CANON
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CANON
nackian critics, employs all the Pauline writings,
except the short Philemon, as sacred and canonical.
The Muratorian Canon, contemporary with Irenseus,
gives the complete list of the thirteen, which, it
should be remembered, does not include Hebrews.
The heretical Basilides and his disciples quote from
this Pauline group in general. The copious extracts
from Mansion's works scattered through Iremeus and
Tertullian show that he was acquainted with the
thirteen as in ecclesiastical use, and selected his
AposMikon of six from them. The testimony of
Polycarp and Ignatius is again capital in this case.
Eight of St. Paul's writings are cited by Polycarp;
St. Ignatius of Antioch ranked the Apostles above
the Prophets, and must therefore have allowed the
written compositions of the former at least an equal
rank with those of the latter ("Ad Philadelphios",
v). St. Clement of Rome refers to Corinthians as at
the head "of the Evangel"; the Muratorian Canon
gives the same honour to I Corinthians, so that we
may rightfully draw the inference, with Dr. Zahn,
that as early as Clement's day St. Paul's Epistles
had been collected and formed into a group with a
fixed order. Zahn has pointed out confirmatory
signs of this in the manner in which Sts. Ignatius
and Polycarp employ these Epistles. The tendency
of the evidence is to establish the hypothesis that
the important Church of Corinth was the first to
form a complete collection of St. Paul's writings.
(e) The remaining Books. — In this formative period the Epistle to the Hebrews did not obtain a firm footing in the Canon of the Universal Church. At Rome it was not yet recognized as canonical, as shown by the Muratorian catalogue of Roman origin; Irenseus probably cites it, but makes no reference to a Pauline origin. Yet it was known at Rome as early as St. Clement, as the latter's epistle attests. The Alexandrian Church admitted it as the work of St. Paul, and canonical. The Montanists favoured it, and the aptness with which vi, 4-8, lent itself to Montanist and Novatianist rigour was doubt- less one reason why it was suspect in the West. Also during this period the excess over the minimal Canon composed of the Gospels and thirteen epistles varied. The seven "Catholic" Epistles (James, Jude, I and II Peter, and the three of John) had not yet been brought into a special group, and, with the possible exception of the three of St. John, remained isolated units, depending for their canonical strength on variable circumstances. But towards the end of the second century the canonical minimum was enlarged and, besides the Gospels and Pauline Epis- tles, unalterably embraced Acts, I Peter, I John (to which II and III John were probably attached), and Apocalypse. Thus Hebrews, James, Jude, and II Peter remained hovering outside the precincts of universal eanonicity, and the controversy about them and the subsequently disputed Apocalypse form the larger part of the remaining history of the Canon of the N. T. However, at the beginning of the third century the N. T. was formed in the sense that the content of its main divisions, what may be called its essence, was sharply defined and universally received, while nil the secondary books were recognized in sonic Churches. A singular except inn to the univer- sality of the above-described substance of the X. T. was the Canon of the primitive East Syrian Church, which did not contain any of the Catholic Epistles or Apocalypse.
(f) The idea of a Xew Testament. — The question of the principle that dominated the practical canoni- zation of the X. T. Scriptures has already been dis- CUSSed under (10. The faithful must have had from
the beginning some realization thai in the writings oi the Apostles and Evangelists they had acquired a now body of Divine Scriptures, a New written Testa ment destined to stand side by side with the Old.
That the Gospel and Epistles were the written Word
of God, was fully realized as soon as the fixed collec-
tions were formed; but to seize the relation of this
new treasure to the old was possible only when
the faithful acquired a better knowledge of the faith.
In this connexion Zahn observes with much truth
that the rise of Montanism, with its false prophets,
who claimed for their written productions — the self-
styled Testament of the Paraclete — the authority of
revelation, aroused the Christian Church to a fuller
sense that the age of revelation had expired with the
last of the Apostles, and that the circle of sacred
Scripture is not extensible beyond the legacy of the
Apostolic Era. Montanism began in 156; a genera-
tion later, in the works of Ireneeus, we discover the
firmly-rooted idea of two Testaments, with the same
Spirit operating in both. For Tertullian (c. 200)
the body of the new Scriptures is an instrument urn
on at least an equal footing and in the same specific
class as the instrumentum formed by the Law and
the Prophets. Clement of Alexandria was the first
to apply the word "Testament" to the sacred library
of the Xew Dispensation. A kindred external influ-
ence is to be added to Montanism: the need of setting
up a barrier, between the genuine inspired literature
and the flood of pseudo-Apostolic apocrypha, gave
an additional impulse to the idea of a X. T. Canon,
and later contributed not a little to the demarcation
of its fixed limits.
(2) The period of discussion; c. A. D. 22 0-367. — In this stage of the historical development of the Canon of the X. T. we encounter for the first time a consciousness, reflected in certain ecclesiastical writers, of the differences between the sacred col- lections in divers sections of Christendom. This variation is witnessed to, and the discussion stimu- lated by, two of the most learned men of Christian antiquity, Origen, and Eusebius of Cfesarea, the ecclesiastical historian. A glance at the Canon as exhibited in the authorities of the African, or Cartha- ginian, Church, will complete our brief survey of this period of diversity and discussion: — ■
(a) Origen and his school. — Origen's travels gave him exceptional opportunities to know the traditions of widely separated portions of the Church and made him very conversant with the discrepant attitudes toward certain parts of the N. T. He divided books with Biblical claims into three classes: (a) those uni- versally received; (/3) those whose Apostolicity was questioned; (7) apocryphal works. In the first class, the Homologoumena, stood the Gospels, the thirteen Pauline Epistles, Acts, Apocalypse, I Peter, and I John. The contested writings were Hebrews, II Peter, II and III John, James, Jude, Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hennas, the Didache, and probably the Gospel of the Hebrews. Personally, Origen accepted all of these as Divinely inspired, though viewing con- trary opinions with toleration. Origen's authority seems to have given to Hebrews and the disputed Catholic Epistles a firm place in the Alexandrian Canon, their tenure there having been previously insecure, judging from the exegetical work of Clement . and the list in the Codex Claromontanus, which is assigned by competent scholars to an early Alexan- drian origin.
(b) Eusebius, Bishop of Capsarea in Palestine, was one of Origen's most eminent disciples, a man of wide erudition. In imitation of his master he divided religious literature- into three classes: (ol Homolo- goumena, or compositions universally received as sacred, the four Gospels, thirteen Epistles of St. Paul, Hebrews, Acts. I Peter, I John, and Apocalypse. There is some inconsistency in his classification; for instance, though ranking Hebrews with the books of universal reception, he elsewhere admits it is dis- puted, (p) The second category is composed of the Antilegomena, or contested writings; these in turn
