(August 3, 2018 at 3:03 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote:(August 3, 2018 at 11:03 am)SteveII Wrote: It has always been my understanding that the process of official recognition (canonization) was affirming already held beliefs--not actually changing anything. Of course there were a few books on the bubble.
I'd be interested to know what information this understanding is based on.
Many years of school/church/reading. I found the quote from the wiki article that support that.
Writings attributed to the Apostles circulated among the earliest Christian communities. The Pauline epistles were circulating, perhaps in collected forms, by the end of the 1st century AD.[a] Justin Martyr, in the mid 2nd century, mentions "memoirs of the apostles" as being read on "the day called that of the sun" (Sunday) alongside the "writings of the prophets."[5] A defined set of four gospels (the Tetramorph) was asserted by Irenaeus, c. 180, who refers to it directly.[6][7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developmen...ollections
Although, I thought about this recently. No one has to live by what those councils decided. We still have all the contested documents. We can do incredible things with word usage and sentence structures than ever before. It is easy to reapply some of the same doctrinal-consistency tests the councils would have done back then. The charge that "the winners" decided what was in the Bible is meaningless. You can re-check their work--with more precision. There is not one book that "should" have been included after reexamination. There are some epistles that might not be from Paul--so? Did any doctrine change? Any new teaching get introduced? No.
