OK. Just wanted to clarify ...
The plain fact of the matter is that the canon of the Bible was not settled in the first years of the Church.
No it wasn't.
It was settled only after repeated (and perhaps heated)... (Objection, your honour! Sustained: Please don't project onto the evidence) ... discussions, and the final listing was determined by Catholic bishops.
Depends who you mean by Catholics, and when ... the Canon was not
dogmatically ratified until the 16th century, and only then because Luther tossed the books that didn't agree with his theology. However, the Muratorian Fragment (c155-200AD) lists the NT, minus a couple, plus a couple: Matthew, James, 3 John are missing, but we pretty well know Matthew was there because Papias mentions it earlier.
As we share the same Canon as the Orthodox Patriarchies, we can pretty well assert it wasn't decided by 'Catholic bishops' (bit of surematism on that site).
It's quite likely the Canon would
never have been dogmatically ratified by the Catholic Church if the Reformation hadn't argued the validity of the books that were selected as canonical.
But the Canon ratified by the Fathers was, I'm pretty sure, the one that had been in place for a thousand years. The canon in use by the Fathers from the very beginning is pretty much the canon we have today.
The article you cite mentions Hippo and Carthage in the 4th century – there was no 'Catholic Church' as such in those days, just the Church which was catholic and universal — the pope wasn't at the synods, I don't think. The crucial schism between Greek East and Latin West was a long way off ...
Lol... A list of these hundreds...some new ones were just discovered as DSS and at nag hamadi...obviously most of.the books dissaoeared when the canon was created...
Objection! Sustained: we don't know how many books 'disappeared', and there is a sort of conspiracy tendency to assume the church went round burning books left right and centre ...
Obviously our most prolific bible author Paul, wrote a lot more letters that weren't determined to be worthy...
Did he? Like what?
... This list is only gospels that didn't make it...
Would you have us accept every book that turns up calling itself scripture to be canonical?
Well if we take the DSS to be 1000, 40% of them are copies of Hebrew sacred texts, and another 30% are sectarian texts under the Jewish umbrella. That's 700 of the thousand. The remaining 300 are non-canonical books from the 2nd Temple Period ... and as far as I know there's nothing there to make the Jews break out in a sweat.
The Nag Hammadi Library consists of a collection of works, fifty-two Gnostic-y treatises, three works belonging to the
Corpus Hermeticum and a partial translation/alteration of Plato's
Republic.
The find raised particular excitement about secret gnostic societies and a Dan-Brown type discovery that would upset the institutional Catholic/Orthodox applecart ... it didn't. I don't think any scholar would argue that any book should be included in the Canon. It's all public domain, and there's nothing there, really, to cause a fuss.
Really, the orthodox cannot win. If we allow all books in, we're ridiculed for showing no insight, discretion, lack of scholarly savvy, but if we toss books out, then we're being selective, self-serving, etc. It's very easy to criticise, it's a lot harder to offer a reasoned alternative.
Then, on top of that people like your good self dismiss books that all scholars accept, on the grounds that they're written to put forward a personal agenda, etc., grind personal axes, etc., etc. and are therefore unreliable and are not something to place your faith in or build it on.
So I tend to dismiss all this kind of stuff as blowing smoke.
A lot of fuss about nothing.
