Fr. Dave's Thoughts - February 28, 2025

Dear Friends,

This week, I want to discuss a few foundational things about the Bible before we move on to a more detailed look. Christians almost universally use the word Bible to indicate the book that contains both the Old and New Testaments. Sometimes the Old Testament is called the Hebrew Bible or the Hebrew scriptures. Throughout this blog piece, I will use the term Old Testament because this is the way most Christian people know it. But just because we call it old, does not make it irrelevant or inferior. I do know people who say to me that the Old Testament isn’t as important or doesn’t represent the same God as the New Testament. That is a premise that not only I, but the church throughout its history has soundly rejected. Marcion was a second century theologian who created his own Bible and did not include any part of the Old Testament at all. Marcionism was rejected by the early church fathers as heresy. In fact, the second century church father Tertullian wrote a five-book treatise entitled Adversus Marcionem (Against Marcion). We are not Marcionites, we believe that the Old Testament is just as much the inspired Word of God as the New Testament is. In fact, the Old Testament is the only Bible that Jesus and his apostles knew.

The Bibles used by the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church and the majority of Protestant Churches are all a bit different. According to Merriam Webster, “a canon is an authoritative list of books accepted as Holy Scripture.” The Protestant canon contains 66 books: the Old Testament which has 39 books, the same as the Jewish canon but in a different order, and the New Testament which has 27 books. The Roman Catholic canon contains an additional eleven books that Protestants call the apocrypha. “Apocrypha” is a Greek word that means hidden. We Episcopalians, like our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters, are among those Protestants that use the apocrypha, in fact it comes up as a part of our Sunday lectionary. On occasion, you will hear a reading from the apocrypha on Sunday morning during worship. However, we Episcopalians have also taken these books and put them all together into one book and physically inserted them between the Old and New Testaments. To my knowledge, neither the Roman Catholic Church nor the Orthodox Churches have done this. Martin Luther was the first to put them all together back in the 16th century. Finally, I just want to add that the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Bibles differ only in the order in which the books are presented overall.

As you can imagine, there was a lot of conflict through history on which books should be included in the Biblical canon and which ones should not. That goes for both the Old and New Testaments. The conversation about what was included and what was not included and why is way beyond the scope of this little blog. If you are interested in this, please let me know and I can offer you some resources that might help in your research. I would shy away from the internet, however, as there is so much incorrect information out there online.

The canon that makes up our Bible, including the apocrypha, took its final form sometime between 380 and 495 AD. We do know that the complete list of canonical books was reproduced by Pope Gelasius I in 495, a text known as the Gelasian Decree.[i]

Next week, I want to continue to look at the foundational material before we begin looking at each of the books themselves.

Peace,

Dave

[i] The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, Fl. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, eds., Oxford University Press, New York, NY: 1997; pp. 279