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Topic:
Thoughts And Things Of The Bible --
Canon Of Scripture, The
The canon of the scripture may be generally described as the
"collection of books which form the original and authoritative
written rule of the faith and practice of the Christian Church,"
i.e. the Old and New Testaments. The word canon, in classical Greek, is
properly a straight rod, "a rule" in the widest sense, and
especially in the phrases "the rule of the Church," "the
rule of faith," "the rule of truth," The first direct
application of the term canon to the Scriptures seems to be in the
verses of Amphilochius (cir. 380 A.D.), where the word indicates the
rule by which the contents of the Bible must be determined, and thus
secondarily an index of the constituent books. The uncanonical books
were described simply as "those without" or "those
uncanonized." The canonical books were also called "books of
the testament," and Jerome styled the whole collection by the
striking name of "the holy library," which happily expresses
the unity and variety of the Bible. After the Maccabean persecution the
history of the formation of the Canon is merged in the history of its
contents. The Old Testament appears from that time as a whole. The
complete Canon of the New Testament, as commonly received at present,
was ratified at the third Council of Carthage (A.D. 397), and from that
time was accepted throughout the Latin Church. Respecting the books of
which the Canon is composed, see the article Bible. (The books of
Scripture were not made canonical by act of any council, but the council
gave its sanction to the results of long and careful investigations as
to what books were really of divine authority and expressed the
universally-accepted decisions of the church. The Old Testament Canon is
ratified by the fact that the present Old Testament books were those
accepted in the time of Christ and endorsed by him, and that of 275
quotations of the Old Testament in the New, no book out of the Canon is
quoted from except perhaps the word of Enoch in Jude.--ED.)
Derived from Easton's and Smith's Bible Dictionaries
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