CANONS
279
CANONS
has been retained in the official Vulgate and vernacu-
lar Catholic Bibles. The same is to be said of the
titles, which as a rule are traditional ones, taken
from the Canons of Florence and Carthage. — For the
bearing of the Vatican Council on the X. T. sec II.
The Canon of the Old Testament in the Catholic Church.
The New Testament Canon outside the Church. — The Orthodox Russian and other branches of the schismatic Greek Church have a N. T. identical with the Catholic. In Syria the Xestorians possess a Canon almost identical with the final one of the ancient East Syrians; they exclude the four smaller Catholic Epistles and Apocalypse. The Monophy- sites receive all the books. The Armenians have one apocryphal letter to the Corinthians and two from the same. The Coptic-Arabic Church includes with the canonical Scriptures the Apostolic Constitu- tions and the Clementine Epistles. The Ethiopic N. T. also contains the so-called "Apostolic Consti- tutions". — As for Protestantism, the Anglicans and Calvinists always kept the entire N. T. But for over a century the followers of Luther excluded Hebrews, James, Jude. and Apocalypse, and even went further than their master by rejecting the three remaining deuterocanonicals, II Peter, II and III John. The trend of the seventeenth century Lutheran theolo- gians was to class all these writings as of doubtful, or at least inferior, authority. But gradually the German Protestants familiarized themselves with the idea that the difference between the contested books of the N. T. and the rest was one of degree of cer- tainty as to origin rather than of intrinsic character. The full recognition of these books by the Calvinists and -Vnglicans made it much more difficult for the Lutherans to exclude the X. T. deuteros than those of the Old. One of their writers of the seventeenth century allowed only a theoretic difference between the two classes, and in 1700 Bossuet could say that all Catholics and Protestants agreed on the N. T. ( anon. The only trace of opposition now remain- ing in German Protestant Bibles is in the order, Hebrews, coming with James. Jude, and Apocalypse at the end; the first not being included with the Pauline writings, while James and Jude are not ranked with the Catholic Epistles.
The criterion of inspiration (less correctly known as the criterion of canonicity"). — Even those Catholic theologians who defend Apostolicity as a test for the inspiration of the N. T. (see above) admit that it is not exclusive of another criterion, viz., Catholic tradition as manifested in the universal reception of compositions as Divinely inspired, or the ordinary teaching of the Church, or the infallible pronounce- ments of oecumenical councils. This external guar- antee is the sufficient, universal, anil ordinary proof of inspiration. The unique quality of the Sere,] Books is a revealed dogma. Moreover, by its very nature inspiration eludes human observation and is not self-evident, being essentially superphysicaJ and supernatural. Its sole absolute criterion, therefore, is the Holy inspiring Spirit, witnessing decisively to Itself, not in the subjective experience of individual souls, as Calvin maintained, neither in the doctrinal and spiritual tenor of Holy Writ itself, according to Luther, but through the constituted organ and custo- dian of Its revelations, the Church. All other evi- dences fall short of the certainty and finality neces- sary to compel the absolute assent of faith. (See Franzelin, "De Divina Traditione et Scriptura"; Wiseman, "Lectures on Christian Doctrine", Lec- ture ii; also Inspiration.)
Short disquisitions on the Canon of the N. T. appear in the Catholic Introduction! of Bai I i l, Si 11 u.n Ft, Kauli \, Tren- km. i'.i. longer one in Coknely, Intro-
QeneratU (unabridged); Vioouroux, in !>><■/. dr la Bible; Stanton in Hastings, Diet, at Ou Hi',lr. The great
library treatise i- t>\ Z\hn, Protectant and conser- vatively critical. His Qrundriee der Geschiehte dr.* A mcntlichcn Kanons (Leipzig, 1901) is a compendium of the
voluminous Geschiehte des Neutestamentliehen Kanons (Erlan-
gen and Leipzig, 1888, 1889, 1890, 1891, 1892); Westcott,
General Survey of the Canon of the New Testament (6th ed.,
Cambridge and London, 1889); Charteris, Canonicitu; an
incomplete collection of Patristic testimonies (Edinburgh and
London, 1880); Leipoldt, Geschiehte des NeutestamenHichen
Kanons Pt. I, Die Entstehuna (Leipzig, 1907); Cregory,
Canon and Text of the New Testament (1907). — Special: Cam-
kri.ynck. Saint Irenee et le canon du Nouveau Testament
(Louvain, 1S96I; Refutations ,,f Harnack; Rose, Etudes sur
les Emnqiles (Paris. 1902), 1-38; Batiffol in Revue liibliquc
(1903), 10-26. 226-233.
George J. Reid.
Canons, Apostolic, a collection of ancient ecclesi- astical decrees (eighty-five in the Eastern, fifty in the Western Church) concerning the government and dis- cipline of the Christian Church, incorporated with the Apostolic Constitutions (VIII, 47). They deal mostly with the office and duties of a Christian bishop, the qualifications and conduct of the clergy, the religious life of the Christian flock (abstinence, fasting), its ex- ternal administration (excommunication, synods, re- lations with pagans and Jews), the sacraments (Bap- tism, Eucharist, Marriage); in a word, they are a handy summary of the statutory legislation of the primitive Church. The last of these decrees contains a very important list or canon of the Holy Scriptures (see Canon of the Holy Scriptures under sub-title Canon of the New Testament). In the original Greek text they claim to be the very legislation of the Apostles themselves, at least as promulgated by their great disciple, Clement. Nevertheless, though a ven- erable mirror of ancient Christian life and blameless in doctrine, their claim to genuine Apostolic origin is quite false and untenable. Some, like Beveridge and fiefele, believe that they were originally drawn up about the end of the second or the beginning of the third century. Most modern critics agree that they could not have been composed before the Council of Antioch (341), some twenty of whose canons they quote; nor even before the latter end of the fourth century, since they are certainly posterior to the Apostolic Constitutions. Von Funk, admittedly a foremost authority on the latter and all similar early canonical texts, locates the composition of the Apos- tolic Canons in the fifth century, near the year 400. Thereby he approaches the opinion of his scholarly predecessor, Drey, the first among modern writers to study profoundly these ancient canons; he distin- guished two editions of them, a shorter one (fifty) about the middle of the fifth century, and a longer one (eighty-five) early in the sixth century. Von Funk admits but one edition. They were certainly current in the Eastern Church in the first quarter of the sixth century, for about oL'l) Severus of Antioch quotes canons 21-23 [E. W. Brooks, "Select Letters of Severus of Antioch", London, 1904 (Syriac text), I, 463-64. For various opinions concerning the date of composition see F. Xau, in Diet, de theol. cath., II, 1607-8, and the new Fr. tr. of Hefelc's "History of the Councils", Paris, 1907, 1206-11]. The home of the author seems to be Syria. He makes use of the Syrn- Macedonian calendar (can. 26), borrows very largely from a Syrian council (Antioch, 341), and ac- cording to Von Funk is identical with the compiler or interpolator of the Apostolic Constitutions, who was certainly a Syrian (Die apostol. Konstitutionen,20 I 5
As just indicated the number of these canons has given rise to no little controversy. In the Apostolic Constitutions (loc. cit.) they are eighty-five (occa- sionally eighty-four, a variant in the MSS. that arises from the occasional counting of two canons as one). In the latter half of the sixth century, John of Antioch (Joannes Scholasticus), Patriarch of Constantinople from 565 to . r >77, published a collection of synodal de- crees in which he included these eighty-five canon; (see Justcl-Voellus, Bibliotheca Juris Canonici vet- eris, Paris, 1661, II, 501), and this number was finally consecrated for the Greek Church by the Trullan or
