Antithesis.
Antithesis.
§ 189. Most Papists follow the Council of Trent and place the Book of Tobit among the canonical books of the Old Testament. To confirm this opinion, Bellarmine (De verbo Dei, bk. 1, c. 11), Gregorius de Valentia (p. 336), etc., cite: [I] Certain statements of the fathers, such as of Cyprian (sermon De eleemosyna), Ambrose (De Tobia, c. 1), Basil (Orat. de avaritia), and Augustine (De speculo). These men call this book “holy” and quote statements from it.
We respond. (1) They call this book “holy” to separate it from secular books even as we, in the common manner of speaking, call the entire corpus of canonical and apocryphal books the “Holy Bible.” Ambrose calls 4 Ezra “divine,” yet the Papists do not accept it into their canon. So they are not comparing the properly canonical books with apocryphal books but all biblical books with secular books and books of fables. (2) A bare citation does not make a book canonical, because some things are quoted from those books that, by consensus of the Papists themselves, are apocryphal. (3) The testimonies of the fathers that seem to the Papists to have been drawn from Tobit are not taken from the apocryphal Book of Tobit but from canonical books. In his sermon De eleemosyna, Cyprian says, “The Holy Spirit says in Scripture,” when he quotes a passage from Tobit. Yet the words that Cyprian cites are contained in a canonical book (Prov. 16:6). In his sermon De avarit., Basil seems to Bellarmine to call a statement copied from Tobit a “divine command,” yet he perceives not a statement from Tobit but a passage from Isaiah: “Share your bread with the hungry,” etc. (58:7). (4) The book De speculo is not one of Augustine’s, because verses of Boethius are quoted in c. 3. (5) The Papists are opposing themselves in this dispute about the canon. You see, when we urge on the basis of Jerome the difference between canonical and apocryphal books, they answer: “It is not strange that Jerome calls those controversial books ‘apocryphal’ because the canon of Scripture had not yet been defined by a general council at the time of Jerome.” Nevertheless they themselves want to prove the canonical authority of the apocryphal books from the testimonies of fathers who lived before Jerome.
§190. [II] They cite the decrees of the popes: Calixtus I, Clement I, Anacletus, Alexander I, Marcellus I, Gelasius, etc.
We respond. (1) Those epistles of the popes are spurious, as is proved in its place by the manner of style, the condition of the times, the confession of the more sensible Papists, and other basic points. (2) Why is it strange that they include the apocryphal books in the canon when they count these decretal epistles in canonical Scripture ([Jus canonicum,] dist. 19, c. In canonicis)? (3) What Bellarmine brings out on behalf of Gratian’s defense also can stand as the response to their argument: “He uses the expression ‘canonical Scripture’ in a more general sense.”