Lecture 4: The Canon of the Old Testament: Do We Have the Right Books?

The lecture, section by section

1. A list found in no manuscript

   Every Bible opens with a table of contents, and no ancient manuscript contains one. None of the biblical authors told us which books were inspired; some books, like 2 and 3 John, never even claim inspiration for themselves. So the questions are unavoidable: do we have the right books, why do Roman Catholics and some Orthodox include more, and who has the authority to decide? The word canon means rule or measuring rod, and its first Christian use for the accepted books comes from Athanasius in the fourth century. The teachers open in prayer for a rare balance: not overly confident where confidence is not warranted, and not ambiguous where things are not ambiguous.

2. The fables: what does not determine canonicity

   The teachers walk the class through a gauntlet of failed tests. Age does not make a book canonical, nor does its language, nor agreement with the rest of Scripture: Clement’s letter to the Corinthians, written around 90, is old, Greek, and orthodox, and belongs in no canon. Religious value fails too, or the Didache, Ignatius, and every edifying modern author would qualify. Even authorship by a prophet or apostle is not enough, for apostles wrote other things: Paul wrote at least one earlier letter to Corinth that we do not have, and no shopping list of an apostle is Scripture. Most striking of all, inspiration itself does not determine canonicity, against the view the teachers note in Geisler and Nix: everything Christ ever said was inspired, and we do not have it all; the prophets spoke more than was recorded, and some prophets never wrote at all. The canon does not claim to collect everything God ever inspired.

3. Is the canon closed?

   Most of the class raises a hand for a closed canon, and the teachers press: on what basis? The warning at the close of Revelation caps Revelation the way Proverbs and Deuteronomy carry the same warning for themselves; it is a standing principle against adding to or taking from God’s words, not a padlock John placed on a New Testament he never saw assembled. Canon is a descriptive term coined after the fact for the accepted books, the Scripture needed for the age we are in, and Scripture nowhere declares the collection closed. Patton, consistent with his soft position on the sign gifts from the previous course, says that anyone claiming to add to the canon must face the tests Scripture itself lays down, the tests of a prophet in Deuteronomy 13 and 18 and the signs of a true apostle of 2 Corinthians 12, and that his real objection to a newly unearthed genuine letter of Paul would be providence: God did not leave his church without a needed book for two thousand years.

4. The facts: comprised, recognized, determined

   Three positive statements order everything. The prophetic and apostolic nature of the books comprises the canon: each book was written by a qualified prophet or apostle, or by someone under apostolic authority at the time, as Mark wrote under Peter. The body of Christ recognizes the canon: Christ said my sheep hear my voice, and a book the believing community had persistently rejected through history could not be counted his voice, while a book the whole church received from the beginning must be. And God alone determines the canon. The word determine is reserved for him; churches and councils only ever recognize.

5. Councils as rubber stamps

   The teachers quote F. F. Bruce: the New Testament books did not become authoritative because they were placed on a list; the church listed them because it already recognized them as divinely inspired, and the councils of Hippo and Carthage codified what was already the general practice of the communities. Books circulated church to church, and congregations recognized the voice of God in some and not in others, long before anyone made it official; the Gospel of Thomas circulated too, and was rejected quickly, a second-century work that could claim no living connection to any apostle. Dyke offers a homely illustration: Canada became a country in 1867 and wrote its constitution down only in 1982, yet it had a constitution all along; the writing merely codified what everyone already knew.

6. The Old Testament in the days of Jesus

   If the canon of the Hebrew Scriptures had been in dispute in the first century, Christ, teaching from those Scriptures for three years, would surely have settled it. He never mentions the question. He speaks of the Law as shorthand for the whole, of the Law and the Prophets, and, in Luke 24, of the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms, the threefold division found across Jewish literature: Law, Prophets, and Writings. The canon was simply assumed on all sides. Our English order, following the Septuagint’s grouping, tells the same story three ways: the story itself through the Law and the histories, then the poetry that prays the story, then the prophets who preach into it; the Hebrew count of twenty-two books is the same material as our thirty-nine, with the twelve minor prophets on one scroll, Ezra and Nehemiah joined, and Chronicles undivided.

7. The tests, and the witnesses outside the Bible

   Five tests are offered, frankly as a later reconstruction of what the community did: does the New Testament attest the book, do extra-biblical Jewish writers affirm it, is it consistent with the rest of revelation, was it written by a prophet or one bearing divine authority, and did Christ himself attest it. The outside witnesses are striking. Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, lists the accepted books, the same content as the Protestant Old Testament, and says no one has been so bold as to add, remove, or change anything in them, and that Jews from birth esteem them as divine and would die for them. The Babylonian Talmud preserves the tradition that after Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, the last prophets after the exile, the Holy Spirit departed from Israel. Philo of Alexandria attests the threefold division and quotes nearly every book of our canon. After the temple fell in 70, the rabbis gathering at Jamnia reconfirmed the same books, questioning only a handful of puzzles like the paired sayings of Proverbs 26 about answering a fool, which resolve as two sides of wisdom rather than contradiction. And the capstone: once the historicity and resurrection of Jesus are established, his confidence in the Scriptures of his day settles their canon for his people.

