Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea in Palestine (260 – 340)

Eusebius , Bishop of Caesarea in Palestine, one of Origen's most eminent disciples, was a trusted advisor of Constantine. The Emperor feared that disputes within the church would cause disorder in the empire so he called for the first general council of the Christian church at Nicea (modern Turkey) in 325. (Eusebius Ecclesiastical History, a multivolume history of the church down to year 300, was published in 325.)

In 325 he, like his teacher Origen, divided religious literature into three classes: Homologoumena (acknowledged), Antilegomena (disputed), and notha (rejected) writings.

He concurred with Irenaeus list of twenty books as Homologoumena. The Four Gospels, thirteen Epistles of St. Paul, Acts, I Peter, and I John.

The Gospel was considered the message of Christ by his apostles, whether spoken or written. The Apostles' office was taken as equivalent to the Prophets of the Old Law. As inspiration was attached to the munus propheticum so the Apostles were aided by Divine inspiration in the exercise of their calling either spoken or written. The Gospels of Mark was viewed as a record of Peter's preaching and Luke's works - Luke and Acts - was a record of Paul's ministry.

Eusebius asked whether the writings had been mentioned by earlier generations of church leaders, whether their style compare well with writings known to have been written early in the history of the church, and whether their content is consistent with established orthodoxy. If writings proclaiming to represent the faith do not meet these criteria it was rejected. Examples were the Epistle of Barnabas and the Apocalypse of St. Peter.

Eusebius differed from Origen in rejecting Revelation, though he acknowledge its almost universal acceptance. The East Syrian Church had branded Revelation and all the Johannine writings as the work of the heretic Cerinthus. Revelation remained so for more than a century in Antioch and Constantinople.

Antilegomena (contested writings): Eusebius was uncertain with regard to the Epistles of James and Jude, II Peter, II and III John, and Hebrew. The Epistle to the Hebrews was known as early as Clement and was favoured by the Montanists. This was doubtless one reason why it was suspect. Even weaker is the case for the Didache (Teaching of the Apostles dating from 110), Gospel of the Hebrews, the Acts of Paul, and the Shepherd of Hermas.

All the rest are notha (spurious).

ATHANASIUS, Bishop of Alexandria. (296 – 373)

The term canon was not used in reference to the New Testament texts until the fourth century by Athanasius. The word "canon" means "rule of faith". In his "Epistola Festalis (Easter letter)" published in 367, Athanasius ranked all of Origen's New Testament Antilegomena. He listed the same twenty-seven writings found in the New Testament, including the Apocalypse of Peter and the Acts of Paul. He excluded Origen's list of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Didache. This became known as the Alexandrian Canon. In the years intervening between Eusebius and Athanasius, the six books that were disputed had found their way into the acknowledged category.

THE DAMASAN CANON (382)

Pope Damasus realized that the ancient Apostolic Churches of Jerusalem and Antioch, indeed the whole Orient, for more than two centuries had acknowledged Hebrews and James as inspired writings of the Apostles, while the Alexandrian Church and the powerful Patriarchate of Constantinople had canonized all the disputed Epistles. He summoned Jerome from the East, to assist at the synod at Rome in the year 382. This Roman synod presided over by Damasus presented the complete Canon. Hebrews, James, Jude, II Peter, and III John were confirmed and the Shepherd of Hermas and the Apocalypse of Peter was omitted.

AUGUSTINE of HIPPO (354 – 430)

Augustine was converted in 386. He became the Overseer of the church at Hippo, North Africa, and is considered by many to be the father of western theology. Augustine prevailed at the Synod of Hippo (393) and the African Church adjusted its New Testament to the Damasan Canon. It is evident that there were disagreements since three other councils followed immediately - Hippo, Carthage, in 393; Third of Carthage in 397; Carthage in 419. The New Testament Canon was officially confirmed by the third council of Carthage in 397. Even though Hebrews was accepted as the work of Paul, is still numbered separately from the time-consecrated group of thirteen.

As the Roman Empire was under attack and Rome was sacked, Augustine wrote City of God (413-426), showing that the true movement of history was the unseen conflict between sin and salvation, between the city of man and the kingdom of God.

By the close of the first decade of the fifth century churches as a whole has accepted the full Canon of the New Testament, except for the Apocalypse. An act of the Synod of Toledo (633) stated that many contest the authority of this book.

THE REFORMATION

1517, October 31: Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk, nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. This launched the Protestant Reformation. Luther called upon the church to accept that salvation, as taught by the Bible, was by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. This doctrine of justification; through faith alone, apart from works, was "the article upon which the church stands or falls."

