Biblical canon
A Biblical canon is a specific set of texts for the Bible that a religious movement believes are divinely inspired Scripture. Religious Jews believe in the Hebrew Bible while Christians add the New Testament onto it, though some of the texts that they do share are interpreted differently.
Biblical canons can differ even among different sects of the same faith, such as the Protestant and Catholic Bible canons.
Bible canons
[change | change source]Church Councils
[change | change source]There is no singular "Christian Bible," since different denominations of Christianity include or exclude different books. The Catholic Church includes the Deuterocanonical books in the Old Testament, while most religious Jews and Protestant Christians do not.
No ecumenical council was held in the early Church to affirm a standard Bible canon for the whole Church,[source?] though some regional councils were held that did affirm a specific collection of texts as inspired scripture, such as the Synod of Hippo in 393 CE.[source?]
Contrary to popular opinion, the Councils of Nicaea did not affirm any specific Biblical canon.[source?] This myth comes from a 9th-century Greek text called the Synodicon Vetus, which claimed that the members of the council placed the books under an altar and prayed that the divinely inspired scriptures would rise to the top of the altar.[source?]
Some scholars[who?] argue that the Council of Rome[page needed] did not affirm any specific Biblical canon either, believing that the Gelasian Decree was either partially edited or a medieval addition entirely that was not included in the original council.[1][2][3] Jerome of Antioch, who probably attended the council[source?] and who was definitely in Rome,[source?] makes no mention of the council deciding on the inspired scriptures.[source?]
Books
[change | change source]Old Testament
[change | change source]These books are included in most Christian Bibles in the Old Testament, and are mostly shared by Jews.
- Genesis
- Exodus
- Leviticus
- Numbers
- Deuteronomy
- Joshua
- Judges
- Ruth
- 1 & 2 Samuel
- 1 & 2 Kings
- 1 & 2 Chronicles
- Ezra
- Nehemiah
- Esther
- Job
- Psalms
- Proverbs
- Ecclesiastes
- Song of Solomon, sometimes called Song of Songs
- Isaiah
- Jeremiah
- Lamentations
- Ezekiel
- Daniel
- Hosea
- Joel
- Amos
- Obadiah
- Jonah
- Micah
- Nahum
- Habakkuk
- Zephaniah
- Haggai
- Zechariah
- Malachi
New Testament
[change | change source]These books and letters are included in most Christian Bibles, though traditional authorship for most of them is challenged in modern scholarship.[source?]
- Matthew
- Mark
- Luke
- John
- Acts
- Romans
- 1 Corinthians
- 2 Corinthians
- Galatians
- Ephesians
- Philippians
- Colossians
- 1 Thessalonians
- 2 Thessalonians
- 1 Timothy
- 2 Timothy
- Titus
- Philemon
- Hebrews
- James
- 1 Peter
- 2 Peter
- 1 John
- 2 John
- 3 John
- Jude
- Revelation, sometimes called The Revelation of Christ to John
Related pages
[change | change source]Part of a series on Christianity | ||
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| Jesus Christ |  | |
| Foundations | ||
| Bible | ||
| Theology | Salvation · Baptism · Trinity · Father · Son · Holy Spirit · Christology · Mariology · Apologetics · Spiritual warfare | |
| History and traditions | ||
| Denominations | ||
| Topics | ||
- ↑ Hahneman, Geoffrey Mark (1992). The Muratorian Fragment and the Development of the Canon. Clarendon Press. pp. 158–160. ISBN 978-0-19-826341-8.
- ↑ Gallagher, Edmon L. (2012). "The Old Testament "Apocrypha" in Jerome's Canonical Theory". JECS. 20: 213–233.
- ↑ Rothschild, Clare K. (2022). The Muratorian Fragment: text, translation, commentary. Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. pp. 9–10. ISBN 978-3-16-161174-2.