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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



tion to the Protestants, the Council of Trent 

 accepted every book in the Vulgate translation 

 as canonical. 



We turn now to the New Testament collec- 

 tion. The idea of canonicity — the right of a 

 book to be cited as Scripture — was closely con- 

 nected with regular use in public worship, and 

 so the first step toward a New Testament canon 

 was doubtless the establishment of a custom of 

 reading in the churches individual epistles or 

 gospels. The first beginnings of this custom 

 must have been very early. The reference to 

 Luke in 1 Timothy v. 18 is disputed, and 2 Peter 

 iii. 16 is usually taken as one of many argu- 

 ments against the genuineness of that epistle; 

 but a citation from Matthew is certainly referred 

 to as Scripture in the epistle of Barnabas. But 

 such recognition of an individual gospel is a long 

 way removed from the recognition of an apos- 

 tolic canon. The apostolic writings continued to 

 be very partially diffused, and readers used such 

 books as they had access to, often failing to dis- 

 tinguish between books of genuine value and 

 worthless forgeries. The most readers were very 

 uncritical, and there was an enormous floating 

 mass of spurious and apocalyptic literature, in- 

 cluding recensions of the gospel altered by he- 

 retical parties to suit their own views. It was, 

 perhaps, in contest with the heretics of the sec- 

 ond century that the necessity of forming a strict 

 list of really authoritative writings came to be 

 clearly felt; and it is remarkable that heretics, 

 generally hostile to the Old Testament, seem to 

 have been among the first to form collections of 

 Christian writings for themselves. Thus Mar- 

 cion, in the middle of the second century, se- 

 lected for himself on dogmatical grounds ten 

 Pauline epistles, and a gospel which seems to 

 have been based on Luke. Up to this time, 

 perhaps no formal canon of sacred writings had 

 been put forth by the Catholic Church. But in 

 the second half of the century the notion of an 

 authoritative New Testament collection appears 

 in full development, and there is an amount of 

 agreement as to the contents of the canon, 

 which implies that, in spite of the loose way in 

 which apocryphal books circulated side by side 

 with genuine works, the Church had no great 

 difficulty in drawing a sharp line between the 

 two classes when this was felt to be necessary. 

 At the time of the great teachers of the close 

 of the second century (Irenaeus, Tertullian, Cle- 

 ment), we find a twofold collection, the Gospel 

 and the Apostles. The Gospel comprises the four 

 evangelists ; and this number was already so 



absolutely fixed as to admit of no further 

 doubt. 



Quite beyond dispute were also the main 

 books of the Aposiolicon, the Acts, thirteen 

 epistles of Paul, 1 Peter, 1 John, and the Apoc- 

 alypse. The Muratorian fragment, which con- 

 tains a list twenty or thirty years older than 

 the third century, omits 1 Peter, but adds Jude, 

 2 and 3 John (?), and (as a disputed book) the 

 Apocalypse of Peter. The Shepherd of Hernias 

 might also be read, but it is pointed out that it is 

 of quite recent date, and not of prophetic or 

 apostolic authority. From this time forward, 

 then, the controversy is narrowed to a few books, 

 occupying a middle position between the large 

 mass of our present New Testament, which was 

 already beyond dispute, and the spurious litera- 

 ture which was quite excluded from ecclesiastical 

 use. Absolute uniformity was not at once at- 

 tainable, for various churches had quite indepen- 

 dent usages; and, as we see from the Muratorian 

 canon, a book might receive a certain ecclesias- 

 tical recognition without being, therefore, viewed 

 as strictly canonical. This dubious margin to 

 the canon was of very uncertain limits, and 

 Clement of Alexandria still uses many apoc- 

 ryphal books which found no acknowledgment 

 in other parts of the Church. Gradually the 

 list of books, which have even a disputed claim 

 to authority, is cut down. In the time of Eu- 

 sebius, the Shepherd of Hennas was still read in 

 some churches, and several other books — the 

 epistle of Barnabas, the Acts of Paul, the Rev- 

 elation of Peter, the Teachings of the Apostles — 

 appear as controverted writings. But all these 

 are plainly on the verge of rejection, while, on 

 the other hand, 2 and 3 John, Jude, James, and 

 2 Peter, are gradually gaining ground. This pro- 

 cess continued to go on without interruption till 

 at length the whole cla?s of disputed books 

 {antilegomena) melted away, and only our present 

 canon was left on the one hand, and books of 

 no authority or repute upon the other. Thus the 

 Council of Laodicea was able wholly to forbid the 

 ecclesiastical use of uncanonical books (360 A. n.), 

 and the only uncertain point remaining in the 

 tradition of the Eastern Church was the position 

 of the Apocalypse, which had gradually fallen 

 into suspicion, and was not fully reinstated till 

 the fifth century. The Western Church, on the 

 other hand, was long dubious as to the epistle 

 to the Hebrews, which was received without 

 hesitation in the East, as the Apocalypse contin- 

 ued to be in the West. The age of Augustine 

 and Jerome saw the close of the Western canon. 



