Bible Verse Lookup
The Nature and Formation of the Biblical Canon
Gail R. O'Day
David Petersen
Definition
By the biblical canon is meant the official list of the books which make up the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. Books which appear on this list are called canonical and all other books non-canonical. There are also books accepted as Scripture by some Christians but not others, and these are called deuterocanonical, meaning “belonging to a second level of canonicity” (Greek deuteros means “second”). These categories do not express value judgments about the books in question: to call a book non-canonical is not to say that it is necessarily unimportant or worthless. It is simply to say that it does not belong to the Christian Bible.
