THE CANON OF SCRIPTURE: OLD TESTAMENT

As with many other areas relating to the Bible, one can fall into one of several errors in approaching the subject. That is in addition to those Christians who would just as soon not consider the subject at all.

One extreme view is that paradoxically adopted by both fundamentalists and skeptics alike. It is to state that the Canon was laid down by fiat by some authoritative and or authoritarian source and therefore is not worth discussing any further. Thus, many fundamentalists feel that the books chosen to be in the Scriptures were decided by God and confirmed in the “Authorized Version” of King James in 1611 based on the “Received Text.” This simple view ignores the fact that there were indeed many discussions within the church over the years regarding the question. In addition, the phrases in quotes above found in the title page of many King James bibles do not refer to what people think they do. “Authorized Version” just meant that it was approved for publication by an official branch of the English government at the time, and “Received Text” was a phrase coined by the Dutch publishers of Erastus' version of the Hebrew and Greek texts as a publicity stunt. The first phrase certainly does not mean that it was authorized by God just as the second phrase does not indicate that it was handed down directly from Him.

If you look at atheistic views on the subject found on the internet, you will see that their approach is just as simple-minded and incorrect. They give the firm impression that there were all sorts of rival religious writings circulating within the Roman world at the time and none of the churches knew which ones were authentic. Therefore a small council of ecclesiastical highers-up in their fancy robes met at the Vatican and took a vote as to which writings to include and which ones to exclude. By a slim margin, the majority selected the books they liked and declared them to be the official canon of the Bible. And all those excluded religious writings were put under a strict ban with orders given to all Christian congregations to burn the spurious books. The truth is nothing at all like that fanciful scenario, as I described in a an earlier post, “Answering Atheists: The Bible's Flawed Origin.”

For anyone interested in pursuing this subject more deeply, I would very highly recommend the excellent book The Canon of Scripture by F.F. Bruce and published by InterVarsity Press. I will only give a highly simplified overview of the subject below, and this discussion will have to necessarily be divided into three different posts, coinciding with the major divisions in Bruce's book. The first concerns the history of the canon of the Old Testament.

Most of the actual details surrounding both the writing and acceptance of the books in the Hebrew Bible are lost to antiquity. However, the current canon of the OT appears to have been fairly settled by about the time of Christ. For evidence of this fact we can cite the references to almost all of the books in our currently accepted Old Testament canon in early sources such as (a) cross-references within the OT writings to other OT passages, (b) the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls containing all but the book of Esther, (c) the works of Josephus, and (d) the many references in the New Testament to most of the OT books (allusions to Esther, Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs are missing).

But it should be noted that the Hebrew canon was not organized in the same way as our current Bible in that it was divided into the Law (the Pentateuch); the Prophets, which contained our major and minor prophets as well as the “former prophets” (i.e. most of the history books); and the Writings (poetry and wisdom books as well as other later books such as Daniel and Chronicles).

But between the closing of this canon and the time of the Roman occupation, there were several important historical events that complicated the situation somewhat. During most of that time period, Israel was under the firm control of Greek leaders first appointed by Alexander the Great. This was a time of harsh persecution of the Jews until they rebelled under the leadership of the Maccabees and became independent for a while.

This era brought about the creation of a number of religious writings in Greek, many written under the pseudonym of various Old Testament personages such as Enoch and Solomon. Some of these books were considered of enough value that when the time came to translate the Scriptures into the Greek language (i.e. the Septuagint) so that more Jews could read them, these Greek books (later known as the Apocrypha) were included along with the translations of the Hebrew canon. For those interested, a list and brief descriptions of the apocryphal books is given in an Appendix below.

Thus, by the time of Christ, the Septuagint became almost the de facto Bible of the people. Despite this fact, it is telling that the New Testament writers never quote from the Apocryphal books even though they extensively cite the books in the Hebrew canon (often utilizing the Septuagint version) and on rare occasions may even allude to extracanonical writings that were not even included in the Apocrypha.

At the same time, the Samaritans produced a translation of the Bible in the widely spoken language of Aramaic. However, they only accepted the Pentateuch as Scripture.

