Subject: Re: Why do you believe the bible?
Date: 29 Oct 1999 07:08:14 GMT
From:  (Ken Smith)
Organization: University of Queensland
Newsgroups: aus.religion.christian

“ Truth..” < > writes:
>Canonicity of a book DOES NOT rest in whole or in part on whether some
>council, committee, or community accepts or rejects it. The voice of such
>noninspired men is valuable only as witness to what God himself has already
>done through his accredited representatives.

I often think it’s a bit of a pity that Luther behaved 
the way he did towards the NT.

For the OT he separated off the books which weren’t 
accepted into the Jewish canon around AD 95, and put them 
in a separate section, labelled “Apocrypha”.
For the NT he rearranged the order of the books, and 
numbered them from 1 to 23.  The four extra books were put 
together, by themselves, at the end, and not numbered.

If he had put *these* into a separate section, I have 
little doubt that virtually all Protestants would now accept 
his leading, and insist that there are only 23 divinely 
inspired books in the NT.  And it would have saved a very 
large amount of arguments between different Christian 
groups about the interpretation of one of these books.

I’ll let people investigate for themselves which these 
four books were - unless there are lots of requests for 
enlightenment.

Ken Smith

--
Dr Ken Smith < >