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The Cannon

The Cannon is the collection of scriptures we have today that make up the Bible. Many questions come from people who question how the Bible was put together. What if they left something out? What if they put something in that wasn't supposed to be in? Well the Cannon itself was not needed until the second and third century when eyewitnesses had died off and those documents that we now have in the new testament had started to need to be copied and coalesced. In truth, it is God who determines the canonicity of a writing. The men who put it together were in constant prayer for a long time just to come to a decision on what the standards for declaring canonicity would be. Books became valuable because they were put in the cannon, but no book was ever put into the cannon because it was valuable. It is God who was the determiner, mother, and master of the Cannon, not the church. The church was simply the servant, child, and tool of God.

The Cannon was put together between the years A.D. 33 and A.D. 397 at the Council of Carthage. The final conclusion of the standards by which the books would be determined were five in total. 1. Was it written by a prophet or apostle? 2. Was the writer confirmed by acts of God? 3. Does it tell the truth about God? 4. Did it come with the power of God? And 5. Was it recognized by the people of God? By these five criterion the Cannon was declared and has not been argued about since. The apocrypha are a group of writings that made it in for a while, but when the protestant reformation occurred, they were one of the issues. Catholics still have them in their Bible, but protestants have declared them to be no more than historical documents. That has been the only contention since, but in all honesty, the apocrypha are less accurate historically and much more embellishing in its stories than the Bible.

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