| rdfs:comment | - The Biblical canon is an exclusive list of books written during the formative period of the Jewish or Christian faiths; the leaders of these communities believed these books to be inspired by God or to express the authoritative history of the relationship between God and his people (although there may have been secondary considerations as well).
- The Biblical canon is the officially recognized list of books which are considered part of the Bible. The first Christians used the Greek translation of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint which was written and read by Jews as the Greek language had generally replaced Hebrew. In the Council of Jamnia of 90 A.D., Jewish rabbis rejected the Septuagint in favor of the Hebrew language text, and omitted certain books such as Baruch, Judith, Maccabees, Sirach, and Tobit, relatively recent contributions which had become part of Jewish culture.
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| abstract | - The Biblical canon is the officially recognized list of books which are considered part of the Bible. The first Christians used the Greek translation of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint which was written and read by Jews as the Greek language had generally replaced Hebrew. In the Council of Jamnia of 90 A.D., Jewish rabbis rejected the Septuagint in favor of the Hebrew language text, and omitted certain books such as Baruch, Judith, Maccabees, Sirach, and Tobit, relatively recent contributions which had become part of Jewish culture. The Eastern Christian churches continue to use the Greek Septuagint to this day, but the Western Church of Catholicism commissioned a Latin translation from Saint Jerome in the early 5th century which came to be known as the Vulgate. It remains the official Roman Catholic Bible. The Biblical New Testament was taking shape by the end of the first century when the Gospels and the letters of Paul were already being circulated. The heretic Marcion attempted to remove some books around 140 A.D., showing that there was already a grouping of books that were accepted as authentic. Twenty of the 27 books of the New Testament were accepted early in the history of Christianity, while the other seven that make up the Scriptures had a longer ride. When Constantine first made Christianity a legal religion in the Roman Empire in the early 300s, he called together leading Christians from the East and West parts of the empire to iron out the principles of Christianity, including cementing the canon. Subsequent councils dealt with minor questions of authenticity. For the Catholic Church, they made a formal proclamation at the Council of Trent, that the Bible they had been using and the books it contained were correct, in reaction to the Protestant Reformation's rejection of the deuterocanonical works as apocryphal. The 1611 King James Bible, put together after the Church of England had broken away from the Catholic Church under Henry VIII, included these books but placed them in a separate section, and the Church of England continued to use the deuterocanonicals in the liturgy until forbidden by the Long Parliament in 1644. By the 1800s Protestant Bibles began to omit the deuterocanonical books altogether. Orthodox Christians do not usually speak of "the canon of Scripture" but do think of the writings as "canonical", the difference being that the canonical writings are judged as being faithful to the dogma of the Church. The Orthodox Church has never defined the Old Testament canon, but they have been using the same one since the early times of the Church.
- The Biblical canon is an exclusive list of books written during the formative period of the Jewish or Christian faiths; the leaders of these communities believed these books to be inspired by God or to express the authoritative history of the relationship between God and his people (although there may have been secondary considerations as well). There are differences between Christians and Jews, as well as between different Christian traditions, over which books meet the standards for canonization. The different criteria for, and the process of, canonization for each community dictates what members of that community consider to be their Bible. At this time, all of the below canons are considered to be closed; that is, most adherents of the various groups do not think that additional books can be added to their Bible. By contrast, an open canon would be a list of books which is considered to be open to additional books, should they meet the other criteria. Each of the canons described below was considered open for a time before being closed. Generally, the closure of the canon reflects a belief from the faith community that the formative period of the religion has ended, and that texts from that period can be collected into an authoritative body of work. Certain Christian churches (such as the Latter-day Saints) which accept a Bible as part of their formally adopted sacred literature may also include other works in the totality of their canon, but they generally do not consider those other works to be part of their Bible. See Sacred text for examples. The relationship between the closing of the canon and beliefs about the nature of revelation may be subject to different interpretations. Some believe that the closing of the canon signals the end of a period of divine revelation; others believe that revelation continues even after the canon is closed, either through individuals or through the leadership of a divinely sanctioned religious institution. Among those who believe that revelation continues after the canon is closed, there is further debate about what kinds of revelation is possible, and whether the revelation can add to established theology.
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