D31-27: The Catholic Encyclopedia Says ‘The Idea Of A Complete NT Canon Has No Foundation In History’

Over the past couple of days, I’ve given you a super brief but necessary history lesson on how the Bible that we use today came into being starting from the first five books of Moses all the way up to those writings that gentile believers call the New Testament or the BRIT HADASHAH in Hebrew.

This little history lesson was necessary because one has to know how to best prioritize the books in our Holy Bible.

Talk about prioritizing, recall the Rabbinical method of KAL V’HOMER that I’ve spoken about in the past.

This principle teaches us that it is necessary to have the wisdom to know which of God’s laws carry more weight than others when we encounter a situation in which we’re forced to obey one command over the other because it is impossible to obey both commands at the same time.

It is inevitable that from time to time we’ll encounter such thorny situations as a regular part of living life in this fallen world.

A perfect example illustrating this is an ambulance rushing to save a life on Shabbat.

The ambulance drivers are breaking the command to not work on the Sabbath to obey the higher principle that life is ultimately more important.

And Yeshua also spoke about this KAL V’HOMER principle.

“Then Yeshua asked them,
‘Which is lawful on the Sabbath:
to do good or to do evil,
to save life or to kill?’ 
But they remained silent.”

Or how about this passage from Luke.

 ^“One Sabbath day as Yeshua was teaching in a synagogue,
he saw a woman who had been crippled by an evil spirit.
She had been bent double for eighteen years and was
unable to stand up straight.
When Yeshua saw her, he called her over and said,
‘Dear woman, you are healed of your sickness!’ 
Then he touched her, and instantly she could stand straight.
How she praised God!
But the leader in charge of the synagogue was indignant
that Yeshua had healed her on the Sabbath day.
‘There are six days of the week for working,’
he said to the crowd.
“Come on those days to be healed,
not on the Sabbath.”
But Yeshua replied,
“You hypocrites!
Each of you works on the Sabbath day!
Don’t you untie your ox or your donkey
from its stall on the Sabbath and lead it out for water?
This dear woman, a daughter of Abraham,
has been held in bondage by Satan for eighteen years.
Isn’t it right that she be released, even on the Sabbath?”
This shamed his enemies,
but all the people rejoiced at the wonderful things he did.”
-Luke 13:10-17

Yeshua was not preaching or teaching some revolutionary New Testament principle as the church would have you believe, he was actually adhering to the Rabbinic principle of KAL V’HOMER (light and heavy).

And we are to apply the same principle to the books in our Bible.

The Christian church promotes the false idea that the New Testament is superior to the old or they’ll say things like the Old Testament must be read in light of the new and not the reverse.

They get it totally backwards and say that the New Testament is the foundation of the Old.

This is totally ridiculous when you consider that a full 50% of the New Testament consists of direct quotes from the Hebrew Bible.

It is literally impossible to make the New Testament the foundation of the Old because by definition the foundation has to come before.

So what usually ends up happening is that the church simply declares the Old Testament as irrelevant and done away with and that the only Bible the believer needs to concern himself or herself with is just the New Testament.

Big mistake!

And you wanna know something interesting.

Even the Catholic Encyclopedia agrees it’s a big mistake!

Check out this quote from this international and voluminous work on the doctrines and history of the Catholic Church:

“The idea of a complete and clear-cut canon of the New Testament existing from the beginning, that is from Apostolic times, has no foundation in history. The Canon of the New Testament, like that of the Old, is the result of a development, of a process at once stimulated by disputes with doubters, both within and without the Church, and retarded by certain obscurities and natural hesitations, and which did not reach its final term until the dogmatic definition of the Tridentine Council”.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.