Question: I am looking for information on WHO or WHAT actually decided what books were included in the Bible? Can anyone point me in the right direction?
Thanks,
ggronholz
No idea, actually, but I like the question.
Maybe in those days they had some publishers who decided; “That book of John isn’t half bad if we put it in an omnibus with other exciting tales”?
I recall reading somewhere that the content of the New Testament was established by the Council Of Carthage in 397.
I hope this helps.
Thanks. I will check on that. Is it written down anywhere that you know of…like where I could buy the book?
Thanks again.
ggronholz
No book I’m afraid.
Drop ‘Council of Carthage’ into Google and then search within results using 397.
You’ll find something but whether it’s enough for you I cannot say.
Which “Bible”? The Vulgate, King James, Douay, etc.?
Althought these are all Christian bibles, they do not have the same books. And Christian bibles do not share the same Old Testament books as the Torah.
Each bible’s list of included books was made by a different religious body.
Here is one site. Click on “Versions/Translations.”
This site is religiously-oriented, but the brief historical info is probably accurate. I’m sure there are better sites.
There are two different types of response that can be made to this question.
In one variety of response, we have the traditions that whoever’s name is on the book is the author (with a note that Moses wrote the Law/Torah/Pentateuch with Joshua finishing off the last section after the death of Moses).
In the other variety of reaponse, we have literary scholars trying to examine the texts (along with other texts from the same period and other historical/archaeological information) to try to discover who the authors may have been and how the books were compiled or collated.
One thread that addressed the issue (pretty much strictly from the perspective of the New Testament) was Christanity vs The Bible.
In general, we really do not know much about the authors of the various books. The creation of the canon (in the literary analysis scenario) was a series of events in which different works were recognized to have been inspired by God at different times.
The Torah/Pentateuch was certainly accepted as canonical by the time of the Judean Babylonian Captivity, (sixth century BCE), because it is that work that was discovered by Ezra and Nehemiah and read to the assembled people when Nehemiah called upon the people to re-dedicate themselves to God when the early waves of exiles began returning from Babylon.
The Prophets had been recognized as canonical by the beginning of the second century BCE.
The Writings (the Psalms and a few smaller books not placed with the Prophets) were accepted before the end of the first century CE.
Judaism had no formal method of declaring the canon, so our best information on these dates is finding other works from different periods that refer to the works as Scripture. With the rise (and threat) of Christianity, however, Jewish scholars from the school at Jamnia did hold a council around 100 CE to declare that the canon was closed. At that time, they added no new books and decared that the book had to have been at least 500 years old to be included.
(This has led to some bickering between traditionalists and the proponents of the literary approach, since the latter point ot evidence that indicates, to them, that not all the accepted works were truly 500 years old.)
The Christian works were written between the mid-40s (Paul’s letters to the Thessalonians) and a later date. Some people claim that all the books of the NT had been authored by 70 CE. Literary proponents point out indications that several of the non-Pauline epistles show evidence of having been written as late as 100 or even 120.
In the Christian community (and I would venture to guess that a similar event happened a few hundred years earlier among the Jews), the writings that most spoke to the beliefs of the people were collected and passed around between communities. Gradually a list of the “best” writings was compiled.
The Christian canon got an unlikely boost when a guy named Marcinion decided that the Jews were damned and that any association with them was to be condemned. He compiled a list of acceptable works that deliberately excluded the Gospel of Matthew (because there was a tradition that Matthew had originally written it in Aramaic for Jewish Christians) and the Letter to the Hebrews. As a response, several other Christian leaders compiled different lists, being sure to include the “Jewish” works. Eventually, the lists were compared and, at diiferent councils, people argud for the inclusion or exclusion of different works. The matter was finally “officially” decided around 473 in a council at Rome, although, as with the Jewish Council at Jamnia, no books were added that had not already been included on the various lists for 200 years and no books were excluded that had not been left off most lists for the same period.
In each case of compiling the canon, (from the perspectivce of the literary analysis tradition), the perception has been that God inspired the communities to select the works that best reflected their faith and then God inspired the community, through the agency of a council, to put the final stamp of approval on the selection.
One additional point needs to be made regarding the OT Apocryphal/Detero-Canonical works. Several religious books in the Jewish community were used by early Christians as the Word of God, although they were never formally accepted by Judaism as Scripture. The early Christian church did accept them as Scripture, ignoring the pronouncements from Jamnia as irrelevent to their belief. Since they were not part of the Jewish canon, they were known as the Second or Deutero canon. When Martin Luther reviewed Scripture during his break from Catholicism, he determined that they were actually spurious inclusions by the RCC that should be dropped. The Catholics (and the Orthodox who were not caught up in the Catholic-Protestant struggle) never saw any need to remove those books.
If you want names associated with the decisions, you can find them at these sites. (There has been a lot of scholarship since these were written 90 years ago and Protestants and Jews can surely find fault with some interpretations, but the basic players are named.)
Catholic Encyclopedia - Canon of the Old Testament
Catholic Encyclopedia - Canon of the New Testament
Among Christians, all the 27 books of the New Testament are accepted by all major bodies. The Eastern Church (that was the basis for the Orthodox groups) did not all accept Revelation or the Letter to the Hebrews as early as the rest of the Church, but they have all included all the books since at least the ninth century.
