he Palestinian canon, after hot debates, was finally
settled in the form in which the Hebrew Old Testament now appears.
Alexandrian Judaism had a different standard and accepted, in addition
to the Palestinian collection, a group of books (the Apocrypha) that the
Palestinians rejected. Certain other books (as the various Enoch
apocalypses) were not accepted by either Jewish body, though they were
highly esteemed. Both canons were slow growths of national
feeling--books were chosen that accorded with prevailing ideas; but it
is now impossible to recover all the critical views that determined the
results.[2078]

+1131+. Young Christianity, at first a Jewish body, naturally adopted
the Jewish canons, but in the course of a century produced a
considerable normative literature of its own. The Christian canon was
settled much in the same way as the Jewish. There was doubt about
certain books, there were differences of opinion in different quarters,
the growth of heresies called for the establishment of a definite
standard, and a final decision was reached in the West and announced
toward the end of the fifth century by Pope Gelasius; in the East the
action was less definite, but the conclusion was about the same. The
books of the Alexandrian canon that were rejected by the Palestinians
were largely used by early Christian writers, by whom some of them are
constantly cited as sacred Scripture, for they were found in the Greek
translation of the Old Testament (the Septuagint), which was the Old
Testament text used by Christians. So great was their popularity that
Jerome was led, against his judgment, to include them in his translation
(the Latin Vulgate), and by the Council of Trent (1546) they were
indorsed as deuterocanonical, and are still so regarded in the Roman
Church. In the Greek Church they were accepted as canonical in the
beginning and up to the early part of the nineteenth century, but are
now, it would seem, looked on only as useful for the instruction of
catechumens.[2079] By Protestants their canonical authority is generally
denied, though up to the early part of the nineteenth century they were
commonly printed in editions of the Bible; the Articles of the Church of
England characterize them as instructive but not of authority for
doctrine, and lessons from them now appear in the Lectionary of the
Church.[2080]

+1132+. The history of the collection of the Zoroastrian sacred books
is involved in obscurity. A l