Whose canon is divinely inspired?

  The many Christian canons

by Ibn Anwar

    The word canon comes from the Greek kanna which accoding to Prof. Bleddyn J. Roberts means ” ‘reed’ or ‘cane’; which gives the idea of a measuring-rod, and it was first used in this sense when Athanasius applied it to the books of the NT.” [1] In the Biblical sense canon refers to a select number of books that are considered authoritative and divinely inspired, hence, their inclusion in a particular Bible volume. Many Christians, especially from the west are pretty much familiar with the 66 books canon – 39 books in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament. The Protestants would be less familiar with the Catholic canon which consists 73 books containing 7 extra books. The so-called Deuterocanonical books are regarded as apocryphal(doubtful) by the Protestants, but the Catholics consider them canonical. One may think that the existence of different canons end at the Catholic-Protestant traditions. One would be very wrong to think that. As a matter of fact throughout Christian history there have been numerous different canons that differ from one another. In this article we shall have a glimpse at those many Christian canons. The main purpose of this article is to show that those Christians out there who want to talk about Qur’anic manuscripts burned by Uthman r.a. and try to undermine its credibility from that approach need to reconsider their tactic.