The Jewish Torah comprises the exact same five books as the Christian Pentateuch. What the Jews call Tanakh and Christians call the Old Testament are identical between Jews and Protestants and are different by the exclusion or inclusion of the Apocrypha between Jews and Protestants on the one hand and Catholics and Orthodox on the other–so everyone uses the Jewish canon, but Catholics and Orthodox have a few extra entries. The situation is not one of multiple groups choosing vastly different lists for their canons.
(It is possible that the Coptic Church has some differences, but it is now a fairly small community.)
Translations and interpretations diverge widely, of course.
Always found the book Don’t know much about the bible to be very helpful in this regard.
We’re also working on an extended report on this for an upcoming Mailbag series. Stay tuned.
good post, tomndebb, very insightful. let me just add that martin luther went a little overboard in determining which books were spiritually “inspired” and which were not: he wanted to reject the book of james, but his peers and fellow councilmen kept him from doing so. isn’t it great to know that a bunch of old white guys, rather than God, decided what was to be in our Bible? that’s religion for ya.
I suppose. A different view, which can certainly not be proven “true,” would be that God does not allow any single person to interfere with His Word and that the resistance to someone’s decisions (even someone as devout and thoughtful as Luther) was the act of the Holy Spirit guiding the Church. (Alternatively, one could take an extreme version of the RCC position and simply dismiss Luther and company as “those heretics.”)
From outside of Faith, most of this appears utterly arbitrary; from within Faith, it makes complete sense. In GQ, I am not about to take sides beyond the historical record (aside from a basic acceptance of the literary view over the traditional view).
Thanks for all the wonderful input. I did look up several of the web sites offered to me and they were of great assistance to me in answering, or compounding, my query. I am looking forward to further insight on this topic as stated by Eutychus55 in the MialBag in the future.
tomndebb:
This is not the traditional Jewish understanding of history. In my understanding, the Jewish canon was formally declared by the “Men of the Great Assembly,” a group of some 120 Rabbis who presided over matters of the Jewish religion at the time of the construction of the second Holy Temple, in the middle of the 4th century BCE.
And the Pentateuch wasn’t exactly “discovered” by Ezra and Nehemia. It was read in public by them with a call for re-dedication to its principles, but the Biblical books were well-known amongst the Jews throughout the entire preceding period.
Don’t use “Don’t know much about the Bible” the title says it all. His history book was excellent but I don’t know where his head was at for the other.
well, DUH! this ancient, 200 AD kid heard all those stories about the even more ancient legends and thought, “hey, this could make me rich!” and threw them all together. DUH…
ow, stoppit, it IS a good idea after all, stop throwing!
dives off this message board
First post here. If I offend anyone, or any of the board’s conventions, my apologies in advance…
This is a popular, but incorrect, understanding of what the sages decided at Jamnia (or Yavneh, to give the place its Hebrew name).
A little (okay, a lot of) background:
Some years before the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the Rabbis considered removing the book of Ezekiel from the Scriptural canon, on the grounds that many of its legal provisions (in chs. 40-48) contradict those of the Torah (Pentateuch), which is something that a prophet may not do. [This doesn’t mean that they suspected it of not being a genuine prophetic book; as cmkeller pointed out, the canon was fixed in its present form by the Men of the Great Assembly - some of whom were prophets themselves - in the 4th century BCE, and the later sages could well have relied on their predecessors’ judgment. They may have felt, though, that with the loss of the “keys” to a proper understanding of the book, it would be subject to misinterpretation, and therefore would be better off hidden from the masses.]
In any case, a scholar named Chananiah ben Chizkiyah ben Garon set himself to the task of reconciling Ezekiel with the Pentateuch; the Rabbis accepted his solutions as correct, and allowed Ezekiel to remain in the canon.
At one point while he was working on this task, the leading sages of the period came to visit him, and ended up voting to enact eighteen new Rabbinical laws. One of these was that touching sacred writings would make one’s hands ritually impure. (The Talmud (Shabbos 14a) gives the rationale for this enactment: people had been storing sacred food together with books of Scripture, with the result that mice, attracted to the food, were destroying the books; this decree would force people to keep them apart, since one’s hands must be ritually pure in order to handle sacred food.)
“Sacred writings,” though, doesn’t necessarily equal “books in the Scriptural canon,” and here’s where the discussion at Jamnia (the sages’ seat of learning after the destruction of the Temple, 70-86 CE) comes in. Some Rabbis held that Esther, or Song of Songs, or Ecclesiastes, though indisputably part of the Bible, should be excluded from the terms of this law. The final decision was that the law should indeed cover these three books as well, but that “the books of Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus), and any other (noncanonical) books written besides these, do not make one’s hands ritually impure” (Tosefta, Yadayim 2:5).
[In the preceding quote, the words I translated as “besides these” are mikan va’eilach in the Hebrew, which literally means “from then on.” Presumably this is where historians got the idea that there was a cutoff point - 500 years earlier, or around the time of Ben Sira - after which no later-dated books could be included in the canon. Aside from the fact that the issue under discussion is not their place in the canon but rather their status vis-a-vis the above Rabbinical law, the expression mikan va’eilach, in context, actually means “besides these.” Thus, a somewhat similar quote (Jerusalem Talmud, Sanhedrin 10:1) uses the expression “the books of Homer and all books written mikan va’eilach,” where it obviously doesn’t mean “from then on,” as that would exclude any book written after c. 700 BCE, including the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, etc.]
So in summary: the discussion at Jamnia revolved around which books are included under a certain Rabbinical law intended to protect sacred writings. Their status as part of the Bible had been determined much earlier.
RedNaxela
What was wrong with the book? I haven’t had a chance to read it. Should I not bother?