Summer in the Systematics – Bibliology (Part Five): The Canonization of the Old Testament

Transcript

JRS 30
7/30/2023
Summer in the Systematics - Bibliology (Part Five): The Origins of the Bible (Part One)
Selected Verses
Jesse Randolph

Alright, well good evening, and welcome to our fifth installment now of Summer in the Systematics. Our summer-long study of Bibliology, the Doctrine of the Bible. So far in our study, we’re up to having covered four topics. We’ve covered the authority of the Bible. We’ve covered the inspiration of the Bible. We’ve covered the inerrancy of the Bible. We’ve covered the canonicity of the Bible. Those are the four topics we’ve covered thus far. In that session, the canonicity of the Bible, which was two weeks ago we looked especially, you’ll recall, at the marks of canonicity or the characteristics of canonicity. That is, why it is that only some books “made the cut” so that they are now considered to be among the 66 books of Scripture that now sit in our laps.

Well, tonight, we’re going to move into a related topic, namely the History, the process of how the canon of Scripture formed. Putting that in very basic terms, how we got our Bible. What theologians would call the canonization of the Bible. That’s our topic for tonight. But because this topic is so massive, this topic of “how we got the Bible” we necessarily need to break it into two parts. So actually tonight, we’re looking at the canonization specifically of the Old Testament and then next week, we’ll look at the canonization of the New Testament.

To make our time profitable this evening we need to go over some important definitions and points of distinction. We especially need to drill down on the differences between canonicity, what we studied last time and canonization which we’ll be studying tonight. “Canonicity,” here’s a definition for you, is the inherent quality of Scripture by which it is self-authenticating as divinely inspired. It’s the inherent quality of Scripture by which it is self-authenticating as having been divinely inspired. In other words, canonicity is determined by God. But men have, recognized historically, what God has already determined, i.e., that the book is canonical. That’s the key word that you should think about. We saw this last time, when you think of this topic of canonicity. It’s “recognition.” Men recognize what God had already declared and decreed, that these books were in fact canonical. In fact, here’s Rene Pache who says, “The canon is the fruit of divine inspiration, not the result of human decisions. The canon was not so much a prescribed list of inspired Jewish and Christian books as it was a number of books given by divine inspiration to both Jews and Christians. Because the writings of the apostles and prophets were canonical by virtue of their intrinsic quality, the canon, in principle, existed from the time these books were written; and it was added to with successive appearances of new inspired works.” He also says, “It happened that the church was a long time in expressing its unanimous acknowledgment of certain of the writings; but when it finally came to it, all it did,” meaning the Church, “was bow in recognition of that which already existed.” So those are some reminders about this concept of canonicity. Canonicity, as Pache puts it, is “the fruit of divine inspiration.” Canonization, what we’re looking at tonight is related, but distinct. “Canonization” describes this process by which an ancient book or writing is recognized as being part of the canon; that is, is affirmed as divinely inspired Scripture, the process. It’s a process that we’re talking about. Here’s how Geisler and Nix define “canonization.” They say, “Canonization concerns the recognition, ‘there’s that word again, “and collection of the God-inspired, authoritative books of Scripture.” So, the process of canonization then has as its purpose the affirmation of the canonicity of texts which have been included in the canon of Scripture. Clear enough? I’ll say that again. The process of canonization has, as its purpose the affirmation of the canonicity of texts which have been already included in the canon of Scripture. One more thought by way of review so that we don’t get too far ahead of ourselves. This question of what is the canon? What do we mean when we refer to the term “canon?” F.F. Bruce gives us a good definition. He says, “The canon of Scripture is the list of books that belong to the Holy Scriptures and that are reckoned as supremely authoritative for belief and conduct.” Or here’s J.R. McRay. He says, “The term canon in Christianity refers to a group of books acknowledged by the early church as the rule of faith and practice.”

Alright, with that, let’s get right into the meat of this evening’s message. You’re going to have four blanks on your worksheets there, if you grabbed one on the way in. We’re going to look at, you’ll see, and you can fill these in as we go. I’ll give you a chance here to fill these in right now. We’re going to look first at the compilation of the Old Testament canon. The preservation of the Old Testament canon, the witness to the Old Testament canon, and then the boundaries of the Old Testament canon. Nice guy that I am I’ll do those again. The compilation of the Old Testament canon, the preservation of the Old Testament canon, the witness to the Old Testament canon, and then the boundaries of the Old Testament canon.

Let’s start with the first one, the compilation of the Old Testament canon. As we get into the heart of our material tonight, I’m going to start by sketching out some basic details for you. The Old Testament canon, meaning, the 39 books on the left side of your Bibles was given and compiled over a roughly-1,100-year period of time. The process started with the divinely inspired writings of Moses who wrote right around 1445 B.C. soon after the Israelites’ exodus out of Egypt. Then that process, completed around 400 B.C. with Nehemiah and Malachi being the last to write. Then after Nehemiah and Malachi there were the 400 years of silence. That’s when those 400 years of silence began where there was no further prophetic voice in Israel until the days of John the Baptist. Now what we now know as the Old Testament, whether what was written was legislative Old Testament, the Law, whether it was history, whether it was poetical literature, whether it was wisdom literature, it was all composed for a national purpose which was to define and direct the nation of Israel in terms of its covenant relationship with God. Now, while we know from our study of the doctrine of inspiration from several weeks ago, that the Holy Spirit was the author of Scripture in the ultimate sense, we also know that God the Holy Spirit moved men including scribes and shepherds and statesmen to write the words which we as Christians now known as “the Old Testament.” That’s II Peter 1:21, “for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.”

