Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 3.djvu/325

 CANON

277

CANON

are of the superior and inferior sort. The better ones are the Epistles of St. James and St. Jude, II Peter, II and III John; these, like Origen, Eusebius wished to be admitted to the Canon, but was forced to record their uncertain status; the Antilegomena of the inferior sort were Barnabas, the Didache, Gospel of the Hebrews, the Acts of Paul, the Shep- herd, the Apocalypse of Peter. (7) All the rest are spurious (v68a).

Eusebius diverged from his Alexandrian master in personally rejecting Apocalypse as un-Biblical, though compelled to acknowledge its almost univer- sal acceptance. Whence came this unfavourable view of the closing volume of the Christian Testa- ment? — Zahn attributes it to the influence of Lucian of Samosata, one of the founders of the Antioch school of exegesis, and with whose disciples Eusebius had been associated. Lucian himself had acquired his education at Edessa, the metropolis of Eastern Syria, which had, as already remarked, a singularly curtailed Canon. Lucian is known to have edited the Scriptures at Antioch. and is supposed to have introduced there the shorter X. T. which later St. John Chrysostom and his followers employed — one in which Apocalypse, II Peter, II and III John, and Jude had no place. It is known that Theodore of Mopsuestia rejected all the Catholic Epistles. In St. John Chrysostom 's ample expositions of the Scrip- tures there is not a single clear trace of tin' Apocalypse, while he seems to implicitly exclude the four smaller lea — II Peter, II and III John, and Jude — from the number of the canonical books. Lucian, then, according to Zahn. would have compromised between the Syriac Canon and the ( 'anon of Origen by admit- ting the three longer Catholic Epistles and keeping out Apocalypse. Hut after allowing fully for the prestige of the founder of the Antioch school, it is difficult to grant that his personal authority could have sufficed to strike such an important work as Apocalypse from the Canon of a notable Church, where it had previously been received. It is more probable that a reaction against the abuse of the Johannine Apocalypse by the Montanists and Chiliasts — Asia .Minor being the nursery of both these errors — led to the elimination of a book whose authority had perhaps been previously suspected. Indeed it is quite reasonable to suppose that its early exclusion from the East Syrian Church was an outer wave of the extreme reactionist movement of the Aloges — also of A^ia Minor — who branded Apocalypse and all the Johannine writings as the work of the heretic Cerin- thus. Whatever may have been all the influences ruling the personal Canon of Eusebius, he chose Lucian 's text for the fifty copies of the Bible which he furnished to the Church of Constantinople at the order of his imperial patron Constantine; and he incorporated all the Catholic Epistles, but excluded Apocalypse. The latter remained for more than a century banished from the sacred collections as cur- rent in Antioch and Constantinople. However, this book kept a minority of Asiatic suffrages, and, as both Lucian and Eusebius had been tainted with Arianism. the approbation of Apocalypse, opposed by them, finally came to be looked upon as a sign of orthodoxy. Eusebius was the first to call atten- tion to important variations in the text of the Gos- pels, viz.. the presence in some copies and the absence in others ..f the final paragraph of Mark, the passage of the Adulterous Woman, and the Bloody Sweat.

(c) The African Church. — St. Cyprian, whose Scriptural Canon certainly reflects the content of the first Latin Bible, received all the books of the N". T. except Hebrews. II Peter, Jani'-s. and Jude ; however, there was already a strong inclination in his environ- ment to admit II Peter as authentic. Jude had been recognized by Tertullian, but, strangely, it had lost its position in the African Church, probably owing to

its citation of the apocryphal Henoch. Cyprian's testimony to the non-canonicity of Hebrews and James is confirmed by Commodian, another African writer of the period. A very important witness is the document known as Mommsen's Canon, a MS. of the tenth century, but whose original has been ascertained to date from West Africa about the year 360. It is a formal catalogue of the sacred books, unmutilated in the N. T. portion, and proves that at its time the books universally acknowledged in the influential Church of Carthage were almost identical with those received by Cyprian a century before. Hebrews, James, and Jude are entirely wanting. The three Epistles of St. John and II Peter appear, but after each stands the note una sola, added by an almost contemporary hand, and evidently in protest against the reception of these Antilegomena, which, presum- ably, had found a place in the official list recently, but whose right to be there was seriously questioned. (3) The period of fixation; c. \. d.. 367-405.

(a) St. Athanasius. — While the influence of Atha- nasius on the Canon of the O. T. was negative and exclusive (see supra), in that of the N. T. it was tren- chantly constructive. In his "Epistola Festalis" (a. d. 367) the illustrious Bishop of Alexandria ranks all of Origen's N. T. Antilegomena. which are identical with the deuteros, boldly inside the Canon, without noticing any of the scruples about them. Thence- forward they were formally and firmly fixed in the Alexandrian Canon. And it is significant of the gen- eral trend of ecclesiastical authority that not only were works which formerly enjoyed high standing at broad-minded Alexandria — the Apocalypse of Peter and the Acts of Paul — involved by Athanasius with the apocrypha, but even some that Origen had re- garded as inspired — Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hennas, the Didache — were ruthlessly shut out under the same damnatory title.

(b) The Roman Church: The Synod under Dama- sus: St. Jerome. — The Muratorian Canon or Frag- ment, composed in the Roman Church in the last quarter of the second century, is silent about He- brews, James, II Peter; I Peter, indeed, is not men- tioned, but must have been omitted by an oversight, since it was universally received at the time. There is evidence that this restricted Canon obtained not only in the African Church, with slight modifications, as we have seen, but also at Rome and in the West generally until the close of the fourth century. The same ancient authority witnesses to the very favour- able and perhaps canonical standing enjoyed at Rome by the Apocalypse of Peter and the Shepherd of Hermas. In the middle decades of the fourth cen- tury the increased intercourse and exchange of views between the Orient and the Occident led to a better mutual acquaintance regarding Biblical canons and

the correction of the catalogl f the Latin Church.

It is a singular fact that while the East, mainly' through St. Jerome's pen, exerted a disturbing anil negative influence on Western opinion regarding the O. T., the same influence, through probably the same chief intermediary, made for the completeness and integrity of the \. T. Canon. The West began to realize that the ancient Apostolic Churches of Jeru- salem and Antioch, ind 1 the whole < Went, for more

than two centuries had acknowledged Hebrews and James as inspired writings of Apostles, while the ven- erable Alexandrian Church, supported by the prestige of Athanasius, and the powerful Patriarchate of Con- stantinople, with the scholarship of Eusebius behind its judgment, had canonized all the disputed Epistles. St. Jerome, a rising light in the Church, though but a simple priest, was summoned by Pope Damasus from the East, where he was pursuing sacred lore, to assist at an eclectic, but net oecumenical, synod at Rome in the year 382. Neither the general council at Con- stantinople of the preceding year nor that of Nice