This brings us up to the post-apostolic era during which we must now look at the separate ways the Old Testament canon was viewed by the Jews, early Christians in the east and the west, the Roman Catholic church, and the later Protestant world. Briefly, here is how these various groups began to depart from one another in their understanding of what constituted the Old Testament canon.

Once the Septuagint was adopted as the accepted version of the early church, the Jewish world reinvestigated the position of the Apocryphal books in it and removed them from their canon partly in reaction against their use by the Christian church and partly because there was no evidence that those books had ever been written in Hebrew other than I Maccabees. It has been understood that this decision was officially pronounced at the so-called Council of Jamnia which took place some time after the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. As Bruce explains, “So far as these scriptures are concerned, the rabbis at Jamnia introduced no innovations; they reviewed the tradition they had received and left it more or less as it was.” Their extended discussions at these meetings do not indicate that there was any real doubt in their minds as to their final conclusion. “But this simply means that the rabbis of Jamnia, like religious disputants of other ages, enjoyed a really tough subject for theological debate.”

The Jewish nomenclature used in conjunction with those discussions is a bit confusing to our way of thinking since they talked about which books did or did not “defile the hands.” According to this expression, they were thus deciding which books defiled the hands with their holiness (canonical books) and which ones did not defile the hands but were strictly profane in nature.

Most of the earliest founded churches were in the east and spoke Greek. One of our sources for deducing which OT books they included in their canon is the evidence of our three oldest bound Greek manuscripts: Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, and Alexandrinus. Not all of them are complete manuscripts, but we can generally state that all of today's accepted OT books are present in addition to much of what we would call the Apocrypha.

In addition, we have the writings of the early Church Fathers in the generation following the apostles as indications of which OT books (generally in the Septuagint version) were accepted as canonical in various geographical regions of the East. However, Bruce explains, “Few of the early Christian writers had occasion to give a precise list of the Old Testament books recognized and used in their own circles; therefore, for our present purpose, special interest attaches to those who do give such a list. One of these was Melito, bishop of Sardis about AD 170.” The telling fact is that his list is identical to today's Protestant canon of the OT with none of the books of the Apocrypha included.

There is another identical, but bilingual (Greek and Aramaic), listing dating to about the same period. The noted scholar Origen (AD 185-254) provides the next extensive listing of books in the OT canon. His greatest achievement was the production of the Hexapla (“threefold”) edition of the OT with parallel columns for the text in Hebrew and five different Greek translations. The original of the Hexapla was kept at Caesarea for scholars to study until the seventh century. The only book from outside the accepted Hebrew canon that is found in the Hexapla is the Letter of Jeremiah (one of the books of the Apocrypha). And Athanasius around AD 350 produced his listing, which agreed with that of Origen except that he omitted Esther and added the book of Baruch (found in the Apocrypha). It is possible that he also accepted the apocryphal additions to Daniel and Jeremiah as well, but we cannot be sure.

In later Orthodox synods of the Middle Ages, the books of the Apocrypha were given official canonical status. “Most Orthodox scholars today, however, follow Athanasius and others in placing the books of the [Apocrypha] on a lower level of authority than the 'proto-canonical writings.” (Bruce) A final quirk of the Orthodox canon is worth noting – it contains Psalm 151 (see my post aptly titled “Psalm 151” for more detail).

Meanwhile in the western world, we have early church leaders such as Tertullian writing at the end of the second century. He does not provide a detailed OT canon, but he discusses some of the disputed books not even included in the Apocrypha. It becomes obvious that he probably took it for granted that all of the OT books in the Septuagint were to be considered canonical. And he even speaks favorably of books such as I Enoch (accepted as part of the OT much later by the Ethiopic church only) and The Sibylline Oracles.

The western church became centered more and more in the culture of Rome, and so it became obvious that a Latin translation of Scripture was needed. One of the few scholars at the time who was fluent in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew was Jerome. When he was commissioned around A.D. 382 to produce the first Latin version of the Bible (the Vulgate), for the OT books he went back to the original Hebrew rather than starting with the Greek Septuagint. At that point, he realized that the apocryphal books were not found in the original Hebrew Bible. However, he translated them from Greek into Latin anyway and prefaced them with an explanation that they were to be received “for the edification of the people but not for establishing the authority of ecclesiastical dogmas.”