Now, whenever you get into this subject of the canonization of the Old Testament one of the first questions, you’ll inevitably have to grapple with is how to divide up and categorize the Old Testament. We know that by the time of Jesus’ day the Old Testament was viewed as having been divided into three parts. The Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. In fact, that’s exactly how the Lord Himself expressed it in Luke 24:44. He says, “These are My words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things which are written about Me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets, and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” Even from an extra-biblical standpoint, the Jewish philosopher Philo, who lived around the same time as Christ, as you can see here on the slide, made a similar threefold distinction in the Old Testament when He spoke of the laws and then the oracles delivered through the mouth of prophets, and then the psalms and anything else which fosters and perfects knowledge and piety.”

But what I’m surfacing here this evening is, is not how the Old Testament was divided in Christ’s day or was thought of in Christ’s day. What I want us to lock in on and what I want us to surface here is how the Old Testament was thought of, how it was divided or perceived as it was being written by those original, divinely inspired authors. To them, I’m going to propose to you, to those original authors in their original context, in some cases writing well over a thousand years before Christ, they really viewed what they were writing as being a part of two groups of writings, not three. One was the Law. That was group one, the Torah, the five books of Moses, and then two was everything else. What I’ll call tonight, “other historical documents.” More specific labels like the ones Christ would eventually use later in Luke 24:44, like “prophets” and “writings,” that came later between the time that the Old Testament was written and the earliest days of Jesus’ ministry. So, as we take a step back here and remember that we’re looking tonight at the process of the compilation of the Old Testament as a whole, we remember that these writings which became the Old Testament were, in their time, considered to be part of one of two groups. Either the Law of Moses or not the Law of Moses, which we’re calling, “other historical documents,” here tonight.

Let’s start with group one, the Law of Moses. How did the Law of Moses or the Torah come into being? Well, we start with this matter of audience. Who was the Torah written to? Who was it written for? Well, it was written for Israel. Deuteronomy 5:1, “Then Moses summoned all Israel and said to them: ‘Hear, O Israel, the statutes and the ordinances which I am speaking today in your hearing, that you may learn them and observe them carefully.” The Law was written for Israel. What the Law did was it provided divine instruction to the Israelite nation about what it meant to keep covenant with God, with Yahweh. Exodus 34:27 says, “Then the LORD said to Moses, ‘Write down these words, for in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel.” Or Deuteronomy 12:28, “Be careful to listen to all these words which I command you, so that it may be will with you and your sons after you forever, for you will be doing what is good and right in the sight of the LORD your God.” The Ten Commandments, Exodus 20:1-17, were contained within the Torah. These words were given directly to the Israelites through Moses by God. We are in the Ten Commandments now. It says, “So He declared to you His covenant which He commanded you to perform, that is, the Ten Commandments.” Or Deuteronomy 5:22, “These words the LORD spoke to all your assembly at the mountain from the midst of the fire, of the cloud and of the thick gloom, with a great voice, and He added no more,” speaking of the Ten Commandments. Those words of the commandments were said to have been “engraved” on stone tablets. Exodus 32, “The tablets were God’s work, and the writing was God’s writing engraved on the tablets.” The tablets, the previous verse says, “were written on both sides; they were written on one side and the other.” And further Exodus 31 says, these two tablets of stone were “written by the finger of God.” Now even though Moses broke these two initial sets of tablets at the base of Mt. Sinai when he came upon the Israelites worshiping the golden calf, we have that recorded here, Exodus 32, “It came about, as soon as Moses came near the camp, that he saw the calf and the dancing; and Moses’ anger burned, and he threw the tablets from his hands and shattered them at the foot of the mountain.” Or Deuteronomy 9:17, “I took hold of the two tablets and threw them from my hands,” this is Moses’ first-hand account, “and smashed them before your eyes.” So even though those first set of tablets were broken at Mount Sinai, we know that a second set, also written by God, was restored to Moses for Israel, Exodus 34:1. This is referring to the second set of tablets. What we are covering here by the say, I hope you’re tracking, is just the transmission of the Old Testament law from the tablets, from the finger of God to where we have it right now. 34:1 of Exodus, “Now the LORD said to Moses, ‘Cut out for yourself two stone tablets like the former ones, and I will write on the tablets the words that were on the former tablets which you shattered.” A couple verses later speaking of Moses, “So he cut out two stone tablets like the former ones, and Moses rose up early in the morning and went up to Mount Sinai, as the LORD had commanded him, and he took two stone tablets in his hand.” A few verses later, “So he was there with the LORD forty days and forty nights; he did not eat bread or drink water and he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments.” As we saw last time, because of their special divine status these tablets were placed inside the Ark of the Covenant. First, in the Tabernacle and later, in the Temple in the Holy of Holies. Deuteronomy 10:5 summarizes that. It says, “Then I turned and came down from the mountain and put the tablets in the ark which I had made; and there they are, as the LORD commanded me.” That’s Moses speaking. But Moses not only wrote out the Ten Commandments, the Ten Commandments were just a sliver of the Law in its entirety which Moses also took down from God, the Law which was communicated directly by God to Moses in those 40 days and 40 nights spent up on the mountain. That is what led Moses to taking down the words of the Law then codifying them into written form. Here we go, Exodus 24:4, speaking of the Law here, “Moses wrote down all the words of the LORD.” Or Deuteronomy 31:24, “Moses finished writing the words of this law in a book until they were complete.” Those words, here “the words of this law” is a reference to the five books of the Torah which were as we saw last time, to be placed “beside” the Ark of the Covenant. Moses wrote this law and gave it to the priests, the sons of Levi who carried the ark of the covenant of the LORD, and to all the elders of Israel. “Take this book of the law and place it beside the ark of the covenant of the LORD your God, that it may remain there as a witness against you.” Now, note the distinction that’s being drawn here. The law of Moses, the five books, was placed beside the ark of the covenant. The Ten Commandments, which is a sliver of the law, was placed within the ark of the covenant, which we see confirmed here in
I Kings 8. “There was nothing in the ark except the two tablets of stone,” the Ten Commandments, “which Moses put there at Horeb, where the LORD made a covenant with the sons of Israel, when they came out of the land of Egypt.” So that’s where the Ten Commandments and the Law of Moses ended up when they were first produced. Either in the ark of the covenant or beside the ark of the covenant. We also know that Moses deposited the Torah, the five books, as a “finished” work, as a completed work, in the Ark or adjacent to the Ark. Look at Deuteronomy 31:24. It says, “It came about, when Moses finished writing the words of this law in a book until they were complete, that Moses commanded the Levites who carried the ark of the covenant of the LORD, saying, ‘Take this book of the law and place it beside the ark of the covenant of the LORD your God, that it may remain there as a witness against you’.” The book was complete, and it was placed where it needed to be placed, adjacent to, beside the ark of the covenant. Then these divine documents, this law, these divine documents continued in that existence unaltered all the way up to the reign of King Josiah, some 800 years later. Somewhere in the 600s B.C. which we see recorded when it was discovered during the reign of Josiah here in II Kings 22 where “Hilkiah the high priests said to Shaphan the scribe, ‘I have found the book of the law in the house of the LORD’.” The point that I’m trying to make here is that the Law, the Torah was a completed document when it was placed beside the ark of the covenant back when it was first produced. It was then a very well-preserved document all the way up until the time it was re-discovered in the reign of Josiah. The Torah, the law was not compiled progressively by editors. It wasn’t composed at a later date. Both of those are the heart of modern critical scholarship by the way. No, the Law of Moses was given, completed, and established during the days of Moses and it was preserved from that point forward. The Law wasn’t a moving target. It was a settled body of legislation that was breathed out, and then preserved, by God.

