In this episode, Jimmy Akin joins Cy Kellett to discuss how the Church views the canon of Scripture and why not everything Paul wrote became part of the New Testament.
Transcript:
Caller: Imagine if, or suppose that, they find St. Paul’s letter to the Athenians. And for the sake of argument, it’s completely orthodox, and we know with 100% certainty that Paul wrote it. Would it be scripture? And could it ever become scripture if we started using it in liturgy?
Jimmy: Okay, well, first of all, we don’t know that there was a letter to the Athenians. We do have references to some letters that we know St. Paul wrote that are not in the New Testament, that have been lost, but we don’t know if there was one to the Athenians. But supposing that there were, you ask, would it be Scripture? And I assume you mean by that, would it be divinely inspired?
Well, there’s no way to answer that. Just because a book is divinely inspired does not mean it was automatically preserved. And so consequently, God could have divinely inspired works through St. Paul or any other writer that he didn’t choose to have survive and become part of the canon of the Church.
So I would say there’s no way to answer if you know this. Even if we know Paul wrote it, which we never would, and even if it were 100% orthodox, there’s no way at this point to determine whether or not it’s inspired. It would require some new revelation of God to tell us that it was inspired. And even that would only be a private revelation, so it wouldn’t be binding on us as a matter of faith.
So I would say, could it be divinely inspired? Hypothetically, is it required to be divinely inspired? No, it’s not. Paul undoubtedly wrote a lot of stuff that we don’t have, and that stuff that we don’t have may not have been inspired.
So that’s the first thing I’d say. You then said, could it become scripture? And I would say no, because the way the Church has discerned what books are scripture is by looking at what’s been passed down to us for use in the churches as scripture.
And when it comes to Paul’s letters, we even have evidence that. And this goes into some interesting areas that I don’t know if we have time to go into today. But we have evidence that Paul himself was the author of the letters. We have evidence that Paul wrote a whole bunch of letters. The question is, why do we have those that we do? Why did these letters get collected?
For a period of time in the 20th century, it was thought, oh, well, they were just kind of gathered up here and there by churches, and it was kind of a random thing that we ended up with these letters. But the evidence is that that’s not the case. They did have ancient collections of letters in the ancient world.
For example, Cicero, the Roman author, was very famous for writing letters, and he collected them. Similarly, with the governor of Bithynia, Pliny the Younger, he collected his letters. And we know something about how this process worked. Typically, the initial collection of letters would be done by the author himself, and he would organize them according to some criterion.
He could organize them by date, he could organize them by who they were written to. He could order them by length from smallest to longest. He could order them by length from largest to shortest. But it was up to the initial author to identify what went into the initial letter collection and what organizing principle would be used to sequence them.
And when you study Paul’s letters, it looks like we have an initial collection that consisted of Romans, 1st Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, and Galatians. The normal pattern was for the author himself to do an initial collection. Later expanded editions might be done by somebody else, but they’d follow the author’s pattern.
In the case of St. Paul’s letters, they’re arranged in descending order of length. So Romans is his longest letter, First Corinthians next, Second Corinthians next, Galatians next. But then there’s a bump, and the bump is Ephesians. It is slightly longer than Galatians, and then it starts shrinking again. And then you have the Pastoral epistles that are written to individuals last.
So what it looks like is during his own lifetime, St. Paul likely published an edition of Romans through Galatians. And then either Paul or one of his associates later expanded that collection to form the collection we have now.
Now, what that means is there was conscious thought given to which letters were going to go into this collection and which were not. That’s, for example, one reason why we don’t have 0 Corinthians, because we know he wrote a 0 Corinthians, but it was not selected to go into this collection.
Well, this collection was what was chosen by Paul and possibly by his associates to become scripture for the Church. And by implication, everything else Paul wrote was not passed on to the Church to become scripture.
And so I would say if we discovered a letter to the Athenians or if we discovered 0 Corinthians or something like that, well, it wasn’t selected to become scripture for the Church. It was consciously excluded from that role by not being included in Paul’s letter collection.
And so I would say, even if it were inspired, which we wouldn’t have any way of knowing since inspiration is not a detectable literary quality, I would say it would not be canonical. I would say it would never be canonical because it does not meet the criterion that the Church used of being passed down to us as scripture.
Cy: Liam, I wanted to say thank you very much for the call. I’d love to send you a copy of Jimmy’s book, *The Bible is a Catholic Book*, if you’d like it. Hang on the line and we will send it off to you.