Are you ***ured of salvation?

[Trinity]

Originally Posted by Leslie

Saint Jerome, the translator of the Latin Vulgate and one of the few Church Fathers that could read and write both Hebrew and Greek did not accept the Apocrypha as inspired. He did consider them to be profitable to be read in the churches for edification as they do contain alot of good wisdom. but that no doctrine should be made from them.

He's just one example of some of the fathers who did not accept it.

Hello Leslie,

Perhaps you do not know this, but books that we have presently in our New Testament were also contested by the early Church. In the Eastern side and also in the Western side of the Roman Empire, churches had many distinctive canons. There was much debate about other books including Hebrews, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, and Revelation. Some churches accepted the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas as Scripture. Also, the Septuangint was the version adopted by the Apostles and this version had included the Deuterocanonical books. Almost all the biblical quotes or references in the New Testament are from the Septuangint.

Furthermore, the Essenes people or the people from the Qumran community, also had those books in their libraries. In brief, those books were present in the Church until the arrival of Luther.

You are correct when you said that St. Jerome (also, Gregory of Nazianzus and Epiphanius) favored the list of the Hebrew Bible and that he did not accept all the Deuterocanonical books, as canonical. However, Ambrose and Augustine disagreed with him. Anyway, the canon was not decided according to the opinion of one man but with councils. That was the same thing with the dogma of the Trinity.

Keep also in mind that the Jews had no canon in Jesus time. Jews are not a authority for the Christians to decide which book is canonical. Yes they rejected the Deuterocanonical books at the end of the first century of the christian era, but they also rejected the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles.

In conclusion, Jerome was not the only polyglot and some Fathers of the Church also quoted the Deuterocanonical books (ex. Polycarp of Smyrna,Clement of Rome, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Cyprian of Carthage, Augustine, etc). Ultimately, Jerome recognized that the Church alone had the authority to determine the canon.

"We are obliged to yield many things to the papists that they possess the Word of God which we received from them, otherwise we should have known nothing at all about it."

Martin Luther
Commentary on St. John
Chapter 16th

Trinity