Alright, that’s a bit about the compilation of the Law, that first category of documents were God-breathed scripture in the Old Testament. What about the other category, what I’ve called, “all but the Law,” or the “Other Historical Documents”? Well beyond what we’ve just looked at there’s actually surprisingly little internal or historical information about how the rest of the Old Testament came together and developed into the form that we now know it. We have the books themselves. We have what they say about themselves, and we trust and affirm that. We have what the New Testament authors say about the Old Testament books, and we know as we saw last time that each of these Old Testament books bears the marks of canonicity but there is otherwise very little historical information about how these books came to be assembled and eventually recognized for what they are, Scripture. In fact, here’s Paul Wegner. He says, “There is a great deal of uncertainty regarding when the Old Testament canon was formed. Scripture itself is almost silent regarding how or when the books were assembled. What can be pieced together of its history is gleaned from the few references found in Scripture and other literature.” But note, it’s not as though we have zero evidence as to how these historical books came into being. It’s just that the evidence is not as voluminous as you might think it is. That being so let’s go ahead and spend some time looking at the evidence that we do have related to books of the Old Testament, the non-law books of the Old Testament. We’ll start with Samuel, an Old Testament judge and prophet. I Samuel 10:25 tells us that “Samuel told the people the ordinances of the kingdom and wrote them in a book and placed it before the LORD.” Now in this context where it says, “placing it before the LORD,” that likely means that whatever Samuel wrote was placed, like Moses’ writings beside the ark of the covenant. Then it says, Samuel wrote of the “ordinances of the kingdom” which likely means that much of the historical material that we see in the book of I Samuel leading up to Samuel’s death in I Samuel 25.

There’s the Proverbs. The book of Proverbs itself teaches us that there was some form of transcription and compilation process. Look at Proverbs 25:1 “These also are proverbs of Solomon which the men of Hezekiah, king of Judah, transcribed.” What that’s referring to is that, under King Hezekiah apparently there was some sort of committee who read through all three thousand of Solomon’s proverbs and then culled them down to what we now have in the book of Proverbs. It’s also a reasonable conclusion, though there’s no definite proof of this, that these same men could have been the ones who gathered all the other human authors and brought them into what we now know as the Book of Proverbs.

Then we come to the Psalms and just as the “men of Hezekiah” collected and arranged the collection of Proverbs there’s no question that there was is some form and there was some form of intentional arrangement and compilation of the Psalms. Now note what I’m not saying when I say what is just said. I’m not saying that the content of individual psalms was edited, or redacted, or otherwise modified by mere human agents. But what I am saying, is that there clearly was some sort of intentional arrangement of the existing biblical material in the Psalms. It’s just there. You can see it as the Psalms are laid out. The Psalms are not chronologically arranged. Psalm 1 is not the oldest of the Psalms. Psalm 90 is written by Moses. Rather, the Psalms have been arranged very clearly into this five-part hymnbook which is largely divided by author and topic.

Then there are the Prophets. Some of them wrote before Israel went into exile. Some of them, like Nehemiah and Ezra, wrote after the period of the exile. The writings of the prophets are marked not only by their historic accuracy, whether that be their geographic references or their genealogies or their census lists. But by their continuity as each of the writings of the prophets’ references, many of the writings of the prophets reference each other and build upon each other. Like in Nehemiah 9 it reviews much of Israel’s history as it is recorded from Genesis to Ezra. Or Daniel, in Daniel 9:2 cites Jeremiah 25. Or Jonah in Jonah 2 cites from the Psalms. Or Ezekiel in Ezekiel 14 mentions Noah and Job and Daniel. It’s clear from the Prophets, then that they were writing into an established and still growing stream of biblical revelation. While the paper trail of the origins of the Old Testament is admittedly somewhat thin we have no reason to doubt that the same Holy Spirit who inspired the writing of those sacred texts also superintended their collection and arrangement into what Christians today call the “Old Testament.” So that’s a bit about the compilation of the Old Testament canon. That’s our first heading on your worksheet this evening.

