Who decided which of the original books should go in each verson of the Bible?

More like all the religious leaders at the time had a battle over Dogma and what they settled on were the Books we have. The Catholic version or the King James version, I don’t know which have more. The one factor Constantine had was how to have all of the Christian Churches unite as one. What he came up with was throwing out reincarnation as a belief, and if any Christian believed in it he would be excommunicated. This joined all the Churches together except for the Cathar’s, which believed in reincarnation and had their own version of Jesus. they were finally destroyed in the 13th century, I believe. The Greek Orthodox Church, the eastern stem of the Roman Church, agreed with the outcome, had a Pope too, but decided against having one and disconnected from Rome because they didn’t believe in the infallibility of one man being right.

Council of Carthage, 287, afaik, is when they got together and decided what books represented the ‘canon’ and their belief system the best.

Several books (such as one that featured a scene with Jesus physically hitting somebody) were tossed out as not being representative of their belief of what must have happened.

Thanks guys, another angle that surprised me: online bible search engines mostly oblige you to choose which version to search, rather than give you all the results to choose from - that’s usually around up to 21 versions to search individually, with different results. When a fundamentalist says they believe absolutely in ‘The Bible’ it can make quite a difference if they are referring to one version over another, but unless they specify, it can make a difference as to how people understand their viewpoint. For all we know, they may be talking about a version specific to their sect. They don’t usually say, however. I just find it odd that something so important can be so ‘pick n mix’ - and yet it seems that one version be more true than another. I’m slowly unpicking the history to understand how believers in all the main religious texts have come to disagree over the detail. Fascinating. Your contributions have given me some useful areas to reasearch - I’m most grateful.

The Council of Hippo 397