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Notes -
There are some things in the books of the Maccabees that could look like the intercession of saints if you squint, and there’s some level of arguments about that.
But also, the main difference in the OT canon is that Protestantism ended up holding as canonical only the books that were known to the 16th century in Hebrew. At that time, Tobit, Maccabees, Sirach, Wisdom, etc were known from ancient sources only from the Septuagint, which is of course the Greek Hebrew Bible known and used by Hellenistic Jews in the first century, including many Christians. It's important to note that the Septuagint (the 70, for its 70 translators) was the book referenced by New Testament authors, and the quotations from the OT in the NT demonstrate its textual differences from the Masoretic texts.
It’s also relevant to note that these books known in Hebrew were the precise ones that made up the Masoretic Text of Judaism, as rabbinical Judaism had gone through its own winnowing of the Biblical text and these books were available in Hebrew principally because Judaism had preserved them. Many Protestant Biblical translations are based on the same Hebrew texts used by Jews. They're numbered differently, but the texts are often the same.
Because Protestantism included a strong belief in going back to the sources, the availability of these books in Hebrew from Jewish sources made them the natural starting point, and thus the Protestant Bible ended up with only the 39 books that could be sourced in Hebrew.
This was not a unique concept of Protestantism, and Jerome's Latin translation, the Vulgate, regularly referenced the Hebrew texts in addition to the Septuagint, a principle for which he was sharply criticized by contemporary Christians who held the Septuagint to be, itself, strictly canonical. That said, there is a long custom of seeing the books totally unavailable to the ancient world in Hebrew as part of a different category than the Hebrew-available books. Protestantism didn't invent this. Jerome himself had complicated views on the Old Testament canon, and in particular thought that including the non-Hebrew books in the text was harmful to Christian dialogue with Jews, and that founding doctrine on these books was questionable. He was incredibly controversial in his day for his views on the canon, but in many ways his views do approximate the views of more "apocrypha-friendly" Protestant churches, though he quoted the extra books with great frequency and respect, as did Luther, occasionally. It should be noted, of course, that when Jerome was questioned by other Christians for his views on the canon, he stated firmly that if a Church authority contradicted him, he would accept the judgment of the Church.
Because some of the readings of the Septuagint lend themselves to a Christological interpretation of the messianic prophesies more than some of the Hebrew readings (Isaiah 49 is an infamous example), it was a not-infrequent accusation among early Christians that the Hebrew texts used by post-second-temple Judaism had been altered from the originals as a manner of deflecting from the application of these texts to Jesus of Nazareth. Archaeological study has shown that there was a considerable diversity of Hebrew texts in ancient times and it's likely that both the Septuagint and the texts that would ultimately become the Masoretic Text were pulling from Hebrew sources of equal vintage and ancient authority. No modern Christian source informed on the matter would make an accusation of deliberate post-Christian defacement against the Jewish Tanakh.
I should also note that many of the books in what Protestants would call the apocrypha were not necessarily considered bad by magisterial Protestantism; it's just that they weren't considered authoritative for the establishment of doctrine.
A good example of the approach of magisterial authorities to them is found in the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles, which lists the Protestant canon of the Old Testament, and then states:
and then lists the extra books from the Catholic canon. I presume the justification for this choice was basically "all the good Protestants are doing it," based largely on the Hebrew Masoretic tradition custom.
That's not a massively satisfying answer to you, but as far as I know it just kind of... happened this way, and justifications were back-filled in to justify what was essentially a ressourcement movement that used the Masoretic Text as a basis because it was available in Hebrew. The Protestant take on this wasn't radical and wasn't new, but what was new was how firm Protestantism as a whole would ultimately take the rejection of the deuterocanonical books. It's one of the many areas where 16th century Protestantism and 21st century Protestantism are very distinct.
The truth is that, with the Old Testament, there really isn't a canon, other than the 39, and this is a reality that goes back to ancient times. Just about the only thing that can be conclusively said by the Christian tradition is there are between 39 and infinity texts written at some point by Hebrews under divine inspiration.
What were the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches using instead of the Hebrew texts? Generally the Vulgate or the Greek Septuagint/Greek New Testament.
The Vulgate has a strong authority in historical Catholicism, and many of the canonical and doctrinal principles of Catholicism are based on its unique readings (for instance, 2 Corinthians 2:10 being translated roughly, "What I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, has been for your sake in the person of Christ", which relates to the doctrine of the confessor as being in persona Christi). It's also notable that the Catholic Bible does not contain the entire Septuagint, and Trent's formal holding of the Catholic canon did not include some books like the books of Esdras and 3 Maccabees.