Let’s next look, briefly, at the preservation of the Old Testament canon. Now based on what we can find in the historical record none of the original autographs, the originals of the Old Testament exist today and they haven’t existed for some time now. The stones tablets on which God wrote out the Ten Commandments with His finger, the original writings that Moses took down from Him at Mt. Sinai, they no longer exist. Here’s F.F. Bruce on this subject where he gives some explanation for why that might be. He says, “Only in such conditions as are provided by the dry sands of Egypt and the volcanic ash of Herculaneum have papyrus documents been preserved; in humid climates,” and that’s speaking of the region of Israel, “they soon rotted away. So, while we can read the original inscriptions of the Assyrian and Babylonian kings,” those were written usually on clay brick. “The autographs of the Hebrew prophets who were their contemporaries disappeared long ago, as also have the autographs of all the other Biblical writers. But those autographs were copied before they perished, and throughout the intervening centuries they have been copied and re-copied continually.” That last fact pointed out by F.F. Bruce that the “autographs were copied and re-copied” is going to be the focus of a future lesson in a future week on the subject of textual criticism which is all about comparing the copies to other copies to trace our way back to the original.

But we concede as we must that the original autographs no longer exist. Now, since the autographs of the Old Testament are nowhere to be found and since even the earliest copies of the autographs have disappeared it is reasonable to ask well what happened? What happened to them? No doubt the originals of the Old Testament were of extremely high value and high esteem to the people of Israel, so much so that as we have already seen the Law was deposited alongside the ark of the covenant and the Ten Commandments were placed within the ark of the covenant. So how did this happen? How did these original works simply disappear or vanish? There have been a lot of different theories that have been articulated over the centuries. I’ll give you a few. One is that the originals were hidden. Hidden by the Levitical priests, as a way to protect them because they were so valuable. But they were so well-hidden that as multiple generations died and then succeeded them, they were never to be found again. It’s possible.

Another theory is that the original autographs simply disintegrated by ordinary wear and tear the way that your bibles disintegrate on your laps after thirty-forty years. Think about this happening over a thousand years, especially in the climate of this part of the world. Again, it’s possible. Another theory that’s been advanced is that the originals, the autographs were destroyed, perhaps at the destruction of the Temple or the first destruction of the Temple when the Babylonians invaded and destroyed Judah in 586 B.C. which would have included all the royal archives and all the stored documents in the library of that Temple. In fact, we have an account of this in II Kings 24 speaking of the king of Babylon here. It says, “He carried out from there all the treasures of the house of the LORD, and the treasures of the king’s house, and cut in pieces all the vessels of gold which Solomon king of Israel had made in the temple of the LORD, just as the LORD had said.” Perhaps, it’s not recorded here but the Law was done away with as well, or the books were done away with. Or could have happened in terms of the destruction of the original autographs during the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in A.D. 70., it’s possible.

But pertinent to our study tonight, because we don’t have definite answers on any one of those is that we have to remember that if God allowed the destruction of the originals of His Word to take place, whether it was in the destruction of the first temple or the second temple or simply through ordinary wear and tear, He did so recognizing that copies of His Word, not the originals but copies of His word would be sufficient for us. That we would have what we need through copies. That though we don’t have the original autographs anymore, that we have no less Scripture than what God designed for us to have.

Recognizing that the original autographs no longer exist and recognizing that God deemed possession of the originals as not being necessary for the continuity and the preservation of His Word. Next question is well what documents do we actually have? What do we have to work with? What do we actually possess? Which documents actually have been preserved over time? How do those documents present themselves as a witness to the actual, the original text of the Old Testament? That brings us to our third point this evening which is the witness to the Old Testament canon. The witness to the Old Testament canon. Now as we’re going to see in just a second, the original text of the Old Testament is witnessed to by both primary and secondary sources. By primary sources, I mean copies as in original or ancient Hebrew manuscripts. By “secondary sources,” I mean versions or ancient translations of the Old Testament scriptures. We have a mountain of evidence of both. We have tons of primary sources as well as secondary sources, copies, versions and translations. What these all do, as we are about to see, is reveal to us the text of the original Old Testament in its various stages of transmission.

Now, what we’re going to do here, this is something that we could teach for like twelve weeks, just go through what I’m about to go through, I’m going to try to do it in like fifteen minutes. This is all preliminary, this is survey level material, but we’ve got to do something with it. So, we’ll start here in terms of the first and primary witness to the Old Testament canon. That would be the Masoretic Text.

