THE CATHOLIC EPISTLES IN THE CANON OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

Abstract

Our intention in this article is to provide a study into this set of letters of the New Testament titled Catholic Letters, which, since the ancient times, has faced considerable issues in the acceptance and in the study of its corpus, and which constitute the group of letters of the New Testament that are the least studied or explored, even in our seminaries, colleges and religious universities in general, either Catholic or Protestant; we also believe that it would not be an exaggeration to say that the researches in this field are more common in the Catholic circles than in the Protestant ones, given the difficulties that the Fathers of the Reformation raised regarding the canonicity of some of these letters and the fact that, in the Protestant circles, the domain really belongs to the Pauline texts and not to the non-Pauline texts of the New Testament, such as Gospels, Catholic Letters, Hebrews and Revelation. Given the scarcity of documentation in this area, we believe that an illustrative article will help us go further in this field and extend the production of material in this area, in order to help advance our biblical and theological studies.