Martin Luther was troubled by four books, Jude, James, Hebrews, and Apocalypse. In 1522 he placed them in a secondary position relative to the rest in his translation of the New Testament. Over a century the followers of Luther excluded Hebrews, James, Jude, and Apocalypse, and even rejected II Peter, II and III John. The trend of the seventeenth century Lutheran theologians was to class all these writings as of lesser authority. Zwingli could not see in Apocalypse a Biblical book.

After the Reformation, the books of the Canon were widely agreed upon. The Reformists excluded the Old Testament Apocrypha. The Apocrypha, which means “hidden,” “secret,” or “profound” was never recognized as fully inspired by either the Jews or the early church.

Luther and the reformers focused on the internal witness of the Holy Spirit. John Calvin argued that it is God Himself, via the Holy Spirit who assures the transmission of the text down through the ages, not the human efforts of the Catholic Church or any other group.

As late as the seventh and eighth centuries there were church leaders who added to or subtracted from the list of texts. Gregory the Great added Tobias and Wisdom and mentioned 15 Pauline epistles, not 14. John of Damascus, the first Christian theologian who attempted a complete systematic theology, rejected the Old Testament apocrypha, but added the Apostolic Constitution and 1 and 2 Clement to the New Testament. The Catholicism of the day rested far more on ecclesiastical authority and tradition than on an authoritative Canon.

ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH - Council of Trent (1546)

The Roman Catholic Church did not issue an authoritative statement about the contents of the Bible until 8 April 1546. The Council of Trent was to defend the integrity of the New Testament against the Protestants.

The order of books follows that of the Bull of Eugenius IV (Council of Florence), except that Acts was moved from a place before Apocalypse to its present position, and Hebrews put at the end of St. Paul's Epistles.

By a vote of twenty-four to fifteen, with sixteen abstentions the writings in Jerome's Latin Vulgate version was declared the church's official canon. Catholic tradition of the infallible pronouncements of ecumenical councils was the ultimate criterion of canonicity of the Sacred Books as a revealed dogma.

The Orthodox Russian and other branches of the Eastern Orthodox Church have a New Testament identical with the Catholic. In Syria the Nestorians possess a Canon almost identical with the final one of the ancient East Syrians; they exclude the four smaller Catholic Epistles - II Peter, II and III John, Jude - and Apocalypse (Revelation). The Armenians have one apocryphal letter to the Corinthians and two from the Corinthians. The Coptic-Arabic Church include with the canonical Scriptures the Apostolic Constitutions and the Clementine Epistles. The Ethiopic New Testament also contains the so-called "Apostolic Constitutions".

None of the original manuscripts written by the biblical authors are still in existence.

Then a great change began to occur in the way that learned men and women thought about the nature of the universe, God, and man's relationship to both. As men like Galileo and Francis Bacon began to lay the foundation for modern science, their successes led others to apply their empirical methodology to answering philosophical and theological questions. The search for knowledge would begin from a position of doubt and answering the question asked. Spinoza (1633-77) arrived at pantheism, a belief that all is god.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) attempting to protect Christian thinking from the attacks of science and reason, separated knowledge of God (or spirit) from the knowledge of the phenomenal world. The first was unknowable, the second was knowable. Christianity was reduced to a set of morals, the source of which was unknowable by humanity. The 1800s German theologians built upon Kant's foundation resulting in man becoming the source of meaning and God fading into obscurity. Frederick Schleiermacher (1768-1834) replaced revelation with religious feeling. The faith that leads to this religious feeling may come from a source completely independent of the Scriptures. David Strauss (1808-74) in his book, Leben Jesu (The Life of Jesus), completely denied any supernatural events traditionally associated with Jesus and His apostles, and calls the Resurrection of Christ a myth.

1870: Pope Pius IX proclaims the doctrine of Papal Infallibility.

In 1947, an Arab boy threw a stone into one of the hundreds of caves that pocket the cliffs surrounding the Dead Sea. To his surprise, he heard something shatter. When he crawled in to investigate, he found a broken pottery jar and some old manuscripts, including one of the book of Isaiah. This was the first of the collection of what came to be known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Soon archeologists excavated caves throughout the area. They found fragments of every Old Testament book and some complete manuscripts. It was found that the Dead Sea Scrolls, copied almost 1,000 years earlier, were almost identical to the Masoretic text.

We have the remarkable situation of modern theologians attempting to do theology without any knowledge of God and His dealings with His creation. It is not surprising that modern theologians are seeing Hare Krishna and Zen Buddhism, along with other Eastern traditions, as possibilities for integration with Christian thought or at least Christian ethics. Once individuals refuse to accept the claim of inspiration that the Bible makes for itself, they are left with a set of ethics without a foundation.