This is deemed universally, the Masoretic Text, in our day as being the traditional text which undergirds and points to the original Hebrew scriptures. The Masoretic Text is the text from which all of our English translations of the Old Testament have been derived. The Masoretic Text, it represents a group of closely related ancient Hebrew manuscripts called the Masorah, and that name derives from a school of Jewish scribes known as the Masoretes. Their name derives from a Hebrew verb masar, which means “to hand down.” From about 500 A.D. until about 1100 A.D. it was the job of these Masoretes, these scribes to copy, and edit, and preserve the textual traditions that had been passed down to them. What these Masoretes were working with as they went about their task for those six hundred or, so years were hundreds and hundreds of ancient manuscripts of the Old Testament which are now lost to us today. But what they produced, the Masoretic Text, has long been accepted as the authorized text as it relates to getting a baseline understanding of the contents of the Hebrew Bible. Or, what we Christians would call, “the Old Testament.” So just file that away. The Masoretic Text is the baseline text. The recognized text. The starting point for textual criticism as we seek to understand what was in those original scriptures, the original autographs. Even then, though, you probably picked up on this already, since this Masoretic text is from A.D. 1000 or so scholars have had to regularly compare it because it’s quite forward in terms of where it sits related to when the original Hebrew scriptures were written. There’s a lot of years separating the two. What scholars have done historically is looked for earlier dated fragments of the Old Testament scriptures and measured the Masoretic text against them, and vice versa to make sure that the Masoretic text, because it is so modern, matches up with those older fragments. One of those fragments is known as the Nash Papyrus. Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and more on those in just a minute, the earliest example of a Hebrew biblical text that was written on papyrus was this one, the Nash Papyrus. W. L. Nash was the secretary of the Society of Biblical Archaeology and in 1902, in his role he acquired this papyrus from an Egyptian dealer, and then he donated it to the Cambridge University library. And based on the type of script that you see here in this papyrus, it has been dated to somewhere between 169-137 B.C., so it’s right in that time frame, the intertestamental time frame. And, interestingly, this papyrus has an assortment of key passages of the Old Testament. We have Exodus 20, the Ten Commandments. We have the Shema from Deuteronomy 6 in here and the suggestion is that this was probably used for some sort of devotional or liturgical purpose. Well, up until 1948, more on that date in a second, Biblical archaeologists and textual critics were forced to work with slivers of materials like this. Fragments like this one to inform their reading of the Masoretic text.

That all changed in 1948 when a little shepherd boy threw a rock inside a cave near the Dead
Sea and heard the sound of breaking pottery. That brings us to our next witness to the Old Testament and it’s a crucial one, the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Dead Sea Scrolls were first revealed to the world in 1948 when that shepherd boy threw that rock into that cave. What was found later were these scrolls discovered in jars in eleven different caves. Researchers have since done all sorts of analysis of these scrolls which were on leather parchment and papyrus. As they look at the type of script that was used and as they do carbon-14 testing on these. Based on other evidence they have found in these caves like the dating of the coins that they found adjacent to these scrolls, the conclusion that has been reached that the Dead Sea scrolls were created or written out somewhere between 225 B.C. up until around 68 A.D., and that’s what makes these scrolls so valuable, their age. Because before the discovery of these Dead Sea scrolls the oldest-known intact Hebrew text was something called the Aleppo Codex which was part of the Masoretic Text. But the Aleppo Codex was some 1300 years removed from the last book that would have been composed by an Old Testament author. We saw earlier the oldest books are Nehemiah and Malachi, 400 B.C. or there abouts. And the Aleppo Codex was from about 1000 A.D. so there’s just tons of time between when those original autographs were written and the dating of the codex or the Masoretic text. So that led to there being natural doubts about potential errors in transmission or mistakes having been made by scribes over thirteen hundred years. Or the possible existence, in the Masoretic Text, considering how far removed it was from the original events of errors.

Well, doubts like these were laid to rest when in the first of the eleven caves a scroll of the entirety of the book of Isaiah was found. That book of Isaiah scroll has an objective dating of 125 B.C. Meaning it’s well over a thousand years older than the Masoretic version of Isaiah. The Dead Sea Scrolls version of Isaiah proved to be virtually identical to the Masoretic version of Isaiah. There’s over 95% correlation rate and the differences that you see between the two are things like slips of the pen by a scribe or spelling errors by a scribe and things of that nature. There’s a direct correlation. That also proved to be true for the other biblical books that were found in the collection of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Every Old Testament book except Esther is represented in the Dead Sea scroll collection and in those books as you compare the Dead Sea scroll content, which again, is really, really old to the Masoretic text which is what we’ve been relying upon this whole time, there is a staggeringly high degree of continuity between the two. That just speaks to the exceptional preservation of the biblical text through the centuries and validates that the traditional text that we’ve been using this whole time, the Masoretic Text is a close and accurate witness to what the Old Testament originals would have said.

So that’s a bit about the Masoretic Text, the Nash Papyrus, the Dead Sea Scrolls and those by the way are what we call the primary witnesses to the Old Testament. Now we’re going to get into some of the secondary witnesses. And as we’re going to see, these secondary witnesses, which are really just versions or translations bear further witness and shed further light on the original autographs of the Old Testament. First is the Septuagint. The Septuagint. We know the Old Testament was not originally written in Greek. But after the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C. we do know that many Jews became Greek speakers and they had a natural interest in having their scriptures translated into their new language, Greek. Around 280 B.C., the Egyptian ruler Ptolemy II received a request from the curator of the library in Alexandria, Egypt to have the Hebrew Bible in his collection, but in Greek. What Ptolemy II did was he secured the services of seventy-two Jewish translators who then translated the first five books of Moses into the Greek language of the day. And the subsequently, the rest of the Old Testament was translated by those translators into Greek and that translation became known as the Septuagint. There’s a legend out there that says that these seventy-two translated everything in the Greek in seventy days. That’s why it’s called the Septuagint. The name Septuagint links to the word “seventy”, but we don’t know if that’s true or not. What we do know is that the Septuagint is a helpful tool. A helpful tool because, number one, it was frequently cited by the New Testament writers, the New Testament authors, the human authors. Those authors we have to remember, they wrote in what language? Greek, Kione Greek. As they quoted the Old Testament what they would do is heavily rely upon the Greek version of the Old Testament since that was the language of the day, the lingua franca. Not only that though, but the Septuagint is also beneficial in that it helps us get after even older ancient Hebrew texts. We have to remember that the Septuagint translation was done in the third century B.C. meaning what those translators were using back in the 3rd century B.C. was some Hebrew Old Testament version that they had in the 3rd century B.C. which is way older than even what we have today now that we have the Dead Sea scrolls. So, by reading through the Septuagint, we can have a witness to what would have been even older Hebrew manuscripts that don’t exist today but the translators of the Septuagint were using and then measure that against the Masoretic text.