8. The Apocrypha: what it is

   The Apocrypha, literally hidden writings, is a group of books written mostly in Greek during the four hundred silent years between Malachi and Matthew, carried in Christian copies of the Septuagint and in the Latin Vulgate, received as Scripture by Roman Catholics and some Orthodox, rejected by Jews and Protestants. The neutral name is the deuterocanonical books, the second canon, over against the protocanonical books, the thirty-nine everyone has always accepted; both differ from the pseudepigrapha, rejected books written falsely under borrowed names, like the Gospel of Thomas or the books of Enoch. Even the lists disagree: the Greek Orthodox collection includes books Rome’s does not. And the teachers insist the Apocrypha is worth reading: it narrates the era that explains how you close Malachi with Persia in charge and open Matthew to find Rome, it is part of the Christian heritage, and it sat as an appendix in Bibles well past the Reformation before Christians grew afraid of it.

9. The case for the Apocrypha, argued fairly

   The teachers give Rome’s case its full weight. First and strongest: the New Testament writers quoted the Septuagint overwhelmingly, about seventy percent of Old Testament citations, and if the Septuagint contained these books, the apostles were treating a collection that included them as Scripture. Second, deuterocanonical books turned up among the Dead Sea Scrolls, suggesting early circulation. Third, early Christians show knowledge of them, and some fathers, Clement of Alexandria and Origen among them, quote them at times as Scripture. Fourth, the councils of Rome, Hippo, and Carthage in the late fourth century included them in their lists, the very councils Protestants cite for the New Testament canon. Fifth, the charge: Luther presumptuously deleted them in the sixteenth century because they contained theology, like support for purgatory, that he opposed.

10. The response: the Septuagint that never held still

    The reply begins with the Septuagint itself. Whether the original translation of 300 to 150 BC included these books cannot be shown: the earliest surviving copies are fourth-century AD codices, half a millennium later, and the original was a pile of scrolls, not a bound volume with a fixed table of contents. Worse for the argument, the three great codices disagree with each other about which apocryphal books to include, and none matches the canon Rome later defined. Meanwhile the two most prolific first-century Jewish users of the Septuagint, Philo in Alexandria itself and Josephus, quote it constantly and never once cite the Apocrypha, and Josephus’s canon list omits them entirely. The community that made the translation shows no sign of receiving these books as God’s voice.

11. The response: scrolls, fathers, councils, and Luther

    The Dead Sea Scrolls prove nothing, since the community there copied many books no one counts canonical, including Enoch. Knowledge and even respectful quotation are not acceptance: the earliest Christians show no acceptance at all, and the earliest Christian list of Old Testament books, from Melito, bishop of Sardis, around 170, who traveled to Jerusalem precisely to learn which books the church there received, contains exactly the Protestant canon. The councils that included the Apocrypha were local North African and Roman gatherings, all under the towering influence of Augustine, not ecumenical councils. And Luther invented nothing: Origen’s list, Athanasius’s list, Jerome, translator of the Vulgate itself, who footnoted these books as not inspired, Gregory the Great, a pope, the Glossa Ordinaria, the standard Bible commentary of the late Middle Ages, and even Cardinal Cajetan, Luther’s own opponent, in a commentary dedicated to the pope, all denied the Apocrypha canonical status in the strict sense. Rome made no infallible pronouncement on the canon until Trent, after the Reformation, when the second canon was raised to full canon in reaction against Luther.

12. The verdict of the sheep

    The positive case for exclusion gathers: the New Testament never quotes any apocryphal book as Scripture, and while unquoted canonical books exist, Esther and the Song of Solomon among them, every division of the Hebrew Bible, Law, Prophets, and Writings, is quoted representatively, and the Apocrypha as a category never is; Patton adds, with Protestant freedom, that a single thus-saith-the-Lord citation of Maccabees would genuinely reopen the question for him. The Palestinian Jews never accepted these books; Christ did not recognize them; they carry historical inaccuracies; and 1 Maccabees itself confesses a distress in Israel such as had not been since the prophets ceased to appear, an admission that the prophetic voice was silent in its own day. Books disputed for so long, held so timidly even by their friends, cannot bear the weight of the criterion that governs the whole question: the sheep hear the Shepherd’s voice, and here, for centuries, they did not.

1. The session’s governing criterion is that the sheep hear the Shepherd’s voice. How have you experienced Scripture’s self-authenticating voice in your own reading, and how would you keep that testimony from collapsing into mere private feeling?

2. Patton says a single New Testament citation of Maccabees as Scripture would genuinely reopen the question for him. Does that openness strengthen or weaken your confidence in the canon, and why?

3. The teachers commend reading the Apocrypha as history and heritage while denying it a place in the canon. What is the difference between valuing a book and submitting to it, and where else in your Christian life does that distinction matter?