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Written by Sherry
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Saturday, 27 December 2008 10:57 |
Here's a nifty way to compare and contrast Biblical canons. From Bible Study Magazine. comes a colorful chart which compares and contrasts the 7 major canons: Protestant, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Syrian, Ethiopian, Hebrew, and Samaritan.
The issue of the canon is a very complicated one and this chart is simplification - but a very helpful one.
The Ethiopian canon is the least known to me - and the one with the most books. And the Samartian canon is by far the shortest
And for those of us from English language Protestant backgrounds - a little note on the history of the "Apochrypha" or Deutero-canonical books.
"Protestant Reformers like Martin Luther doubted the canonicity* of the Apocrypha*, but when Luther prepared his translation of the Bible into German, he did not remove the Apocrypha; he simply moved those books to an appendix. This tradition continues in many European bibles.
The English were the first group of people to remove the Apocrypha altogether. In 1599, an edition of the Geneva Bible was published without the Apocrypha. In 1615, during the reign of King James the First, George Abbot, the Archbishop of Canterbury, declared the penalty for printing a Bible without the Apocrypha to be a year in prison! But over the next three centuries the growing influence of Puritans and Presbyterians over the populace, the government, and the British and Foreign Bible Society led to a strong tradition of printing bibles containing only 66 books.
The situation today reflects this bifurcation. The bibles used by many European Protestants, as well as the Anglican Church, still include the Apocrypha. Most other English-speaking Protestant churches have bibles without the Apocrypha."
(The Protestant canon in the chart below is the European/Anglican version which does include the Deutero-canonical books - not the 66 book version that I grew up with. Here's the link:
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