The first catalogue of the Holy Scriptures, drawn up by any public body in the Christian church, which has come down to us, is that of the Council of Laodicea, in Phrygia, supposed to be held about the year 365. In the two last canons of this Council, as we now have them, there is an enume ration of the books of Scripture nearly conform able, in the Old Testament, to the Jewish canon. The canons are in these words,— 'That private Psalms ought not to be said in the church, nor any books not canonical, but only the canonical books of the Old and New Testament. The books of the Old Testament which ought to be read are these :—I. Genesis ; 2. Exodus ; 3. Leviticus ; 4. Numbers ; 5. Deuteronomy ; 6. Joshua, son of Nun ; 7. Judges, with Ruth ; 8. Esther ; 9. I and 2 Kingdoms ; 1 o. 3 and 4 King doms ; I I. I and 2 Remains ; 12. 1 and 2 Esdras ; 13. the book of 15o Psalms ; 14. Proverbs ; 15. Ecclesiastes ; 16. Canticles ; 17. Job ; 18. the Twelve Prophets ; 19. Isaiah ; 20. Jeremiah and Banich, the Lamentations and the Epistles ; 21. Ezekiel ; 22. Daniel.' We have already given the books of the New Testament as enumerated by this Council (see ANTILEGOMENA).
This catalogue is not, however, universally ac knowledged to be genuine. Possibly learned men,' says Lardner, according to the different notions of the party they have been engaged in, have been led to disregard the last canon ; some because of its omitting the Apocryphal books of the Old Testament, and others because it has not the book of Revelation.' Basnage, in his History of the Church, observes that Protestants and Catholics have equally disparaged this synod.' It is said,' remarks Lardner, that the canons of this Council were received and adopted by some General Councils in after times ; nevertheless, perhaps, it would be difficult to shew that those General Councils received the last canon, and exactly approved the catalogue of said books therein contained, without any addition or diminution, as we now have it' (see Mansi Concilia, 574 These books, it will be observed, though avow edly not in the Hebrew canon, were publicly read in the primitive church, and treated with a high degree of respect, although not considered by the Hebrews, from whom they were derived (see the passage above cited from Josephus) as of equal authority with the former. These books seem to have been included in the copies of the Septuagiet, which was generally made use of by the sacred writers of the New Testament. It does not appear whether the Apostles gave any cautions against the reading of these books ; and it has been even sup posed that they have referred to them. Others,
however, have maintained that the principal pas sages to which they have referred (for it is not pretended that they have cited them) are from the canonical books. The following are the passages here alluded to Some of the uncanonical books, however, had not been extant more than a hundred and thirty years at most at the Christian era, and could only have obtained a place in the Greek Scriptures a short time before this period ; but the only copies of the Scriptures in existence for the first three hundred years after Christ, either among the Jews or Christians of Greece, Italy, or Africa, contained these books without any mark of distinction that we know of. The Hebrew Bible and language were quite unknown to them during this period, and the most learned were, probably, but ill informed on the subject, at least before Jerome's translation of the Scriptures from the original Hebrew. The Latin versions before his time were all made from the Septuagint. We do not, indeed, find any catalogue of these writings before the Council of Hippo, but only individual notices of separate books. Thus Clement of Alexandria (Stromata, A.D. 211), cites the wisdom of Solomon and Ecclesiasticus, and Origen refers to several of these books, treating them with a high degree of veneration. ' There is,' says Eusebius, ' an epistle of Africanus, addressed to Origen, in which he in timates his doubt on the history of Susanna in Daniel, as if it were a spurious and fictitious com position ; to which Origen wrote a very full answer.' These epistles are both extant. Origen, at great length, vindicates these parts of the Greek version —for he acknowledges that they were not in the Hebrew—from the objections of Africanus, as serting that they were true and genuine, and made use of in Greek among all the churches of the Gentiles, and that we should not attend to the fraudulent comments of the Jews, but take that only for true in the holy Scriptures which the Seventy had translated, for that this only was con firmed by Apostolic authority. In the same letter he cites the book of Tobit, and in his second book De PriltCW IS, he even speaks of the Shepherd of Hermas as divinely inspired. Origen, however, uses very different language in regard to the book of Enoch, the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, and the Assumption of Moses.
The local Council of Hippo, held in the year of Christ 393, at which the celebrated Augustine, afterwards Bishop of Hippo, was present, formed a catalogue of the sacred books of the Old and New Testament, in which the ecclesiastical books were all included.