The Septuagint and original-language New Testament have a privileged position in Orthodoxy, as the Orthodox churches (Eastern and Oriental) trace their theological lineage to the Hellenistic world, where ancient Greek was a sacred language. I have joked, considering the long history of the Septuagint's authority in Christianity and especially eastern Christianity, that in the same way many American Bible Churches are King-James-Version-Only churches, the Eastern Orthodox Church could be described as a Septuagint-Only Church -- don't be quoting the Vulgate or the Hebrew to them.
There is no good English translation that follows this mode of the EOC's Biblical canon, and "Orthodox Study Bibles" generally just launder a Protestant translation. I've heard, however, rumblings that there is a push inside the growing English-speaking Orthodox community to make a genuine Orthodox critical text of the Old Testament.
Various Orthodox Churches have various numbers of Greek books they add to the 'standard' canon, with the Ethiopian Orthodox famous for having a lot. This plays a very minor role in inter-Orthodox dialogue because the Biblical canon is not a first-order issue against the reception of tradition. It's also my understanding that many of the Septuagint's additional books have been found in ancient Hebrew or Aramaic as part of archaeological finds, but those are not considered authoritative in the churches that include them.
You asked about the New Testament, and I've been neglecting it thus far.
There are no canonical differences in the New Testament among mainstream Christian churches, which is nice.
Luther, particularly initially, pushed for some, and personally demoted the so-called "catholic epistles", which have nothing to do with the RCC and are called that because they aren't written to a particular group or individual like Paul's letters and were addressed to all Christians ("the Church Catholic"). Luther had a particular misgiving about the book of James, which he once described as "an epistle of straw", because of the way James 2 discusses justification. Ultimately he pushed James and some other books to an appendix, but his views cooled, and Lutheranism and Protestantism as a whole accepted them as fully canonical.
I'm unfamiliar with Luther having an issue with the book of Revelation/Apocalypse of John, and in fact Luther could be called the most creative interpreter of this text in history. Because the subject, to secular and serious Christian scholars, of the book of Revelation is the Roman Empire, the book makes frequent references to things that are intended in code to reference Rome, like the whore of Babylon being seated upon the "seven hills" which John wink wink nod nods to us in order to communicate this means the seven famous hills of Rome. Since Luther's project was to sharply criticize the Bishop of Rome, who of course resided in and ruled a meaningful portion of Italy from the very city of these seven hills, it was incredibly rhetorically useful to him to describe the Pope as the very "whore of Babylon" and the "Beast," and yes, the antichrist. Similarly, it was rhetorically useful of Luther to speak of Catholicism as "the Babylonian Captivity" of Christianity, in reference to the Old Testament event.
You can actually trace the history of 'modern' debates over the book of Revelation to these fierce disputes between Luther and the other reformers and Catholicism.
Ancient Christians were actually fairly slow to accept the Apocalypse as canonical, and it was in many respects the 'last' book of the New Testament to be fully accepted. This has a lot to do with its intense scenes, obviously coded nature, and cryptic predictions, which of course are the subject of considerable theological debate. It was, in fact, so slow to be accepted that the ancient calendars of Biblical readings still used by some churches like the Orthodox Church do not include it -- not because they reject it, but because they had a good rhythm going before it was universally regarded.
Ancient Christian sources reference it, and sometimes give their own interpretations that often rhyme with the later syntheses, but Revelation was not the subject of great theological debate in ancient Christianity and interpreting prophesy wasn't a matter of great import.
The claim of anti-Papal reformers like Luther, Calvin, and Cranmer that the Pope was the antichrist dropped a thermonuclear bomb in the middle of apocalyptic interpretation, and the Catholic Counter-reformation sprung into action, with many of the approaches to the book theologians recognize today -- futurism, amillenialism, preterism, etc -- being developed in response by Catholic theologians and especially Jesuits, to provide a coherent reply based on a fresh interpretation of Biblical prophesy.
Also as far as the early development of the canon, there was never really a “one moment” where a truly universal decision as to which books should be included in the Bible was made. It was a process of development that took over a century of the proliferation of numerous writings, before anyone even bothered to start picking and choosing, and by then it was largely a cumulative, individual and happenstance event, that was more-so guided by chance and vibes more than objective and scholarly research. That was until priests and academics began pronouncing what was authoritative and holy, and even they weren’t unanimous. Every church had its favored books, and since there was nothing like a clearly defined orthodoxy until the fourth century, there were a lot of simultaneous literary traditions. The idea that it was otherwise is created by the fact that the church that came out on top simply preserved texts in its favor and destroyed (or let disappear) opposing documents. What we call “orthodox” is simply the church that won.
