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Actually, The RCC did not control the councils that determined what was canon and what was not.
There was nearly universal agreement on the canon of the OT by A.D. 250, according to one scholar, though there was at least some debate. This would be more than one hundred years before the start of the RCC.
Although the NT was debated much more, its canon began taking shape long before the RCC came to be. Paul considered the gospel of Luke to be authoratative scripture in 1 Tim 5:18. Peter also recognized Paul's writings as scripture in 2 Peter 3:15. Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp, Irenaeus, and Hippolytus were said to have recognized several books of the NT as canon all before A.D. 250. Aside from the Apocrypha, the books receiving the most controversy were Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 John and 3 john, according to the same scholar.
Here's an interesting artlicle on the subject and the New testament and who put the Bible together. I am sorry that it is long, but it is to the point and very interesting and very pertinent.
"You may ask me, however, what was the difference between the lists of New Testament books found in various countries and different authors before 397, and the catalogue drawn up at the Council of that date? Well, that introduces us to a very important point which tells us eloquently of the office that the Catholic Church performed, under God the Holy Ghost, in selecting and sifting and stamping with her Divine authority, the Scriptures of the New Law; and I make bold to say that a calm consideration of the part that Rome took in the making and drawing up and preserving of the Christian Scriptures will convince any impartial mind that to the Catholic Church alone, so much maligned, we owe it that we know what the New Testament should consist of, and why precisely it consists of these books and of no others; and that without her we should, humanly speaking, have had no New Testament at all, or, if a New Testament, then one in which works spurious and works genuine would have been mixed up in ruinous and inextricable confusion.
I have used the words 'spurious' and 'genuine' in regard to the Gospels and Epistles in the Christian Church. You are horrified, and hold up your hands and exclaim: 'Lord, save us! here we have a Higher Critic and a Modernist.' Not at all, dear reader; quite the reverse, I assure you. Observe, I have said in 'the Christian Church'—I did not say 'in the Bible' for there is nothing spurious in the Bible. But why? Simply because the Roman See in the fourth century of our era prevented anything spurious being admitted into it. There were spurious books floating about 'in the Christian Church', without a doubt in the early centuries; this is certain, because we know their very names; and it is precisely in her rejection of these, and in her guarding the collection of inspired writings from being mixed up with them, that we shall now see the great work that the Catholic Church did, under God's Holy Spirit, for all succeeding generations of Christians, whether within the fold or outside of it. It is through the Roman Catholic Church that Protestants have got their Bible; there is not (to paraphrase some words of Newman) a Protestant that vilifies and condemns the Catholic Church for her treatment of Holy Scripture, but owes it to that Church that he has the Scripture at all. What Almighty God might have done if Rome had not handed down the Bible to us is a fruitless speculation with which we have nothing whatever to do. It is a contingent possibility belonging to an order of things which has never existed, except in imagination. What we are concerned with is the order of things and the sequence of history in which we are now living, and which we know, and which consequently God has divinely disposed; and in this providential arrangement of history it is a fact, as clear as any other historical fact, that Almighty God chose the Catholic Church, and her only, to give us His Holy Scriptures, and to give us them as we have them now, neither greater nor less. This I shall now proceed to prove.
