Later Growth.— When now we glance once more from this specular mount of history, the junction of the 2d and 3d centuries, down the stream of years, we behold the notion of the Canon indeed firmly fixed, but the bor ders still vaguely defined, uncertain, unsteady_ Of the Fathers, Cyprian followed Tertullian as his °master)); Origen (as we have seen) indeed attempted scientific criticism but without ade quake principles to guide him Church tradi tion was empirical and often inconsistent, .m spiration was not determinable. Slowly during the 3d century the mantle of the Canon was widened. At length, in 363, the Cotmcil of Laodicea by its 59th canon enacted that °only the Canonics of the New and Old Testament* be read in the. Church, but *not private psalms nor uncanonized books*; the 60th canon, which follows with a list, has been shown by Credner to be not genuine but of much later date (G. d. nt. K., 217ff). The Apostolic Constitutions (viii, 47, 135) gives the Old Testament list of *books to be esteemed venerable and holy* by *all you both clergy and laity* (adding, °See that your young men learn the Wisdom of the most learned Strach"), and names as *our sacred books" °of the New Covenant* *the four Gos pels, fourteen Epistles of Paul, two of Peter, three of John, one of James, one of Jude, two of Clement, and the Constitutions dedicated to you, the Bishops, by me, Clement, in eight Books, which it is not fit to publish before all, because of the mysteries contained in them,— and the Acts of us, the Apostles,* omitting Revelation. Cyril of Jerusalem (348) in his list of divine Scriptures includes *Baruch and the Epistle* with Jeremiah and also omits Revelation. At last the archbishop of Alex andria, Athanasius, in his 39th Festal Epistle (367), determines as °canonized and handed down and believed to be divine* 22 Old Testa ment books (excluding Esther) and our pres ent New Testament exactly; but he still quotes Apocrypha as *Scripture') and allows them to be °read.* The great authority of Athanasius finally prevailed, though various fluctuations lingered long in the judgment of the Fathers.
East and In the West the councils swayed by Augustine, though somewhat more liberal toward the Old Testament, yet fixed the New Testament as at present. Meantime the Syrian Church inclined to a narrower con ception of the Canon. The Common (Pe shitta) version, omitting the Apocrypha at first, admitted them later, but in the New Tes tament it lacked four Catholic Epistles and the Apocalypse, all of which, however, were used by Ephrem. Like Origen, the Syrians (about 500) divided the Scripture_s into authoritative, semi-authoritative and unauthoritative. In the mid-class, beside job, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehe miah, Esther, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, were found James, 2 Peter, Jude, 2 and 3 John,— and Revelation was much debated. Armenian and Abyssinian canons show many minor ec centncittes of no great interest or importance.
Still During the !diddle Ages the Eastern canon alternately expanded and con tracted from time to time under various hands, but thesc variations about balanced each other. Meanwhile in the West the pendulum trembled between the stricter view of Jerome and the laxer of Aug.ustine, till the day of Luther, when the Catholic sided definitely with the lat ter and the Protestant with the former. In dealing with the New Testament also Luther showed a similar spirit, reviving the Eusebian distinction between Accepted and Contradicted, and ranging among the latter the Apocalypse, Hebrews and the Epistles of Jude and James, which last he called a °straw-epistle,* an un critical judgment determined by his dogma of *Justification by Faith alone,* against which James had protested, and which, as it existed in the early Christian consciousness, the Re former had wholly misunderstood. But his
work was invaluable in partially freeing the Christian mind in the presence of the Canon. His notion of degrees of inspiration, authority, dignity among the Scriptures* has been fol lowed up by many theologians and has even found its way into various creeds and confes sions; but it makes a vain distinction leading nowhere and logically worthless. Better rea soned were the decrees of the Florentine, Tridentine and Vatican Councils (1441, 1546, 1870) and of the Jerusalem Synod under Dosi theus (1672), which threw the robe of the Canon over all the Deutero-canonics. Of ab solute authority there are no degrees.
Text Criticism.
Modern thought accepts the millennial de bate over the Canon as an interesting phase of the history of spirit, but turns its own at tention to a far deeper question, as to what the remarkable literature thus canonized really is, or, What is the TExr of the canonical scrip tures? It was the learned Jerome, a critic born out of due time, who first consciously con fronted this query, when he came to translate the Hebrew into Latin. His notion, that only the original script itself is inspired and au thoritative, has maintained itself to this day, when it is still widely prevalent, though crit icism long since perceived it to be wholly il lusory. More sanely the Council of Trent (1546) declared that canonicity and authority reside in the Vulgate translation used in Church Service.t It would indeed be vain and nugatory for authority to reside wholly in the Hebrew text, which extremely few could read if ascertained, and which could not really be ascertained at all. Of what use a Supreme Court inaccessible to appeals? Nevertheless, though the Council has wisely closed the ques tion for the faithful, it still remains open for unfettered critics: What is the Text of the Scriptures? What in their own tongue do they really say? The Old Testament.
The Original.— The Old Testament was composed and is extant in the Hebrew, ex cept certain small portions (Jer. x, II, Ezra iv, 8— vi, 18; vii, 12-26, Dan. ii, 46—vii, 28) written in Aramaic or Chaldean as some times called since Jerome (because used by the Chaldeans in the speech reported in Dan. ii, 4ff.). Hebrew was the language of Ca naanites, called "lip of Canaanx' (Is. xix, 18) but also Jewish (in Judea, 2 K. xviii, 26, Neh. xiii, 24), from the 5th century B.C. on, gradually displaced as the vernacular by the kindred Aramaic (called profane in contrast with the holy but obsolescent Hebrew, and displaced in turn by the conquering Arabic, 7th century). The term hebraisti ("in He brew") occurs first in Scripture in Ben Si rach's Prolog (117 a.c.), long after the eclipse of Hebrew, and is used often for the profane, sometimes for the holy tongue. Both belong to the grand group of languages (called Se mitic by Eichhorn), between whose two chief representatives, Assyrian north and Arabic south, the Hebrew lies in the middle, some what as Dutch between German and Old Eng lish. The main mark of these tongues is that the stems consist nearly always of three con sonants, whose vocalizations vary from shade to shade of the radical idea. Vowels being unwritten, the text was purely consonantal, as if one should write r g d and pronounce it raged, rouged, ragged, rugged, rigged, rigid, according to sense, or f r m and pronounce it farm, frame, firm, form, from, forum, or even affirm-- a fact of fundamental importance.