ShooterTX said:
I know that you've been told that the RCC gave us the Bible, but this is completely untrue.
What we identify as the RCC did not exist before 1054 A.D; it could not have given us the Bible.
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The scriptures existed long before the first bishop of Rome declared himself to be the Pope.
Yes.
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The Old Testament was canonized by the Jews long before Christ was born.
This needs a lot of unpacking. Canon has different layers of meaning. The one we are most familiar with is some form of "this is divinely inspired." The other meaning is "this is suitable for use/reading during corporate worship." Judaism tends towards that second definition, and prior to around 300 B.C., there were different Jewish "canons" depending on which community you talked about. One community might use something in corporate worship while another did not, but that didn't necessarily mean they outright rejected it.
That circa 300 B.C. (it was actually 280 something but I forget the exact date) date is significant because that is when "King Ptolemy II of Egypt commissioned the royal librarian, Demetrius of Phaleron, to collect by purchase or by copying all the books in the world. He wrote a letter to Eleazar, the high priest at Jerusalem, requesting six elders of each tribe, in total seventy-two men, of exemplary life and learned in the Torah, to translate it into Greek." Philo, writing in the first century, tells us that these translators were shut into separate cells to work and that the resulting Greek translations of the Old Testament were all in perfect agreement with each other indicating divine inspiration of their work.
This Old Testament came to be known as
the "Septuagint", or Greek for 70, and was the Old Testament referenced by Christ and the apostles during their earthly ministry. Due to the conquests of Alexander the Great the Septuagint spread widely and was broadly accepted and used from around 300 B.C. to 800 A.D by Jews. Philo's 1st century testimony from antiquity is particularly important because in it you have a pre-Masoretic Jewish philosopher, not a Christian, testifying to the validity and authenticity of the Septuagint which makes the subsequent work of the Masoretes described below that much more suspect.
Although Justin Martyr identifies the actions of Rabbis to edit out sections of the Septuagint that identified Christ as the Messiah in their teachings as early as the 2nd century A.D, by 800 A.D., a problem had arisen. The Church had grown significantly, eclipsing Judaism, and the teaching/prophecy of Hebrews 8:13 had come to pass. Rabbinic Judaism was in need of an Old Testament that less directly identified Jesus as the Christ. A group of Jewish Talmudic scholars known as the Masoretes undertook the task of producing an alternative rendering of the Jewish old Testament, a process that was largely completed 200 years later. This gave us what today is known as the "Masoretic Text".
I won't go into all the changes that were made, but one of them was a subtle alteration in the lifespans of the patriarchs in Genesis that subtracted around 1400 years from the age of the earth, in an attempt to advance the timing of the coming of the messiah into the future and the elimination of the Wisdom of Solomon and it's prophecy about Christ's crucifixion.
It is this Masoretic Text that is the canon of modern Rabbinic Judaism. Unfortunately, this Masoretic text is also the underlying text of most English language Bibles today based on the flawed reasoning Saint Jerome in compiling the Roman Catholic Vulgate and of modern textual critics.
(I will stop here to make a somewhat tangential point. If you are a modern Christian, particularly a "sola scriptura" Christian, it is incumbent upon you to get, read, and study the same scriptures that Christ and the apostles read and referenced while on earth. This involves stopping the use of the Old Testament that is currently found in your Bible (unless its an Orthodox Study Bible) and getting and reading the Septuagint for your study and devotions. I would recommend Brenton's, which has the English and Greek in parallel columns. The Lexham's grammar is more modern, but so is their insertion of gender neutral language.)
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The New Testament was canonized over many years at many different councils, mostly occurring in the 3rd & 4th centuries. Even before the first council of Nicea, most Christians had an understanding of which NT books were scripture and which were not. By the end of the 4th century, pretty much everyone accepted the same New Testament books.
Pretty much correct.
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Meanwhile Pope Leo was the first to declare himself to have universal authority over all the churches in the mid 5th century... long after the Bible had been established. His claim to authority was not accepted, and it was many years before the Papacy was truly established.
Unlike papal infallability, which was dogmatized by the Roman Catholic Church in 1870 A.D. at the First Vatican Council, the idea of papal supremacy developed gradually, really taking root in the Latin Church after the great schism of 1054 A.D.
In fact, Saint Gregory the Great, the 64th bishop of Rome from 540 A.D. - 604 A.D. wrote these words:
"Now I confidently say that whosoever calls himself, or desires to be called, Universal Priest, is in his elation the precursor of Antichrist, because he proudly puts himself above all others. Nor is it by dissimilar pride that he is led into error; for, as that perverse one wishes to appear as above all men, so whosoever this one is who covets being called sole priest, he extols himself above all other priests. But, since the Truth says, Every one that exalts himself shall be humbled Luke 14:11; 18:14"