(i) Before the collection of New Testament books was finally settled at the Council of Carthage, 397, we find that there were three distinct classes into which the Christian writings were divided. This we know (and every scholar admits it) from the works of early Christian writers like Eusebius, Jerome, Epiphanius, and a whole host of others that we could name. These classes were (I) the books 'acknowledged' as Canonical, (2) books 'disputed' or 'controverted', (3) books declared 'spurious' or false. Now in class (I) i.e., those acknowledged by Christians everywhere to be genuine and authentic, and to have been written by Apostolic men, we find such books as the Four Gospels, 13 Epistles of St Paul, Acts of the Apostles. These were recognised east and west as 'Canonical', genuinely the works of the Apostles and Evangelists whose names they bore, worthy of being in the 'Canon' or sacred collection of inspired writings of the Church, and read aloud at Holy Mass. But there was (2) a class—and Protestants should particularly take notice of the fact, as it utterly undermines their Rule of Faith ‘the Bible and the Bible only'—of books that were disputed, controverted, in some places acknowledged, in others rejected; and among these we actually find the Epistle of St James, Epistle of St Jude, 2nd Epistle of St Peter; 2nd and 3rd of St John, Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Apocalypse of St John. There were doubts about these works; perhaps, it was said, they were not really written by Apostles, or Apostolic men, or by the men whose names they carried; in some parts of the Christian world they were suspected, though in others unhesitatingly received as genuine. There is no getting out of this fact, then: some of the books of our Bible which we, Catholic and Protestant alike, now recognise as inspired and as the written Word of God, were at one time, and indeed for long, viewed with suspicion, doubted, disputed, as not possessing the same authority as the others. (I am speaking only of the New Testament books; the same could be proved, if there were space, of the Old Testament; but the New Testament suffices abundantly for the argument.) But further still—what is even more striking, and is equally fatal to the Protestant theory—in this (2) class of 'controverted' and doubtful books some were to be found which are not now in our New Testament at all, but which were by many then considered to be inspired and Apostolic, or were actually read at the public worship of the Christians, or were used for instructions to the newly-converted; in short, ranked in some places as equal to the works of St James or St Peter or St Jude. Among these we may mention specially the 'Shepherd' of Hermas, Epistle of Barnabas, the Doctrine of the Twelve Apostles, Apostolic Constitutions, Gospel according to the Hebrews, St Paul's Epistle to the Laodiceans, Epistle of St Clement, and others. Why are these not in our Bible today? We shall see in a minute. Lastly (3) there was a class of books floating about before 397 A.D., which were never acknowledged as of any value in the Church, nor treated as having Apostolic authority, seeing that they were obviously spurious and false, full of absurd fables, superstitions, puerilities, and stories and miracles of Our Lord and His Apostles which made them a laughing-stock to the world. Of these some have survived, and we have them today, to let us see what stamp of writing they were; most have perished. But we know the names of about 50 Gospels (such as the Gospel of James, the Gospel of Thomas, and the like), about 22 Acts (like the Acts of Pilate, Acts of Paul and Thecla, and others), and a smaller number of Epistles and Apocalypses. These were condemned and rejected wholesale as 'Apocrypha'—that is, false, spurious, uncanonical.
(ii) This then being the state of matters, you can see at once what perplexity arose for the poor Christians in days of persecution, when they were required to surrender their sacred books. The Emperor Diocletian, for example, who inaugurated a terrible war against the Christians, issued an edict in 303 A.D. that all the churches should be razed to the ground and the Sacred Scriptures should be delivered up to the Pagan authorities to be burned. Well, the question was what was Sacred Scripture? If a Christian gave up an inspired writing to the Pagans to save his life, he thereby became an apostate: he denied his faith, he betrayed his Lord and God; he saved his life, indeed, but he lost his soul. Some did this and were called 'traditores', traitors, betrayers, 'deliverers up' (of the Scriptures). Most, however, preferred martyrdom, and refusing to surrender the inspired writings, suffered the death. But it was a most perplexing and harrowing question they had to decide—what really was Sacred Scripture? I am not bound to go to the stake for refusing to give up some 'spurious' Gospel or Epistle. Could I, then, safely give up some of the 'controverted' or disputed books, like the Epistle of St James, or the Hebrews, or the Shepherd of Hermas, or the Epistle of St Barnabas, or of St Clement? There is no need to be a martyr by mistake. And so the stress of persecution had the effect of making still more urgent the necessity of deciding once and for all what was to form the New Testament. What, definitely and precisely, were to be the books for which a Christian would be bound to lay down his life on pain of losing his soul?
(iii) Here, as I said before, comes in the Council of Carthage, 397 A.D., confirming and approving the decrees of a previous Council (Hippo, 393 A.D.) declaring, for all time to come, what was the exact collection of sacred writings thenceforth to be reckoned, to the exclusion of all others, as the inspired Scripture of the New Testament. That collection is precisely that which Catholics possess at this day in their Douai Bible. That decree of Carthage was never changed. It was sent to Rome for confirmation. As I have already remarked, a Council, even though not a general Council of the whole Catholic Church, may yet have its decrees made binding on the whole Church by the approval and will of the Pope. A second Council of Carthage over which St Augustine presided, in 419 A.D., renewed the decrees of the former one, and declared that its act was to be notified to Boniface, Bishop of Rome, for the purpose of confirming it. From that date all doubt ceased as to what was, and what was not 'spurious', or 'genuine', or 'doubtful' among the Christian writings then known. Rome had spoken. A Council of the Roman Catholic Church had settled it. You might hear a voice here or there, in East or West, in subsequent times, raking up some old doubt, or raising a question as to whether this or that book of the New Testament is really what it claims to be, or should be where it is. But it is a voice in the wilderness.
