The Council of Carthage and the Formation of the New Testament

“What is the LDS Opinion on the Council of Carthage, 397 AD, which is reputed to have selected the books of the New Testament as well as the discarding of Gnostic Scriptures from the New Testament?”

“Did this Church Council act legally, and by what authority?”

I’ll try to give you some short answers. They will most likely cause more questions, but that’s a good thing.

We accept the Bible in its current state. We believe it to be the word of God. In English, we use the King James Version. We also believe that the word of God can be found outside what is today included in the current version of the Bible. We have the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price that we consider to be the Word of God. There are certainly ancient books that have been left out of both the Old and New Testament (see Lost Books) that could be considered true scripture or the word of God. As far as defining specifically what those books are, we haven’t really, otherwise we would include them in what we call our “standard works” (The Bible and the three others I mentioned before)

As far as what the Church Council did, that gets into a discussion of the Apostasy and Priesthood Authority. When Christ died, the apostles, with Peter at the head, were left in charge of the affairs of the church. They took action to replace Judas (Acts 1:21-26), and really, the New Testament after the four gospels is a record of their council and instruction to the church (or the saints) as its leaders. Therefore, with a loss of the apostles, the church lost its authority and leadership and fell into what we call the apostasy. It should be said, that inspiration and divine guidance were not necessarily lost, but direct revelation and priesthood authority were. So, my answer to your question would be, that the work they did to form the New Testament was certainly inspired and that they had the earthly authority (so far as the church stood in that state) to make the decisions they did. We are very grateful for the inspired and faithful men who preserved those ancient scriptures that we may have them in our day.

Did that answer your question? Where there underlying questions that led you to ask this question? What questions did my answer bring up for you?

Thanks for the question!