The next secondary witness is the Samaritan Pentateuch. Pentateuch is another word for the law, the torah, the five books of Moses. And the Samaritans, when they had the five books translated into their dialect or their language it was limited to the five books. All this does is, this Samaritan Pentateuch, it has various columns and annotations to it that provide a useful gloss or understanding of the insights of those who wrote out this translation, which again is just something to check against the Masoretic Text.

Next up is the Aramaic Targum. Aramaic, we have to remember there was a real pervasive influence of the Babylonians in the near east during the time that the Old Testament canon was being recognized and affirmed. Aramaic was the language of the Babylonians and living in a world that was dominated by Babylonian influence, the people of the people of Israel eventually adopted Aramaic and used Aramaic alongside Hebrew during their daily discourses and in their written works. One of products of that, of the Israelites’ incorporating Aramaic was this translation of the Hebrew Bible into Aramaic, which is called the “Targum” which means, “explanation” or “commentary.” Some of the Targumim, that’s the plural for Targum, what they really do is they provide commentary. It’s like reading a translation or a paraphrase or they give a lot of explanatory notes on the original Old Testament text. So those notes are just helpful and useful to cross-check against the Masoretic Text to get a sense of what was in those original autographs.

Next is the Syriac Peshitta. That word Peshitta comes from a word meaning “simple” or “common.” This originally circulated in the first and second centuries A.D. in both Jewish and Christian circles. It’s a translation into Old Syriac which is an Aramaic spin-off from the Hebrew text and like others, this is just a useful tool to cross-reference the Masoretic Text.

There are many others that we could go through and for the sake of time I should speed through these. You can read Philo, a Greek Jewish philosopher who I’ve mentioned already whose quotations from the Old Greek version of the Septuagint he was using give helpful commentary on what would have been the original Hebrew text. You have Josephus. A first-century A.D. historian and apologist who wrote these words during his life. He said “We have given practical proof of our reverence for the Scriptures. For although such long ages have now passed, no one has ventured to add, or to remove, or to alter a syllable; and it is an instinct within every Jew, from the day of his birth, to regard them,” meaning the Scriptures, “as the decrees of God, to abide by them, and if need be, cheerfully to die for them.” You can read the Latin Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Scriptures which came into existence in the fourth century A.D. through the labors of Jerome, a church father who we see here, lived from about 347-420. He’s known for translating the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament into language of the day for his time which was Latin.

Alright, we’ve covered three points so far. The compilation of the Old Testament, the preservation of the Old Testament, the witness to the Old Testament canon. Here’s our fourth and final point: The boundaries of the Old Testament canon. Now, by the time of Christ there were twenty-two or twenty-four recognized books in the Hebrew canon. I say twenty-two or twenty-four because the number that we would have eventually arrive at has everything to do with if you would append Ruth to Judges and Lamentations to Jeremiah or if you wouldn’t do that with either of those books. It’s twenty-two if you append those two books. It’s twenty-four if you don’t. We see examples of arrangements showing both. But whichever way you go, twenty-two or twenty-four, those twenty-two or twenty-four books equate in terms of their content to the thirty-nine books that we have in the Old Testament. I’ll show you what I mean in a second.

As I mentioned earlier, as the books of the Old Testament were being written there were really only these two categories of contents that were being produced. You had the Law and you had everything else. By the time of Christ, as I quoted earlier from Luke 24 there was now a recognized three-part division in the Hebrew Scriptures. The Law was the first category, the Torah and that had five books, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy we know. The second category was the Prophets, the Neviim which had eight books broken up into two categories, the former prophets and the latter prophets. The former prophets were Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. The latter prophets were Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and here’s where you get the rest of that number of books that we know as thirty-nine, the Twelve. We would break them up individually in the Christian scriptures. In the Hebrew bible they were considered one book, the Twelve, one roll or one scroll. Then this third category, so you had the Law, you have the Prophets, the Neviim, and then you have the Writings, The Ketuvim which were also broken into two categories. First the poetical writings, Psalms, Proverbs, Job, and then you had the rolls, the megilloth, Song of Solomon, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther. So, you have the Torah, the Neviim, and the Ketuvim. They make up the acronym “TNK.” You put a few vowels in between those letters TNK and you get this word, Tanakh, which is another term for the Hebrew Bible. What we call “the Old Testament.”

Well, whenever of course, we talk about the Bible that we study, the Bible that we recognize as being authoritative over our lives, the question that is often asked by the skeptic and I know we’ve all heard it at some point, is “Why only 66 books?” Or limiting it to the Old Testament, “Why only 39 books”? Weren’t there other books? Why weren’t other books accepted as being in the canon or recognized as being canonical?

Well, as we embrace in our final leg of our study for this evening it would be helpful for me to note that the writings of the Old Testament period, whether they were ultimately accepted as being canonical or excluded as being non-canonical, have historically been grouped into four categories. The Homologoumena, the Antilegomena, the Apocrypha, and the Pseudepigrapha. We’ll go through each one of these so you can spell them later. But these groupings all go back to the early church historian Eusebius who came up with these categories sometime around 325 A.D. and let’s go ahead and do a brief survey of these now as we look into this matter of the boundaries of the Old Testament canon and wrap up our study tonight.

