Ultimately, only the magisterium (teaching authority) of the Church can tell
us which books are inspired. There are many beautiful books, free from
error, and full of truth, which are not inspired. Conversely, in the inspired
books, there are many difficult and strange things which could have misled
the limited mind of man into thinking they were not from God. In the final
analysis, all purely human criteria are inadequate to resolve the question.
Inspiration cannot be detected by investigation of the text alone; an external
authority is needed to declare it is inspired. Only the authoritative voice of
the Church of God can tell us which books are the word of God. So at
Vatican I, the Church declared, “These books of the Old and New
Testament, complete with all their parts … as contained in the ancient Latin
Vulgate edition, must be held as sacred and canonical. The Church holds
them as sacred and canonical, not as having been composed by merely
human labor and afterwards approved by her authority; nor merely because
they contain revelation without error; but because, written under the
inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God for their author, and have
been transmitted to the Church as such.”
16
The Fathers
Exhortation to the Greeks 13 (inter 260-302 AD) Author Unknown
“Ptolemy, the king of Egypt, when he had constructed a library in
Alexandria, and had filled it by collecting books from everywhere,
afterwards learned that ancient histories written in Hebrew letters had been
carefully preserved. Desiring to know these writings, he sent for seventy
wise men from Jerusalem who knew both the Greek and the Hebrew
languages, and appointed them to translate the books...He supplied
attendants to care for their every need, and also to prevent their
communicating with each other, so that it might be possible to know the
accuracy of the translation, by their agreement one with another. When he
found that the seventy men had given not only the same meaning, but even
the same words, and had failed to agree with each other by not so much as
a single word, but had written the same things about the same things, he
was struck with amazement, and believed that the translation had been
written with divine authority.”
16
Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith, 1870, chapter 2.
 |
 |
 |