Canon of the Old Testament

THE CANON OF THE OLD TESTAMENT, BY TOBIAS MULLEN, Bishop of Erie I, for my part, would not believe the Gospel, unless the authority of the Catholic Church moved me to it.” Saint Augustine, Contra Ep. Man. Fund. 1892 FR PUSTET, Printer to the Holy Apostolic See and the S. Congregation of Rites FR. PUSTET & CO. NEW YORK 2 Preface. “Entered according to act of Congress in the year 1888, by TOBIAS MULLEN, In the office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.” Preface. Western Christendom is still infested with the plague of religious controversy, a baneful heritage transmitted to the present age by certain theologians of the sixteenth century. That heritage has in too many instances led long ago to deeds of violence and bloodshed disgraceful not only to all who encouraged them, but particularly so to those forms of religious belief in whose behalf they were perpetrated. Christians, however, convinced that those who sought in that way to force their opinions upon others, were generally unsuccessful; and that any appeal to pains and penalties for such a purpose only exposed the inherent weakness of the cause in support of which it was made, learned at last, while differing in opinion, to practice, if not mutual respect, at least mutual forbearance. As a consequence, religious wars waged for the purpose of maintaining, or suppressing some form of Christian belief have long ceased to embroil with each other the Kingdoms of Europe, or even to affect in any way their mutual relations. There, now, neighbor meets neighbor and discusses the relative merits of their respective creeds, without uttering an offensive or even an unkind word. It is much the same in the New World. Thus the plague of controversy, as it once raged, has (praised be God) been stayed at last, and, let us hope, forever. So far as religious strife is concerned, the present compared with any age that has passed since the sixteenth century is, therefore, eminently one of peace and good will; one in which men generally recognize the good traits possessed by others, and accord to them their full rights even though not in sympathy with their doctrinal principles. Nevertheless, the spirit of controversy still survives, and must survive, so long as truth is combated by error, and good confronted by evil. Several of the old controversies have, indeed, been almost forgotten, or been divested of the interest they once possessed. And many a creed in which its first i ii Preface. professors could discern no flaw, has been found by those, who now belong to the same sect, to be more or less inconsistent with reason and revelation. As a symbol, it no longer expresses their belief, and sooner or later must be recast, in order to adapt it to views far too humane, too rational and too Christian for its authors to have entertained, much less approved, dominated as they were by polemical prejudices and the stern dictates of sectional rancor. Such movements may tend to narrow the field of controversy, but cannot close it altogether; until Christendom shall have become what it once was, and what it ought to be still, one fold and one shepherd. Among the many points of controversy which have kept Christendom divided into two principal camps for nearly four hundred years, is that which forms the subject of the following volume. That controversy, like others originating at the same time, has been conducted by many in a way which showed that they were more anxious for factional ascendancy than for the triumph of divine truth. On the Catholic side of the discussion, hardly has anything been written in English beyond a few pages, though the subject has been exhaustively treated by Catholic scholars. But these scholars generally wrote in Latin, their works being intended principally for the use of ecclesiastical students, who, when afterwards charged as Pastors with the care of souls, would thus be prepared to teach the Faithful whatever it was necessary to know regarding the Sacred Scripture. However, once the Canon of Scripture was solemnly proclaimed, the unanimity with which that decision was received by the Catholic laity made it unnecessary to explain to the people in detail the reasons on which it was based; and this the more so, as all were aware that the contents of the Bible remained substantially unchanged. What Catholics found, for example, in the Bible of the sixteenth and subsequent centuries, they found in the Bible of the fifteenth and preceding centuries. For them, therefore, little instruction on the subject was necessary beyond what they already actually knew. They believed in the Church. The Church had solemnly approved, as a canon of Scripture, a catalogue of sacred books universally used by her in her divine offices already for ages. In what she had thus done, she, as infallible, could be no more mistaken than she was in inculcating the existence and unity of God. All this the laity, as well as their teachers, Preface. iii knew full well. What use, then, in wasting time on the why or the how of the decision in question? That decision, once made, stands forever. And that is all there is about it. It was far otherwise with those who, at the time, had revolted against the authority of the Church. Regarding the Canon of Scripture, they not only disagreed with her but with each other, and their followers do so to this day. Yet they none the less prepared to assail her, as well on account of the Canon she had approved, as on account of other dogmas she retained but they rejected. Volume after volume was issued from the English press, with the single object of proving that certain books in the Bible, which the Church pronounced authentic, were not only human but doctrinally and historically objectionable. So unscrupulous were the authors of those volumes in their statements, that subsequent writers of the same school felt compelled, as a matter of justice, to correct their misstatements, or apologize for their dishonesty. Unfortunately, the work of one of these unscrupulous censors, a member of the Anglican episcopate, has been treated on the continent of Europe and in the United States as possessed of the highest authority on the question it discusses, its arguments being regarded as unassailable and its conclusions accepted as irrefragable. Yet, a learned Professor in the University of Oxford, long ago pointed out several gross and apparently deliberate misstatements in the work. And another dignitary in the Anglican communion, within the last ten or eleven years, warned the public against it, saying it “must be read with great caution.” The discussion, which has for its subject The Canon of Scripture, like almost every other, which the present has inherited from the sixteenth century, has been recently conducted in a spirit far different from that in which it originated, or from that which marked its history for ages afterwards. There is no longer, as there once was among the advocates of the contracted Canon, a disposition to deduce from the writings of any Father other conclusions than such as are warranted by these writings considered as a whole. For these advocates have discovered, and some of them have expressly admitted, that not a few of such writings are characterized by inconsistencies, not to say contradictions. In fact, the canon which any individual Father followed is, as the most advanced critics now hold, not to be ascertained so much from isolated passages in iv Preface. his works or from any catalogue he may have formulated, as from the manner in which he may have referred to the books of Scripture, and the use he has made of them throughout his writings. Nor will the reader often now find what was once so common among the advocates of the same contracted canon, writers urging against some of the Old Testament deutero-canonical books objections which, boomerang-like, recoiling on their projectors, would if admitted have been fatal to books in their own canon, and have furnished infidels with weapons wherewith to assail revelation in general. Writers of that class, warned of their folly by critics of their own school, have become all but extinct. There were several considerations which induced the writer to undertake the following work. But they may all be reduced to two. In the first place, he was anxious to counteract the effect, which the almost constant publication of certain English books in Great Britain and this country, on the canon of Scripture, might have among his own people. It is well known that the persistent attacks of infidels, on the views held by Protestants regarding their Bible, has made it necessary for its defenders to vindicate, as best they may, its claim to the veneration of those who still regard it as the only infallible rule of belief and practice. The volumes that have been thus written in its defense are legion, and almost every year adds to their number. To this no Christian could object. But the authors of some of these volumes, not content with attempting to establish the canonical character of the books retained in the Protestant Bible, go farther and endeavor to convince their readers that the other books contained in the Douay Bible are unscriptural, or, as they generally express it, apocryphal. Now, these volumes, in defense of the Protestant Bible, may be found in the shelves of many booksellers from whom Catholics are accustomed to obtain their works of instruction and devotion, and who may thus be introduced to a class of literature antagonistic to divine revelation.

Load more