A Minute in the Church. Gus Lloyd

question. The Catholic Church has always taught that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant Word of God. But remember, in the years immediately following the Resurrection of our Lord, there was no New Testament...only the Church.

      In the first few centuries of Christianity, there were literally hundreds of letters and books circulating among churches. So how do we know that the 27 books in the New Testament are divinely inspired and supposed to be in the Bible? Late in the 4th Century A.D., Catholic bishops met in council at both Carthage and Hippo, and with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, decided on what books belonged in the New Testament. It is the Holy Catholic Church that was given the authority by Christ to determine the canon of Scripture.

      St. Augustine said, "I would not believe in the Gospels were it not for the authority of the Catholic Church." You see, the Bible didn't just fall out of the sky, or off of a local printing press. There had to be an authoritative Church before the New Testament was ever written to determine what books would be in the New Testament. If you accept the authority of the New Testament, then you accept the authority of the Catholic Church.

      Call No Man Father

      Why do Catholics call their priests “Father”? After all, didn’t Jesus forbid that in Matt 23:9? Let’s go to the Scriptures. In Matthew 23:9 Jesus says, “Call no one on earth your Father; you have but one Father in heaven.” Now, did Jesus mean that you’re not even allowed to refer to your dad as your father? Of course not; Jesus didn’t mean that at all. If Christians took that verse literally, we would all have to refer to our male parent as “our male parent.” So, was Jesus speaking strictly in a spiritual sense? Apparently, St. Paul didn’t think so. In 1 Corinthians 4:15, St. Paul says “You do not have many fathers, for I became your father in Christ Jesus through the Gospel.” And in the letter to Philemon, verse 10 St. Paul talks about his “child” Onesimus (remember St. Paul never married) saying “…whose father I have become in my imprisonment…”. And in Romans 4:16-17, St. Paul refers to Abraham as “…the father of us all…”. The New Testament has many references to fathers. Just read the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew 1.

      It’s clear that St. Paul knew exactly what Jesus meant…not to attribute the Fatherhood of God to any man. So the next time you see a priest, why not say, “Thanks, Father, for guiding your spiritual children.”

      For further study:

      1 Corinthians 4:14-16

      Philemon 10

      Romans 4:16-17

      Matthew 1:1-17

      Canon of Scripture

      Why does a Catholic Bible have 73 books, and a Protestant Bible 66? The canon of Scripture for the Christian Church was determined by Catholic Bishops at the Council of Carthage in 397 A.D. It included the Septuagint, or Alexandrian canon of the Old Testament - 46 books. For more than a millennium, this was the accepted canon of Scripture.

      Now, around 100 A.D., Jewish leaders rejected seven of these books, mainly on the grounds that they could not find any Hebrew versions of these books. Their version of the Old Testament is called the Palestinian canon. In 1529, Martin Luther chose to accept the Palestinian canon, principally citing the lack of Hebrew versions of the seven books. Who could have known that nearly 400 years later, Hebrew copies of some of these books would be found in the Dead Sea scrolls at Qumran?

      In the New Testament, 300 quotations from the Old Testament are from the Septuagint. The Septuagint was the translation used by Jesus and New Testament writers. If you’d like to read for yourself, check out the books of Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, Baruch, Tobit and 1 and 2 Maccabees.