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At Yavneh, (or Jamnia),in the twenty or so years after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the Jewish Rabbis studied their sacred scrolls in depth, and finally, many years later still, produced the literature known as the Mishnah. Their Scriptures were collected under three headings, - the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings, but never would they call their collection the 'Old' Testament.
The 'Old Testament' is a Christian invention, even though its content is very similar to the Jewish Scriptures. The Christians' OT, however, was the Greek Septuagint translation, (LXX), and contained more scrolls than the more conservative Hebrew list. - (Trouble in store for the years of the Protestant Reformation).
Christians accepted the Jewish Scriptures without question, for Jesus had used them in his worship, and in his teaching. They believed Jesus to be the fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets, and quickly began to read the scrolls, interpreting them in the light of the Jesus-event, and seeing him as part of the Jewish heritage. - until 70; until they were banished from the synagogues. But still no-one sat down to write a 'New' Testament. Jesus had written nothing, and it was the spoken word of the apostles that carried authority, not written accounts, even by the end of the 1st cent CE. Both Bp Ignatius of Antioch and Bp Polycarp of Smyrna quote the words of Jesus as being of equal authority with the Scriptures.
In the final analysis, it is authority that creates 'scripture', long before it is canonised.
A collection of Paul's letters was the earliest to be made, and is mentioned in 2 Peter 3.15-16, at the end of the 1st cent. It was considered to be an appendage to 'the' Scriptures.
In the middle of the 2nd cent, Justin Martyr in Rome knew, and wrote about, a collection of four Gospels, which were read, along with the 'compositions of the prophets' in Church. In codex form, as favoured among Christians, it was much easier to keep the four together, and in the same order.
His contemporary, Tatian, introduced his Diatessaron in 165 CE. It was 'one' composite Gospel, compiled from the four, which became very popular in Greek and in Coptic, spreading widely in the East.
Another 2nd cent contemporary, Marcion, a Gentile devotee of Paul, who lived near the Black Sea, rejected the whole of the Jewish Scriptures, and published his 'Gospel and Apostle' with all OT references cut out. It did include the four Gospels and ten letters of Paul, (but not the Pastorals).
His gnostic tendencies resulted in the Church's need for a standard of the apostolic teaching, which could be used to check ideas that were deviant. Attention was now given more to the 'limits' of acceptable texts. All four Gospels were now standard, together with The Acts, and the apostolic letters, while a wide variety of Early Church perspectives were included, to establish a comprehensive list. This was inspired, and far-sighted wisdom, looking through diverse human lenses to the one divine event. The Acts was pivotal, honouring all the apostles, Peter and Paul and James, as if they were in total harmony together as apostles!
By the end of the 2nd cent, a list existed. It is known now as the Muratorian Fragment, after the librarian who found a copy of it in 1740. It contains a list of 21 books in the NT, together with notes on them. Surprisingly, it includes the 'apocryphal' Book of Wisdom, but nothing written after the 1st cent. It was still not mandatory. Many Bible Schools came into existence, in between the occasional but horrific periods of persecution, and scholarship flourished in the East, in the Latin schools of N. Africa, and among the Egyptians who spoke Coptic as well as Greek. Their great scholar was Origen, who established a very important library at Caesarea, where he was Bishop.
A later Bishop of Caesarea was Eusebius, who wrote the history of the Church from its beginnings up to the Edict of Constantine in 312 CE. He benefited from Origen's library for all his sources, and additionally wrote a list of accepted Christian writings for his times, in the early 4th cent. He totally rejected many of the additional writings which had become popular, maintaining the 'apostolic' standard of '1st cent only'.
He was the chief ecclesiastical adviser to the Emperor Constantine, who wrote, commanding 50 copies of the Christian scriptures to be made at his expense, for the new Churches he was building in his new Eastern capital city, Constantinople. (Only 50 years earlier, all Christian books were being burnt! ) At least one of these books still exists! - the Codex Sinaiticus, or the Codex Vaticanus.
Bp Athanasius of Alexandria, wrote to all the bishops in the Church in 367, announcing the date of the next Easter festival as usual, but including a list of books to be considered canonical. It is the first to include the 27 as we have them now. At this time too, Jerome was translating the Bible into Latin for the Bp of Rome.
It became the standard Vulgate edition, which was still in use by Roman Catholics in the 20th cent.
When Augustine was converted to Christianity in 386 CE, he accepted the canon of scripture as complete with its 27 NT books, but realised that no ecclesiastical council had ever made an official pronouncement on such Holy Scripture. When Bishop of Hippo, he convened such a Council to do this in 393, but no records have survived. At the Synod of Carthage in 397, he again ratified the list.
Thus the church acquired its Bible which remained unchanged until the challenges of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th cent.
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