With subsequent editions of the Vulgate, Jerome's explanatory note was deleted. Thus, by default the Apocrypha became unquestionably accepted as part of the OT canon by the later Roman Catholic church. A series of official church councils and papal pronouncements between the years 393 and 419 further cemented the OT canon, which included the books of the Apocrypha. As Bruce says, “When they did so, they did not impose any innovation on the churches; they simply endorsed what had become the general consensus of the churches of the west and of the greater part of the east.”

The situation for centuries afterward is well summarized by Bruce: “Throughout the following centuries most users of the Bible made no distinction between the apocryphal books and the others: all alike were handed down as part of the Vulgate. But the vast majority of western European Christians, clerical as well as lay, in those centuries could not be described as 'users' of the Bible. They were familiar with certain parts of the Bible which were repeated in church services, and with the well-known Bible stories, but the idea of well defined limits to the sacred books was something that would not have occurred to them.”

During the Reformation when the Bible became translated into English, German, and other European languages, the practice regarding the OT was to go back to the original Hebrew to yield the most accurate version. This was the point at which the Protestant churches adopted the Hebrew Bible only as our current OT canon. However, because of the long tradition of utilizing the books of the Apocrypha in the church readings and liturgy, some of the early reform movements such as those in England (Anglican) and Germany (Lutheran Church) included the Apocrypha in their published editions of the Bible, giving them a sort of deuterocanonical status in which they could be used as devotional aids but not to establish any doctrines. Thus, “Luther showed his acceptance of Jerome's distinction between the two categories of Old Testament books by gathering the Apocrypha together in his German Bible as a sort of appendix to the Old Testament (1534), instead of leaving them as they stood in the Vulgate...The section containing them was entitled: 'The Apocrypha: Books which are not to be held equal to holy scripture, but are useful and good to read.'” In the following year, Coverdale's English Bible was published in which the Apocrypha was gathered together after Malachi and a title page stated that these books “are not reckoned to be of like authority with the other books of the Bible, neither are they found in the Hebrew Canon” (spelling modernized). In that manner they were following the original intent of Jerome in his production of the Vulgate.

Those who insist that the King James Version of the Bible is the only acceptable translation should keep in mind that the early editions were all printed with inclusion of the full Apocrypha.

As part of the Counter-Reformation movement within the Catholic Church, they convened the Council of Trent in 1545 to make pronouncements regarding the text and canon of the Bible, among other issues. It cemented even firmer their insistence that it was fully part of the OT canon. But with the next Latin edition of the Catholic Bible, the books of 3 and 4 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh were relegated to an appendix. Bruce explains, “As for the status of the books which Jerome called apocryphal, there is general agreement among Roman Catholic scholars today (as among their colleagues of other Christian traditions) to call them 'deuterocanonical' (a term first used, it appears, in the sixteenth century); Jerome's distinction is thus maintained in practice, even if it does not enjoy conciliar support.”

Finally, in subsequent waves of the Protestant Movement, there was a strong reaction against any inclusion of the Apocrypha in the Bible due to its strong association with the Roman Catholic Church and its use there to bolster up doctrines such as the praying to saints for the souls of the dead (taken from the apocryphal II Maccabees 12:45-46).

APPENDIX: Books in the Apocrypha

1 & 2 Esdras: supplementing Ezra and Nehemiah

Tobit: a short story

Judith: a short story

Additions to Esther: mainly prayers and proclamations

The Wisdom of Solomon (also called Ecclesiasticus or Sirach): wisdom literature

Baruch: supposedly written by Jeremiah's brother

The Letter of Jeremiah: addition to the book of Jeremiah

The Prayer of Azariah

The Song of the Three young Men (while in the Lions' Den)

Susanna: a short story involving Daniel

Bel and the Dragon: two short stories involving Daniel

The Prayer of Manasseh

1 Maccabees: a fairly accurate historical account of the period between the OT and NT

2 Maccabees: more fanciful account of the same time period