The Lost Scriptures – books that did not make it into the New Testament.

The Canon of Eusebius

Eusebius of Caesarea is commonly known as the “Father of Church History”. He published a ten volume work titled Church History in 311 C.E. His work was the first full history of the church from the days of Jesus to his own time. He is the historian many turn to for information about the Christian church during the first three centuries of existence. His listing of books is somewhat complicated – he makes the comment that some of the books he considers were still under dispute. As such he gave four categories of books to be considered in the canon: “Acknowledged Books”, “Disputed Books”, “Spurious Books”, and “Rejected Books”.

Some of the disputed books include the epistle of James, Jude, the second epistle of Peter, and 2 and 3 John. Books he called spurious include Acts of Paul, the Apocalypse of Peter, and the epistle of Barnabas.

Perhaps the most important contribution of Eusebius was a clever and unique way of referencing specific portions of Scripture text. First he divided the Gospels into numbered sections — 355 in Matthew, 241 in Mark, 342 in Luke, and John had 232 sections. This made it easy to refer to a specific passage, even without chapters and verses. Then Eusebius created 10 lists in which parallel passages were listed by their reference number. These were called Eusebius’ 10 “canon” tables; here the word “canon” means a Listing of Items.

The Eusebian canon could be found in bibles up until the 1600’s when better cross-referencing schemes were developed. If you have read some of the Apocryphal books like 1 and 2 Esdras, Tobit, Judith, Ecclesiasticus, or Bel the Dragon, what about those books do you find interesting, helpful, or inspiring?

Pastor Dave