Rome had fixed the 'Canon' of the New Testa*ment. There are henceforward but two classes of books—inspired and not inspired. Within the covers of the New Testament all is inspired; all without, known or unknown, is uninspired. Under the guidance of the Holy Ghost the Council declared 'This is genuine, that is false'; 'this is Apostolic, that is not Apostolic'. She sifted, weighed, discussed, selected, rejected, and finally decided what was what. Here she rejected a writing that was once very popular and reckoned by many as inspired, and was actually read as Scripture at public service; there, again, she accepted another that was very much disputed and viewed with suspicion, and said: 'This is to go into the New Testament.' She had the evidence before her; she had tradition to help her; and above all she had the assistance of the Holy Spirit, to enable her to come to a right conclusion on so momentous a matter. And in fact, her con*clusion was received by all Christendom until the sixteenth century, when as we shall see, men arose rebelling against her decision and altering the Sacred Volume. But, at all events in regard to the New Testament, the Reformers left the books as they found them, and today their Testament contains exactly the same books as ours; and what I wish to drive home, is that they got these books from Rome, that without the Roman Catholic Church they would not have got them, and that the decrees of Carthage, 397 and 419 A.D., when all Christianity was Roman Catholic—reaffirmed by the Council of Florence, 1442, under Pope Eugenius IV, and the Council of Trent, 1546—these decrees of the Roman Church, and these only are the means and the channel and the authority which Almighty God has used to hand down to us His written Word. Who can deny it? The Church existed before the Bible; she made the Bible; she selected its books, and she preserved it. She handed it down; through her we know what is the Word of God, and what the word of man; and hence to try at this time of day, as many do, to overthrow the Church by means of this very Bible, and to put it above the Church, and to revile her for destroying it and corrupting it—what is this but to strike the mother that reared them; to curse the hand that fed them; to turn against their best friend and benefactor; and to repay with ingratitude and slander the very guide and protector who has led them to drink of the water out of the Saviour's fountains"
1 Tim 5:18 - for the scripture says, "You shall not muzzle an ox when it is treading out the grain," and, "The laborer deserves his wages."
Okay, did you mean another verse, because I am having a hard time figuring out how this verse relates to your quote.
Paul refered to Deuteronomy 25:4 "You shall not muzzle an ox when it is treading out the grain" and Luke 10:7 "the laborer deserves his wages" as scripture.
Here's an interesting artlicle on the subject and the New testament and who put the Bible together. I am sorry that it is long, but it is to the point and very interesting and very pertinent.
"...we shall now see the great work that the Catholic Church did, under God's Holy Spirit, for all succeeding generations of Christians, whether within the fold or outside of it. It is through the Roman Catholic Church that Protestants have got their Bible...
...What Almighty God might have done if Rome had not handed down the Bible to us is a fruitless speculation with which we have nothing whatever to do. It is a contingent possibility belonging to an order of things which has never existed, except in imagination...
...Almighty God chose the Catholic Church, and her only, to give us His Holy Scriptures, and to give us them as we have them now, neither greater nor less. This I shall now proceed to prove..."
I shortened the quote you posted just for space considerations. You didn't say whether you believed the article so I won't assume automatically this is what you believe.
Clearly, the writer is giving the RCC all the credit, but it is a sad attempt to rewrite history. I suppose I could try to convinve you my great-great grandfather actually wrote the Declaration of Independence single-handedly too. Even if it were true that all canon had been determined by the RCC (and that it was well done), they should not be so arrogant and proud, as this writer portrays it. As God's inspired word they should rather be humbled greatly to be so used. As it is, it is a false pride that intends to convince us this is true.
The fact that Martin Luther said that they owe the Bible to the Catholics. Martin Luther, King of the Protestants, recognized that they wouldn't have a Bible if it were not for the Catholic Church, and you, the great Just1Man, claim Martin Luther to be a liar?
"We are compelled to concede to the Papists
that they have the Word of God,
that we received it from them,
and that without them
we should have no knowledge of it at all."
~ Martin Luther
Revisionist History is obviously your M.O, not the Catholics.
Once again, You still haven't answered the question of where you get your bible. How do you know it has authority. From which you claim your authority. Don't ignore the question.... Answer it if you are so full of the "truth"
The fact that Martin Luther said that they owe the Bible to the Catholics. Martin Luther, King of the Protestants, recognized that they wouldn't have a Bible if it were not for the Catholic Church, and you, the great Just1Man, claim Martin Luther to be a liar?
