sent to his churches in 367.
5. Regional councils then confirmed that list, notably the synod of Hippo in 393 and the council of Carthage in 397, though both spoke for the Latin churches rather than the whole Christian world.
6. The process took roughly three centuries and was mostly a matter of recognition spreading from congregation to congregation, rather than a decision taken at any one meeting.

The Apocrypha and differing lists

1. Disagreement survives in the Old Testament rather than the New. The Septuagint carried several books that the Hebrew Bible does not, and the churches never fully agreed on what to do with them.
2. The disputed group includes Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and additional passages in Esther and Daniel. Catholics call these books deuterocanonical, and most Protestants call them the Apocrypha.
3. The argument is old. Jerome doubted the books when he translated the Latin Bible in the fourth century, while Augustine defended them, and Latin practice followed Augustine for the next thousand years.
4. The Reformation reopened it. Luther placed the books in a separate section of his German Bible, useful and good to read but not equal to Scripture, and the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles allow them for instruction in conduct but not for establishing doctrine.
5. The Catholic Church answered at the Council of Trent in 1546 by defining the books as canonical, which gives the Catholic Bible forty-six Old Testament books and seventy-three in all against the Protestant sixty-six.
6. Orthodox lists are wider again. Greek Orthodox Bibles add works such as 1 Esdras, 3 Maccabees and Psalm 151 under the heading anagignoskomena, things fit to be read, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo canon is broader still.

The authority of the canon

1. Every tradition calls the canon inspired, citing 2 Timothy 3:16, which describes Scripture with a Greek word meaning God-breathed. Disagreement begins only when Christians say what follows from that.
2. The Reformation principle of sola scriptura, Scripture alone, holds that the Bible is the final authority in doctrine and that councils, popes and traditions are to be tested by it.
3. Catholic teaching sets Scripture beside Tradition, which the Second Vatican Council document Dei Verbum describes as flowing from one divine source. The magisterium, the teaching office of pope and bishops, interprets both authentically while remaining their servant.
4. Orthodox Christians rarely separate the two at all. They describe the Bible as a book that belongs inside Holy Tradition, the continuing life of the Church, and read it with the liturgy and the Church Fathers rather than apart from them.
5. Protestants divide over how far inspiration reaches. Fundamentalist and conservative evangelical churches often affirm inerrancy in every matter the Bible touches, while many liberal Protestants hold it is wholly trustworthy for salvation without being a manual of science or history.
6. All sides agree the canon is closed. Papal encyclicals, Reformation confessions and Orthodox conciliar statements carry real authority for their communities, yet none of them is ever added to the Bible.

The canon in public worship

1. Most Christians meet the canon by hearing it rather than studying it, and for many churches the pattern of that public reading is set by a lectionary.
2. The Catholic Mass runs a three-year Sunday cycle of an Old Testament reading, a psalm, an epistle and a Gospel. The Revised Common Lectionary brings many Anglican, Lutheran and Methodist congregations onto much the same passages on the same Sunday.
3. Orthodox worship treats the book itself with honour. In the Divine Liturgy the Gospel Book rests on the altar table, is carried in procession at the Little Entrance, is censed, and is kissed by the faithful.
4. Non-liturgical churches keep the reading and drop the calendar. In many Baptist, Pentecostal and independent congregations the preacher chooses the passage, often working through a whole biblical book week by week in a preaching series.
5. Scripture is sung as well as spoken. Psalms are chanted in monastic and Orthodox worship, and Anglican Evensong sets the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis, both taken straight from Luke, at the centre of the service.
6. These habits feed back into the canon's authority. A book that is read aloud in the assembly week after week is experienced as Scripture, which is close to the test the early churches used when the list was still forming.

The Bible in private devotion

1. Private reading is the other half of the canon's working life. Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches all encourage daily reading at home, and many Christians follow a printed or digital scheme that carries them through the Bible in a year.
2. The oldest structured method is lectio divina, the slow Benedictine practice of reading a short passage, turning it over, praying from it and resting in silence with it.
3. Prayer books extend the same discipline through the day. The Catholic Liturgy of the Hours and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer both work steadily through the Psalter alongside other readings.
4. Protestant devotion leans on the individual with a Bible open. The evangelical daily quiet time and the home Bible study group both express the conviction that Scripture is the believer's own book.
5. Getting the text into people's hands became a mission in itself. Bible societies, study Bibles with explanatory footnotes and phone applications with daily reading plans all exist to keep private reading going.
6. The canon is therefore not only a list settled in the fourth century. Christians experience it as the fixed shape of what is read in church and at home, which is why questions about its edges still matter to them.