Answering a question about the Ethiopian Canon

This was in regard to Bob Marley's conversion to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church a few months before he died. But the whole thread was about something that was said by WOTM radio and John Macarthur about Dred Locks.

Quote:
Originally Posted by seal
Uh No.... He was
still a Heathen when he made that music...LOL....... And if he converted to EEO
I'm still worried about him as he should be worried about me. We have two
different Canons.... One of us have added or taken away from God's Word....

Scary stuff

Grace and Peace,
seal

The Kingdom of Ethiopia was outside the Roman Empire, and the books they had was mostly depended on the Ethiopian Jews of that region. The Christians just pretty much adopted the Jewish books of that region.


Did some christians argue over this issue? Yes! But, they never split over this issue. A split didn't happen until the 15 hundreds.



If you look at the History of the Church, then you would know that churches didn't split over different books in different regional(local) canons.

For centuries different regions of the Church had different Old Testament books.

So one shouldn't really expect to have a 100% unified canon. I mean even the Latin Vulgate had 3 less books than the LXX of the time. Yet the east and west didn't seem to care about the difference.



This is why I don't mind the Ethiopians having 81 books in the Narrow Canon. I just saw a bunch of ethiopians tonight by the way.




From what I'm seeing, and I may be wrong about this, but it seems that the differences of christian Old Testaments has alot to do with the Jews......depending where the Jews were. The christians of the region probably just embraced their collection of books.


The Jews in Babylon may of had slightly different books, and (what we call) chapters than the Jews in Palestine. The same might be true for the Jews in Alexandria and Ethiopia.



Also the Miaphysites (because they reject the term monophysite). The Miaphysites understand the union in a way that is very similar to Chalcedonians. So one can make a theological case that the difference maybe symantics and culture.








JNORM888