Here it is. I have to go class now.
Non_Serviam wrote:[size=200]I've always had one major problem with modern Christianity. Namely, the First Council of Nicaea. Paul tells us that all scripture is divinely inspired. All. Not the ones that we like, or appeal to the church's political positions.
All.
Since this purports to be a serious question, I'll answer it. The problem is what totality of scripture is Paul referring to? Obviously, he is not referring to all possbile sacred texts, since some are inherantly contradictory to both Christianity and Judaism. So, Paul is clearly referring to some subset ,which he does not seem to name. As a result, we may surmise that Paul is referring to the canon of scripture that was already being used at the time.
However, in roughly 317AD (correct me if I'm wrong) over 80 scriptures that were previously seen by as divinely inspired were tossed aside.
This is simply incorrect. The council of Nicea did not deal with the composition of the canon, but rather with certain Christological concerns (specifically, the Arian heresy). The earliest listed canon of Christian scripture is the one provided by St. Iraneus of Lyons in ~180 AD, and he only lists the four synpotic gospels: "tradition admits no others". Later writers provided other lists, but it was not until the latter fourth century that the church councils defined the canon (see the Councils of Laodicea, Rome, Carthage and Hippo). There is also a tradition stating that the Jewish Council of Jamna defined the
Hebrew canon (the Old Testament) ~90 AD, and as is well known this list corresponds to the Protestant canon.
Among those scriptures was the Book of Enoch, which Christ himself quotes DIRECTLY, though he doesn't reveal his source.
You fail to cite any source demonstrating this. I've read the book of Enoch, and while it is interesting it does not really correspond with anything else in the bible. I've also read many of the other rejected books (the New Testament apocrypha), and have also found them to be at considerable variance from anything in accepted tradition. I own a copy of the Nag Hammadi compilation, for example, which is a set of gnostic texts, and these espouse a world-view that is very different from what you will find in the accepted canon.
Why is it that these priests suddenly have the authority to throw out what had been seen as the word of God in earlier times? Surely the word of God doesn't change based on the century, does it?
It
was a matter of the priest having the authority to define the canon. They had to have it in order to pass on the Word of God without it getting hopelessly muddled with other things.
I'll say that you seem to have an erroneous view of history, and that you should stop reading 'Da Vinci Code' style hacks and actually read material that won't get you laughed out of a university history department. Perhaps you should start by reading Jaroslav Pelikan's stuff, or at least some of those books like Enoch that you seem to be so enamoured of (and compare it to what's actually in the canon).
