I’ve been interacting on various apologetics posts and ecumenical dialogues on different sites over the past several months, and yesterday on Called to Communion, a Protestant interlocutor said this about the Reformation and the Protestant canon of Scripture:
History books tell of of the Septuagint, but also the various “targums” that floated around. We really have only partial and incomplete lists from the first few centuries that acknowledge books of the canon. It wasn’t really until the 1500s and 1600s that such matters where solidly addressed by both Rome and Evangelicals. I am on the Reformation side because I wanted a more ancient and eternal tradition, avoiding “novelties” that accrued over the centuries. Nothing like a Reformation guided by a sovereign Lord, working through His broken and imperfect people. But the history books tell us more detail on that. I will go with the Proto-canonical books, again going with an older and more established tradition.
As for your reference to Luther and Calvin; I see them both rather as a “sledge hammer” and “chisel” to break out the Church from the traditions it had become encrusted in. The work of our sovereign Lord continues. And He has tools He uses every generation as He completes the work that He began.
That seems to make sense, right? Let’s go back to the more ancient and eternal tradition, which must mean rejecting the Catholic Church’s teachings and accepting the Reformation’s instead. He says that that must include going with the “Proto-canonical books,” which he claims is an older and more established tradition.
So what’s wrong with it? A few things: Firstly, he says (accurately) that we only have partial, incomplete, and even contradictory canons from the first centuries. That’s true. Then he claims that it wasn’t until the 1500s that the Catholic Church and the Protestants “solidly addressed” these matters. That’s false. As Catholic convert Tim Troutman responded:
This is demonstrably false. The council of Rome in 382 AD canonized all 73 books of the bible as did the Council of Carthage in 397 AD. Both of these councils were ratified by the pope and so the Catholic Church has long had a set canon which included the DC books. Trent only reaffirmed the long standing tradition. You should retract your statement.
The Catholic Church had settled the canon by the late 300s; however, prior to this time, there was indeed much discussion and debate about which books were inspired by God and which were not. Many books were universally regarded as inspired, which we could call the “Proto-canonicals,” but in both the Old and New Testaments, other books were disputed.
As late as the 350 AD, St. Cyril of Jerusalem drew up a canon of the New Testament that omitted the book of Revelation. Martin Luther was “not impressed” by Revelation, either, so much so that in his preface to Revelation in his Bibles from 1522 to 1527, he said:
…it makes me consider it to be neither apostolic nor prophetic.
For myself, I think it approximates the Fourth Book of Esdras; 8 I can in no way detect that the Holy Spirit produced it.
Moreover he seems to me to be going much too far when he commends his own book so highly — indeed, more than any of the other sacred books do, though they are much more important — and threatens that if anyone takes away anything from it, God will take away from him, etc. Again, they are supposed to be blessed who keep what is written in this book; and yet no one knows what that is, to say nothing of keeping it. This is just the same as if we did not have the book at all. And there are many far better books available for us to keep.
Many of the fathers also rejected this book a long time ago; 9 although St. Jerome, to be sure, refers to it in exalted terms and says that it is above all praise and that there are as many mysteries in it as words. Still, Jerome cannot prove this at all, and his praise at numerous places is too generous.
He questioned several other New Testament books as well, ones which also had been disputed in the early Church. But let’s just focus on Revelation.
I challenged Matt on this point and asked him why, if he was only going with the “Proto-canonicals,” he included Revelation in his Bible, since it was not universally attested to by “the ancient and older traditions” and indeed, Martin Luther, whom he considers God’s “sledgehammer” that smashed down the encrusted Catholic traditions, did not think it was of the Holy Spirit? Matt didn’t answer.
The problem with the Protestant canon and the claim that it is the more ancient one is that it is not. There were varying canonical lists floating around as the Church, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, discerned the inspired books. Finally, in the late 300s, all of the books were settled, but the canon was not dogmatically decreed until the mid-1500s when the Protestants challenged it (both the 7 deuterocanonicals of the OT and as we see with Luther, even books from the NT.)
For the 1100 years between 400 AD and 1500 AD, the Church had Bibles, meticulously copied by hand by monks in every generation to preserve God’s Word, and those Bibles included the full 27 books of the NT and the full OT with the deuterocanicals. This canon was reaffirmed even prior to the Reformation and Luther at the Ecumenical Council of Florence in the mid-1400s.
If a Protestant like Matt wants to go with only the most universally accepted of books from the ancient Church, he needs to jettison Revelation and possibly the other books of Luther’s antilegomena (Hebrews, James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John) from his Bible. But he doesn’t do that because he accepts the Catholic Church’s New Testament canon of 27 books in full (which fortunately Protestantism ultimately retained, in spite of Luther) and then accepts the Old Testament canon minus the books that the Reformers 1500 years after Christ threw out of the Bible. He accepts the authority of the Reformers and so is okay with the rejection of books that had been in the Bible for 1500 years and the acceptance of Revelation even though it was disputed in the early Church.
