The Canon of Scripture

[Yeshua1]

Yeshua, I may be wrong, but I don't think that is correct. No church at this time had a complete copy of all that we call the canon. I would think, they had "bits and pieces" and circulated those.

what i ewas saying was that what later become officially recognised as the NT canon was alread pretty much being circulated around the local churches and was received as inspired texts, and the copying process was already well under way with a few decades of the early second century...

the so cally Church fathers of the second century could quote and referencre essentially parts of the canon even at that time, and if you where to piece together all the various times the NT books were used as a reference, would be able to assemblr the canon pretty much save for handul "disputed books!"

So the catholic Council did NOT give us the canon, but had it "officially ratiifed!" as the churches had already before than pretty much agreed what there were!

 

[preachinjesus]

PJ,

What final group (or meeting) gave us the "final" NT Canon? Were they, what we today would think of as catholic?

The canon was formalized at the Synod of Carthage in AD 397. Almost everyone agrees on that I believe.

 

[Zenas]

For a book to be included in the Canon, doesn't have to be written by an Apostle or by someone directly mentored by an Apostle. Seems like I heard that somewhere.

That's certainly the way it turned out, and that may have been one of the criteria. But who set out the criteria for inclusion?

PreachinJesus, you seem to be really up on this. Are there any ancient writings, council proceedings or otherwise, that set forth the criteria for canonization? I ask because I have seen these lists of criteria, often in bibles, but no one ever cites to the source. I get the impression these criteria were made up by modern commentators who have observed certain patterns throughout the N.T. canon.