His By Grace,No worries. Like you, I would think that everyone is where they are because they believe the Spirit of Truth has led them there. I think if they did not feel that way, then they would move to another place, just as I did in becoming a Catholic. And I certainly would rather a Christian be as good a right where they are than to ask them to be a bad Catholic.However, I do not think it is true that I am the only one inserting “religious beliefs” here. It may appear to you as so, only because my view is different and also in the minority here. Because of my minority status here there is often little use in my attempting to support our view with scripture. We do not agree on meaning so it is rather pointless and in my experience it will tend to hijack any thread into twisting and fruitless debates on the meaning of verses. BTW, I submit that the meaning of a particular verse accepted by any particular person is predominantly an expression of their “religious belief”, not always but mostly so. Therefore I've found it more fruitful in such forums as this to appeal to reason and the early Christians. Perhaps that is an error, but it has been my experience (and am sure other Catholics) that quoting scripture is a waste of my time in defending my view. Perhaps one result is often the false assumption that we Catholics never use or cannot support our views with scripture. Anyway, enough on that and back to this thread. We all do bring “religious beliefs” here. The prime assumption of this thread is a clearly Protestant “religious belief” that the shorter OT canon is “Biblical” and that the longer one is not. Not everything any of us believe is based on the Bible and this is one of those things. The Bible does not contain a list of inspired books. God did not give us a complete book or a list. The presumption that the Bible each of us has and uses is the one God wanted us to have is for the most part coming from our "religios beliefs". We each put our trust that is so, based on the faith of many that have gone before us.As for the Church's role in all our Canons, the list developed over 3-4 centuries. There were private debates and occasionally councils held where a list of “inspired” books developed and gradually was accepted by the Church. Early on there were some Gnostic Jewish writings a few wanted considered and rejected (from inclusion in the OT- these writings predated Jesus). And many, many more Christian Gnostic, even true Christian and heretical books discussed and rejected as apocrypha. As time passed fewer and fewer believable examples of authentic writings could be submitted for consideration. At some point it would become no longer believable that an authentic writing that could be traced to an Apostle that had not previously been mentioned, referenced by another or previously considered could suddenly appear. So gradually the list of possible canidates for consideration as “inspired” stopped growing and was quite focused. I do not want to paint a picture here of unanimous consent, it was anything but. However the interesting thing is that a fairly consistent and constant canon of OT and NT books remained fixed even if some or many scholars did not hold all OT as equals. Even people with reservations about certain books used them and believed them inspired, just not as inspired as the rest. My patron, St Thomas, was among those that reasoned “degrees” of inspiration. The Didache is an example of a work held inspired and also apocrypha, as in not part of the Canon rather than it being false. The Church for many years left the issue of the canon open. This was at least partially because it was realized they did not have everything that was written in the first century and hoped some writings which they knew once existed (the Q for example) might one day be recovered. It was not until Luther forced the issue that the old debate arose again and the Church officially closed the canon An interesting side note is a reversal in attitude between the East and West from the early days in this process. In the earlier times (say 150-300) the Eastern Church was much more lenient about which books to include and which to exclude. The issue was not so much creating a “Bible” as it was which books could be considered inspired and good therefore to use, read in Church and especially in teaching catechumens. Many books considered apocrypha in the West find favor in the East in addition to the Deuterocanical (7 books in question). When the Latin Vulgate (late 4th early 5th century) is translated loosely based (by Church authority requesting it’s use) on the Septuagint, Saint Jerome apparently had some issues with the deuterocanical books (7 books in question). He writes a preface which basically questions those books. Again it is not clear to me his issue was lack of inspiration as much as not placing them on the same level as the rest of the OT canon. The switch of views occurs with the publication of the Vulgate. The East then adopting the canon of the Vulgate and much more rigid stance (though they would later add two more books to it). The West formerly much less flexible concerning inspired books and now following St Jerome’s lead, scholars there start to question the seven books. Again it often seems to me a matter of degrees of inspiration because many of the people sharing Jerome’s view quote and use the deuterocanical the same way they quote the rest of the OT. Regardless of all this, the same fixed canon remains in use everywhere for the next thousand years or so until called in question by Luther. (Think the East still has two extra books of Maccabees in it and an extra Psalms 151).