"We are compelled to concede to the Papists that they have the Word of God, that we received it from them, and that without them we should have no knowledge of it at all."
~ Martin Luther
Revisionist History is obviously your M.O, not the Catholics.
Gee, I guess you got me...I may have erred when I assumed the writer was attempting to rewrite history, but I did say he was trying to give credit, which is only his opinion.
Luther lived in a time where the RCC held the Vulgate as their source. He translated it into German, his native tongue. Luther did some great things because he recognized the arrogance of the RCC. Just because he did some great things, doesn't mean I agree with his every thought. NO, I don't claim he is a liar, but that comment is an opinion, not a "truth".
I should think the Catholic church is still upset with him for his "impudence". They did try to have him killed, or did your history book leave that fact out?
By the way, I am not nor do I claim to be "great". That is why I am just1man. Is "juj" intended to be "judge"? They sound the same to me.
Luther did some great things because he recognized the arrogance of the RCC. Just because he did some great things, doesn't mean I agree with his every thought. NO, I don't claim he is a liar, but that comment is an opinion, not a "truth".
I should think the Catholic church is still upset with him for his "impudence". They did try to have him killed, or did your history book leave that fact out?
First, Luther did have some great ideas, but his execution failed miserably which he later himself admitted. He should have tried to change the church from within if he had issues with the Catholic Church. He did have guts there is no doubt, but the result of his herecy is the total chaos of the protestant world we have today.
Second. Luther was a smart and a religious man and his comment mentioned above might have been his opinion, but I guarantee I will take his word over yours any day of the week. If he thought it and being the author of the first protestant Bible, you as a protestant you should take his word on it. But then again, why would you? Your brand of protestantism probably is 30+ breaks removed from Lutheranism.
The Catholics bear no ill will toward Martin Luther. I certainly don't. I also must disclose that I am an ex-Lutheran.
First, Luther did have some great ideas, but his execution failed miserably which he later himself admitted. He should have tried to change the church from within if he had issues with the Catholic Church. He did have guts there is no doubt, but the result of his herecy is the total chaos of the protestant world we have today.
Second. Luther was a smart and a religious man and his comment mentioned above might have been his opinion, but I guarantee I will take his word over yours any day of the week. If he thought it and being the author of the first protestant Bible, you as a protestant you should take his word on it. But then again, why would you? Your brand of protestantism probably is 30+ breaks removed from Lutheranism.
The Catholics bear no ill will toward Martin Luther. I certainly don't. I also must disclose that I am an ex-Lutheran.
Luther did try to change the church from within, but met with a structure that would not consider his thoughts with any sincerity. That is what eventually led to his posting his Thesis of Contention.
Just as I cannot agree with his every opinion, I do not agree with yours that the protestant world is in total chaos or that he would be entirely to blame if it were. On the other hand, I never expected you to take mine over anyones necessarily.
Luther may have authored the first, but it is the rank and file Catholic that is to give their greatest thanks to him. Without him Catholics would still not own a Bible and couldn't read it if they did. It would have been in latin and the laguage would still have been barred from all but the RCC priesthood.
Although they did not succeed Luther was to be a martre if the RCC had its way.
Luther did try to change the church from within, but met with a structure that would not consider his thoughts with any sincerity. That is what eventually led to his posting his Thesis of Contention.
Just as I cannot agree with his every opinion, I do not agree with yours that the protestant world is in total chaos or that he would be entirely to blame if it were. On the other hand, I never expected you to take mine over anyones necessarily.
Luther may have authored the first, but it is the rank and file Catholic that is to give their greatest thanks to him. Without him Catholics would still not own a Bible and couldn't read it if they did. It would have been in latin and the laguage would still have been barred from all but the RCC priesthood.
Although they did not succeed Luther was to be a martre if the RCC had its way.
Luther wanted instant gratification. Moving the RCC in matters of faith is worse than trying to turn the Queen Mary. It's like trying to move the Rock of Gibralter It takes time, maybe not even in his life time or several life times. The man had no patience, period. But he had many legitimate concerns at the time and pretty much martyred himself for Forest Gumping his way into improvement of the Church. So for that, thank you Martin Luther.
The Catholic idea of keeping the Bible away from lay people was predicated on fools like us reading the it and forming their own opinion and committing herecy as is done on this board in a daily basis. While this is quite a comfortable thought for a protestant, for Catholics, especially Catholics of Luther's time, it was something they didn't want to contend with.
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...I may have erred when I assumed the writer was attempting to rewrite history, but I did say he was trying to give credit, which is only his opinion.
