What is the cannon of Scripture?

Throughout the history of Judaism and Christianity, theologians have argued over which books are Scripture, which are non-inspired but good for personal edification, and which books are total bupkis—"bupkis" being an official theological word for "but uncle's parchment kinda isn't Scripture."

For instance, the Jewish Scriptures are those you would find in most Protestant Old Testaments although they're arranged a bit differently—Ezra and Nehemiah are together, as are the minor prophets and all the 1 & 2 volumes. The Jewish Apocrypha, however, includes such things as 1 & 2 Esdras, Tobit, Judith, and 1 & 2 Maccabees. In addition, they have the Mishnah and the Talmud. These books may be edifying—or not—but they're not considered inspired.

Another category of writing is the pseudepigrapha which, as it turns out, has nothing to do with turkey bacon or any other type of fake pork product. These are books supposedly written by authors who didn't really write them, like the Books of Enoch, the Psalter of Solomon, the Protoevangelium of James, or the Apocalypses of Baruch or Ezra or Paul or Peter. "Apocalypse" means "revelation"—it means they're weird, not necessarily that the world was ending. Although, sometimes the world ends weirdly. Often Greek students would name their books after their teacher as a kind of homage, but that doesn't mean the books are authentic.

"Greek students" meaning students in Greece, not students learning Greek. Although they probably did that, too.

Then there were the antilegomena, or the books we now accept as inspired but it was touch-and-go there for a while. Like Hebrews, because we don't know who wrote it. Or Jude because there's no novel theology. Or 3 John because it's short. Apparently, they expected a lot from an elderly man who had already given us the Gospel of John and Revelation and didn't think to wonder if the poor guy needed a nap.

Finally, the most heretical of all: the Gnostic Gospels. They were written by people who wanted to be Christians but couldn't accept that Jesus could be man and God. Some thought He was a man that God adopted. Some thought He was a hologram. All of them are whack.

The "cannon of Scripture," then, was a very large catapult that Augustine used to throw all the Gnostic Gospels into the Mediterranean Sea. He would have used a real cannon, but gunpowder didn't come to the area until the 1200s. Sadly, the winds were from the west, and some of the pages and parchments blew into the Nile. It happened to be the time of year when the waters flowed backwards, and the pages floated south until they wound up in a garbage dump near Nag Hammadi where Dan Brown found them and wrote The Da Vinci Code, the book that made Christians the world over doubt if Jesus was really God and then the movie that made Christians the world over wonder if Tom Hanks was a Christian after all.

And what happened to his hair.

Not many people know that although early church theologians and local councils determined what books of the Bible were inspired long ago—and our Bibles do reflect their decisions—no ecclesiastical, authoritative, ecumenical council listed the books in an official document until the Protestant Reformation. That's when the Lutherans and Calvinists and such made it official. And then the Roman Catholics had to follow suit and include the Apocrypha because they wanted to be different.

That's right—there was no official dogmatic canon of Scripture until the sixteenth century. Which was only about 300 years after the first cannon but 1200 years after Auggie.

---