He was referring to those pieces of scripture Timothy had known since childhood. That would exclude many if not all of the NT books. Check the list in your NWT with bible books and their presumed date of writing against what you think has been Timothy's age when receiving the letter you refert to.
The rest is as they say history.
Cheers
Borgia
Do Paul's Letters Really Count?
by almostbitten 51 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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Borgia
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Leolaia
Borgia has it right; the author was referring to the scriptures known to Timothy since childhood. Exactly what that constituted however is unclear. The Hebrew canon prior to the Council of Jamnia (c. AD 85-115) was in flux and varied considerably among different Jewish parties, particularly as regards what was accepted in the Writings (although there was some debate on whether Ezekiel belonged in the Prophets). The Essenes regarded books like 1 Enoch and Jubilees as part of their sacred canon (as did many early Christians, such as the authors of Jude and Barnabas, who quoted 1 Enoch as inspired prophecy or "scripture") and the Qumran sect of Essenism accepted the writings of their founder (e.g. the Damascus Document and the Temple Scroll) as scripture as well. The Pharisees did not recognize these books at all as scripture, whereas the Samaritans rejected all books outside of the Torah.
This illustrates a basic fact about the Bible canon; it represents a consensus reached by a given community, and if there are multiple communities, then there are multiple canons. The same holds true for Christianity. Even today you will find different Bible canons in different Christian communities. In the Ethiopian church, 1 Enoch and Jubilees are still part of their holy scripture. The Nestorian church in Syria still excludes 2 Peter, Jude, 2, 3 John, and Revelation from their New Testament. The Anglican church still includes 2 Esdras in its deuterocanon (you can find it in New English Bible), whereas the deuterocanon of the Roman Catholic Church excludes 2 Esdras (along with Psalm 151, 1 Esdras, the Prayer of Manasseh, and 3 and 4 Maccabees, which are found in the Bibles of the Eastern Orthodox and Russian Orthodox churches) while including all the other books of the Apocrypha rejected by most Protestant churches. And when the New Testament itself was being formed as a collection, there were many other ideas about what constituted the Bible by different competing Christian communities. Some early Bible codices included Barnabas, 1 Clement, and the Shepherd of Hermas in a sort of New Testament deuterocanon. Some churches rejected Revelation and preferred the Apocalypse of Peter. The early Syrian church eschewed the four gospels for a gospel harmony called the Diatessaron. The church at Rome for a while rejected Hebrews as canonical. 2 Peter and Jude were disputed for a long time and the Alogoi in Asia Minor refused to accept the gospel of John. The second-century churches under the influence of Marcion accepted only a shortened version of the gospel of Luke and a collection of Paul's letters (which excluded the Pastorals and included an epistle to the Laodicians).
It is also worth considering how Paul's letters were collected together and assembled into a corpus in the first place. He doubtless wrote many other letters (as hinted in places in the surviving letters) and there were other letters circulating under his name that were not written by him (see 2 Thessalonians 2:2, 17 for instance). How did the present corpus of 13 letters take shape? There is some evidence of an early seven-letter collection (e.g. Romans, 1 Corinthians, 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, Philippians, Colossians, with the addition of Ephesians) that circulated in Asia Minor that was imitated in the late first century AD by John of Ephesus (in Revelation) and in the early second century AD by Ignatius of Antioch. One striking fact is that Clement of Rome in c. AD 95 was thoroughly familiar with 1 Corinthians and cited it copiously when writing to the church at Corinth but showed no knowledge whatsoever of 2 Corinthians. This letter is thought to have been edited together from at least two other letters Paul wrote to Corinth, and the highly personal and emotional nature of some of the content of 2 Corinthians (see 1:12-2:11, 6:11-7:16, ch. 10-12) may explain why it was not better circulated in the early period. The Apostolikon of Marcion then added Philemon (a short personal note by Paul), 2 Corinthians and 2 Thessalonians to the Pauline corpus around c. AD 135-140, and it was around this time that the first clear evidence of the Pastorals (1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus) shows up in the writings of Polycarp of Smyrna. The Muratorian canon of the mid-second century AD refers to the seven-church corpus as a distinct group of letters, to which Philemon and the Pastorals have been added. Even in the Pauline corpus that finally was generally accepted, Philemon and the Pastorals follow the seven-church epistles as a sort of appendix. So it appears that the collection took place in stages and over a period of time.