Let’s start with the Homologoumena, the Homologoumena. These are the Old Testament books which once they were recognized as being canonical, they were not subsequently questioned or disputed. That word, homologoumena means “the ones confessed,” “the ones confessed.” These were the Old Testament books that were not only received as canonical without dispute at the beginning, but their place in the Old Testament canon was never questioned or challenged by either the Jews first or by the Church later. Included in this category would be every single book of the Protestant English Old Testament, save five. Song of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Ezekiel, and Proverbs. Those five books after originally being recognized as being canonical were subsequently disputed later by rabbis who called into question their canonicity based on their character and their claims. Those five books are the Antilegomena. These were the books that were challenged by the rabbis and historically and customarily the people see this challenge having taken place at this event which really wasn’t only in the year A.D. 90, it was sort of a series of meetings held by rabbis called “the Council of Jamnia” late in the first century A.D., and there those five books were challenged, the ones I just mentioned. Esther was challenged on the ground that it doesn’t contain the name of God. Well, that book of course very clearly shows God’s providential workings in the lives of His people and how that book even culminated in His people being preserved. Ecclesiastes was challenged on the ground that it appears to contain some unconventional teaching. Like Ecclesiastes 3:19-20 says, “For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same. As one dies so dies the other. All go to the same place.” But the context there clearly shows that Solomon was speaking about death in general and the return to dust of any composed body. Elsewhere in the book, Solomon does distinguish between the directions of the spirit of man and that of animals that they take upon death. Proverbs was challenged on the ground that it was apparently contradictory. In Proverbs 26:4-5, that’s that section where it speaks of “answering the fool” but not answering the fool in successive verses. But that issue is easily resolved by the fact that ordinarily as a principle it is better to ignore a fool but occasionally the most suitable reply you can give that fool is to remind him that he is a fool. Song of Solomon was challenged because of its description of erotic love. Well of course that objection can be opposed by the fact that the description of erotic love that’s given there is within the safety and confines God’s design for a husband and wife in that aspect of their relationship. Ezekiel was challenged on the ground that it describes offerings and sacrifices, especially in Ezekiel 40-48 that are different than some of the Levitical rules in the Mosaic Law. That’s of course because those chapters in Ezekiel refer to a different time. A different time period, the millennial temple and the associated rituals that’ll exist in the future kingdom.

But the outcome of these debates, at Jamnia and other places was about what we would expect sitting where we are sitting today. Which is the acknowledgment, ultimately, of the of the canonicity of each of those five temporarily disputed, books. That takes us to our third category, the Apocrypha. The Apocrypha were books that were accepted by some groups as canonical, but not by others. The Apocrypha, generally speaking were religious compositions written somewhere between 300 B.C. and 100 A.D. which were generally circulated under false titles or unsubstantiated claims of authorship. By and large what these books are, are they are written by pious Jews about persons and events relating to the Old Testament and intertestamental period, in that period of silence. The purpose of these writings, the Apocryphal writings broadly speaking was to fill in certain gaps of Jewish history, strengthening the mind the Jewish individual against the influence of paganism and really extolling the glory of Israel. There are fourteen of these apocryphal books. These books are divided into five categories. First, there is wisdom literature. Historical books, religious romance, prophetic literature, and then legendary additions. We’ll go through each one of these real quick.

First there’s the wisdom literature in the Apocrypha. There we have the wisdom of Solomon, and that was an attempt to protect Hellenistic, Greek-speaking Jews against the pagan influences around them. It presents righteous, practical, legalistic, Jewish living in the style of Solomon. This writer is impersonating Solomon. Ecclesiasticus was dated around 180 B.C. and it’s a long 51-chapter treatise on morality and ethics along the lines of Proverbs.

Even historical books of the Apocrypha, I Esdras. That’s sort of a free-wheeling version of II Chronicles and Ezra and Nehemiah, including this legendary account of the Babylonian captivity and return. You have I Maccabees which covers the Jewish wars for independence and without this book, by the way, we would know very little about the intertestamental period. Then II Maccabees, that book overlaps timewise with I Maccabees but instead of giving a reliable account it gives more of a rhetorical and mythical view of that time period.

Then we have religious romance. It’s another category of the apocryphal books. We have Tobit. That’s a second century story about a rich young Israelite who was captured by Shalmaneser and taken to Nineveh. And we have Judith. That’s a story about a beautiful Jewish widow named Judith, who in the time of the Babylonian invasion of Judah, she disguised herself and killed the Babylonian general.

Then you have the prophetic literature, Baruch. That’s a collection of prayers and confessions of the Jews in exile, which records their hopes of restoration. You have II Esdras, which was written around 100 A.D. and contains a collection of varied visions. Then you have the legendary additions. These are another category of apocryphal works. The Prayer of Manasseh, that’s supposed to be the confession of the wicked king Manasseh of Judah when he was taken into captivity in Babylon. The Remainder of Esther, it tries to be an augmentation of the book of Esther, the canonical book of Esther by explaining the various difficulties and showing how God actually was at work in that book. The Song of the Three Holy Children purports to be an addendum to the book of Daniel, and it contains a prayer of Azariah from the furnace. The History of Susanna is a romance that tells how the godly wife of a wealthy Jew in Babylon was cleared of false charges. Sort of like courtroom drama. Then Bel and the Dragon is a melodramatic tale that narrates the destruction of the idols Bel and the Dragon by Daniel.

Now, these apocryphal books do serve a purpose, especially in filling some of the historical gaps between the testaments that we otherwise would have no record of. They do provide a good survey of Jewish philosophy, and the intellect during this time and they do contain rich and engaging storytelling.