But, the story also isn't quite that simple. The Catholic Church never had any extensive control over the Eastern churches, which were in turn divided even among themselves (with Ethiopian, Coptic, Syrian, Byzantine, and Armenian canons all riding side-by-side with each other, and with the Western Catholic canon, which itself was never perfectly settled until the fifteenth century at the earliest), but it was essentially established by the middle of the fourth century.
The current Catholic Bible is largely accepted as canonical from fatigue. The details were so ancient and convoluted that it was just easier to simply accept an ancient and enduring tradition than to bother actually questioning its merit. That was further secured by the fact that the long habit of time dictated the status of the texts, because favored books were more scrupulously preserved and survive in more copies than those that are unfavorable, so even if some unfavorable books happened to be earlier and more authoritative, in a lot of cases we can’t reconstruct them with a great deal of accuracy.
We know there are very early books that didn’t survive at all, Ancient fragments of others that we never knew existed, because no one’s even mentioned them. To give a quick example: the first Christian text that didn’t become canonized but was respected as authentic, is the First Epistle of Clement of Rome, which was dated to around AD 95-96 and was contained in a lot of ancient Bibles and was frequently read and regarded as Scripture in several churches. It’s significant because even at this late date, Clement never refers to any Gospel, but frequently refers to various epistles of Paul. He calls them “wise counsel,” not Scripture, and he reserves this authority for the Old Testament, which he cited over a hundred times.
Catholic Answers Apologist Jimmy Akin has argued that the Church has declared the 73 books cannon, but that it has not closed the cannon, meaning that other books could still enter cannon if they picked up a following.
But also I think this is one area that no one really found too important to get 100% correct until the proliferation of Bibles with the printing press.
I personally think 1 Clement should’ve been kept. It’s doctrinally very cohesive with dogma, and orthodox theology. Most Catholics accept though that divine inspiration and miracles came to a close at the end of the Apostolic Age, which is why we don’t see them as much anymore, though you’ve still got Marian apparitions and everything else.
The apostles had a very specific charisim of miracles happening all the time, but there are plenty of miracles that have happened since then and are still happening today. St. Padre Pio's life is a more modern example of someone who had "apostolic" things happen all the time around him. There's the guy who's leg grew back, the Life of Christina the Astonishing, St. Joan of Arc, that one guy who could fly, etc. Does dying after consuming the Eucharist for the first time count as a miracle? I don't know.
It seems to me that there has been no end of miracles and miracle claims in the Catholic Church, though of course the sum total might be large but each individual person might not see one in their lifetime.
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AAQC. Thank you for that post. I find it interesting how arguments of sourcing for the Canon existed both before the Reformation, and how the policy of treating the Deuterocanonicals changed a lot after. I suppose the drift towards a more "conservative" Canon makes sense from a Sola Scriptura standpoint; if you are unsure of the canonicity of a given book, it's better to list it as relevant but not divinely inspired than accidentally list it as an authoritative book.
I think that’s exactly right. The canon wasn’t a huge deal, people had arguments over it, various books were read liturgically and some weren’t, Jerome had opinions but translated most books to latin when he was asked. Ultimately figuring out a solid canon wasn’t a priority in antiquity, they were far more concerned with Christological debates. They were interested in what the Word of God was, not what the Word of God was.
The last point of appeal for doctrine was a church council, local or ecumenical, and so having a definitive selection of canonical texts in an exact, harmonized critical version was more of a hobby of Jerome than a church-wide project. He was influential, of course, and it would be fair to say that the entire history of Western theology of the canon is a debate over how to read Jerome in much the same way the entire history of Western soteriology is a debate over how to read Augustine.
But putting an exact number on the canonical texts didn’t become a major issue until the Latin church and Orthodoxy drifted apart and tried to hammer out differences, finding that the Vulgate and the Septuagint had different OT texts. But this was in the background, massively, compared to the question of the authority question, particularly about the Papacy. The Orthodox counter position to the Papacy was “we have the Sacred Tradition” not “we have the Holy Bible.”
When Protestantism came about and placed the highest of premiums on Scripture as the place of final appeal, it became urgent to have a solid OT canon — the authority question moved in one sense from “which councils are ecumenical and which bishops are ecumenical” to “which texts are authoritative and which readings are divinely inspired.” The only texts accepted absolutely universally and available in original languages were the Hebrew edition books, and of course the fact that Judaism had a harmonized edition in the Masoretic text made it widely available. So this became Protestantism’s alternative to the Papacy as a source of authority.
Did you mean for the first "what" to be "who"?
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Great post. One thing you didn't mention: Protestant printings of the Bible did once have the deuterocanonical books. They were in a separate section, with a note that they were edifying reading but not the inspired word of God, but they were in there. Then in the 1800s publishers started to omit those books (to save costs), leading to the status quo where Protestant editions of the Bible don't have the deuterocanonical books.
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