Canon of the Bible
Objection: “The Catholic Church has added extra corrupt books to
the Bible which were never part of the Hebrew canon!”
This is an important accusation for Catholics to contend with, because we
need to be certain that it is to the word of God and not the word of man that
the Church refers when teaching and preaching to the human race, and
determining vital questions of faith and morals. At the same time, it is a
difficult question, because the Bible by itself does not tell us the full list of
which books belong to it. Jesus Himself referred to “the Law and the
Prophets”. This shows that He recognized, as the word of God, the Law or
Torah, which is specifically in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the
Bible; along with “the Prophets”. In His ministry, Our Lord more
specifically quoted the prophet Isaiah, the Book of Psalms, and other books
of the Old Testament—but nowhere is He quoted as saying which is the
full list of divinely inspired books.
The word “canon” may be defined as the catalogue or collection of books
which the Church has declared to be divinely inspired, and which she
regards as a rule of faith. The Old Testament books accepted widely from
the very beginning of the Church, whose inspiration was never in doubt, are
sometimes called protocanonical (protos = first). Books officially
recognized some time later, and about the inspiration of which there was
some uncertainty here and there, are called deuterocanonical (deuteros =
second). The Church herself has never officially used the terminology of
‘protocanonical’ and ‘deuterocanonical.’ But we will use the terms here for
convenience only. A book is simply inspired (and therefore in the canon) or
not. For the Church, all the Biblical books are canonical; there is no ‘first’
or ‘second’ rank. [An apocryphal book is one that some have thought to be
inspired by God, but which in fact is not inspired and the Church has
rejected as such, regardless of how historical or orthodox it may be. The
word apocryphal literally means to ‘hide from,’ to withhold from the
public.]
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