So, that being the case, why aren’t they a part of the Old Testament? Well, there are a few reasons. First, and this is a really simple one, none of these books, the Apocryphal books claim to be Scripture. None of them have that self-authenticating nature like we see in the other Old Testament books. There are no statements of “thus says the LORD” or “the word of the LORD”. We don’t have that in the Apocrypha. They don’t claim to be Scripture. Second, the parameters of the Old Testament canon, whether you view it as having 22 books or 24 books, have clearly been defined and clearly been confirmed by many historical sources and each of those sources lists the same 39 Old Testament books that we have today. Not these books, the Apocryphal books. In fact, here’s Josephus again in a writing called “Against Apion.” He says, “For we have not an innumerable multitude of books among us disagreeing from and contradicting one another as the Greeks have, but only twenty-two books, which contain the records of all the past times, which are justly believed to be divine. And of these, five belong to Moses, which contain his laws, and the tradition of mankind till his death. This interval of time was a little short of three thousand years. But as to the time from the death of Moses till the reign of Artaxerxes, king of Persia, who reigned after Xerxes, the prophets.” There’s a second category, “who were after Moses, wrote down what was done in their times in thirteen books. The remaining four books,” it all adds up to 22, “contain hymns to God, and precepts for the conduct of human life.” So, the historical record doesn’t support including the Apocrypha. Next is the reality that there are significant mistakes and errors in the Apocrypha. Sometimes they are mere chronological or geographical errors. Eleven out of fourteen apocryphal books have been confirmed to have those types of errors in them. But then there are the theological problems and the theological errors in those fourteen books. For instance, and I should have put this up on the screen, but in Sirach 1:14 it says, “We are told that the righteous are those who were given good souls at birth.” So, it speaks of the righteous having good souls at birth, no total depravity. In Tobit 12:9 it says that good deeds atone for evil deeds. So, it’s that weighing of the scales, just try to be a good person the way that everybody today tries to get to heaven. In II Maccabees 12:40-45 there’s open acknowledgment that we ought to be praying for the sins of the dead to be forgiven.

Those are just a few of the huge theological landmines in the Apocrypha. Here’s E.J. Young on the subject of, why not the Apocrypha. He says, “There are no marks in these books which would attest a divine origin. Both Judith and Tobit contain historical, chronological, and geographical errors. The books justify falsehood and deception and make salvation depend upon works of merit. Ecclesiasticus and the Wisdom of Solomon inculcate a morality based upon expediency. Ecclesiasticus teaches that the giving of alms makes atonement for sin,” I forgot about that one. “In Baruch it is said that God hears the prayers of the dead and in I Maccabees there are historical and geographical errors. And of course, the Roman Catholic Church, which, under its systems, and its theology, believes that the church creates the canon, not the other way around, they have found religious value in these books for a long time now. So much so that at the Council of Trent in 1546, the Roman Catholic Church declared the Apocrypha to be canonical with the exception of a few books, I Esdras, II Esdras, and The Prayer of Manasseh.

Well, we’re not Catholic, we are Protestants so we have a different take and I agree here with Wayne Grudem where he says, “the writings of the Apocrypha should not be regarded as part of Scripture: (1) they do not claim for themselves the same kind of authority as the Old Testament writings,” we just saw that; “(2) they were not regarded as God’s words by the Jewish people from whom they originated; (3) they were not considered to be Scripture by Jesus or the New Testament authors; and (4) they contain teachings inconsistent with the rest of the Bible. We must conclude that they are merely human words, not God-breathed words like the words of Scripture. They do have value for historical and linguistic research, and they contain a number of helpful stories about the courage and faith of many Jews during the period after the Old
Testament ends, but they have never been part of the Old Testament canon, and they should not be thought of as part of the Bible. Therefore, they have no binding authority for the thought or life of Christians today.”

Alright, we’ve looked at the Homologoumena, the Antilegomena, the Apocrypha. Last, we need to consider the the Pseudepigrapha which literally means false writings, false writings. These are the books that were immediately rejected as being non-canonical. It was never even up for debate. These books are distinctly spurious and inauthentic in terms of their overall content. It’s not that these books are horrific in what they say, they just plainly never measured up to the standards of canonicity that we looked at last time. These books largely represent the religious lore of the Hebrews of the intertestamental period, and they fall into four categories. Now, because of how outlandish these are and because we are totally out of time, I’m not going to attempt to give summaries of each of these like I did with the Apocrypha. You’ll have to do that research on your own. But here are the categories of the Pseudepigrapha. We have the Legendary Books. The Book of Jubilee, the Letter of Aristeas, the Book of Adam and Eve, and the Martyrdom of Isaiah. We have the Apocalyptic Books. I Enoch, the Testimony of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Sibylline Oracle, the Assumption of Moses, II Enoch, II Baruch, III Baruch. We have the Didactical Books, III Maccabees, IV Maccabees, Pirke Aboth, the Story of Ahikar. We have the Poetical Books, the Psalms of Solomon, and I just love this title, Psalm 151, sure. So those are the Pseudepigrapha. Don’t ever tell me that I never taught you any fun, big words.

Alright, we’ve looked tonight at OK, tonight we’ve looked at the compilation of the Old Testament canon, we’ve looked at the preservation of the Old Testament canon, we’ve looked at the witness to the Old Testament canon, and now we just looked at the boundaries of the old testament canon. Next week we’re going to do the same but as it relates to the 27 books of the New Testament.

Let’s pray. God thank you for getting us through this material. It’s a lot. It’s a lot to take in. It’s a lot to be reminded of. It’s a lot to learn. But I do pray that through it all and in it all we would be reminded of Your providential protection and governance and preservation of Your holy word. God thank you for breathing out Your word and giving guidance to its original audience, the Israelites. Thank you that we, as new covenant believers, can read it, understand it, and see how it relates even to us today. God, it’s the same God behind the Old Testament as behind the New and we acknowledge that live in a different time and a different era in the Church Age and there are different standards and principles that we live by in the New Testament, but all Scripture is profitable. All Scripture is God-breathed including these thirty-nine books of the Old Testament. I pray that what we have gotten tonight is a renewed sense of confidence and a renewed sense of awe that You would do what You’ve done in giving us Your word, namely these thirty-nine books. Thank you for this great day of worship. Thank you for the chance to be with God’s people. I pray that You’d be with each one of us in a special way this week, that You’d go before us and strengthen us for whatever You have for us. It’s in Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.