The Protestant canonical text

Image: 'The Candle is lighted, we can not blow out' (Leading Theologians of the Protestant Reformation) published by John Garrett line engraving, after 1673

“We may look at sacred texts as being those which contain a power and authority and are given certain status within a given community. Such communities and traditions are held together most typically through liturgical acts, which help to focus life upon that which is ultimate and to which the sacred texts give testimony. The status of the sacred text is canonical: as well as being normative for a community or tradition, it is also that community or tradition's canon or canonical text. The term 'canon' has a variety of meanings, but in the context of sacred texts it means the defined groups of texts for the community or tradition . . one does not add to or subtract from them.”

Source: Ninian Smart and Richard D. Hecht, edd. Sacred Texts of the World: A Universal Anthology (New York: Crossroad, 1982), p. xiii-xiv.

The Protestant canonical text was the sacred text chosen by the Protestant faith community. This was a new sacred text for a new religious community. A religious community and a sacred text that had never before existed, distinctly, as such.

This religious community came out of the Catholic church, took with it the ancient creeds of the church and created from the Latin and Greek churches texts of the New Testament—along with the Old Testament Hebrew text of the Jews—a new sacred canonical text never before used by any religious community.