The Canon of the Bible

The first Christians relied on the Old Testament as their chief religious book. To them it was of divine origin and authority. The New Testament writings came into gradual use,...

Semler(382) was the most conspicuous scholar after the Reformation who undertook to correct the prevailing ideas respecting the canon. Acquainted with the works of Toland and Mo...

The first important part of the Old Testament put together as a whole was the Pentateuch, or rather, the five books of Moses and Joshua. This was preceded by smaller documents,...

A more definite testimony respecting the canon is given by Josephus towards the end of the first century A.D. “For we have not an innumerable multitude of books among us, ... bu...

introduced by _which is written_, in a letter to Pammachius; and xxii. 6 has _divine Scripture_ applied to it.(302) Ruth, Esther, and Judith are spoken of as _holy volumes_. The...

Enoch, though Hilgenfeld thinks he has discovered it in lxxxix. 61-64 and xc. 17. (_Dillmann’s Das Buch Henoch_, pp. 61, 63). Was another apocryphal Jewish book current in the t...

It will now be convenient to treat of the two Testaments together, _i.e._, _the canon of the Bible_. The canons of both have been considered separately to the end of the third c...

The Samaritan canon consists of the Pentateuch alone. This restricted collection is owing to the fact, that when the Samaritans separated from the Jews and began their worship o...

The writings of the New Testament show the authors’ acquaintance with the apocryphal books. They have expressions and ideas derived from them. Stier collected one hundred and tw...

I. The arrangement of the various parts comprising the New Testament was fluctuating in the second century; less so in the third. In the fourth century the order which the books...

(_a_) In relation to the Old Testament, the prevailing tendency in the Greek Church was to follow the Palestinian canon. Different lists appeared from time to time in which the...

As introductory to the following dissertation, I shall explain and define certain terms that frequently occur in it, especially _canon_, _apocryphal_, _ecclesiastical_, and the...

The second Helvetic Confession (A.D. 1566) speaks of the apocryphal books of the Old Testament as those which the ancients wished to be read in the churches, but not as authorit...

The substance of the present work was written toward the close of the year 1875 for the new edition of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_. Having been abridged and mutilated, contra...

The number of the books was variously estimated. Josephus gives twenty-two, which was the usual number among Christian writers in the second, third, and fourth centuries, having...