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- Herausgeber: IVP Academic
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
Winner of two 1990 Christianity Today Awards: Readers' Choice (1st place; theology doctrine) and Critics' Choice (1st place; theology doctrine) A 1989 ECPA Gold Medallion Award winner How did the books of the Bible come to be recognized as Holy Scripture? Who decided what shape the canon should take? What criteria influenced these decisions? After nearly nineteen centuries the canon of Scripture remains an issue of debate. Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox all have slightly differing collections of documents in their Bibles. Martin Luther, one of the early leaders of the Protestant Reformation, questioned the inclusion of the book of James in the canon. And many Christians today, while confessing the authority of all of Scripture, tend to rely on only a few books and particular themes while ignoring the rest. Scholars have raised many other questions as well. Research into second-century Gnostic texts have led some to argue that politics played a significant role in the formation of the Christian canon. Assessing the influence of ancient communities and a variety of disputes on the final shaping of the canon call for ongoing study. In this significant historical study, F. F. Bruce brings the wisdom of a lifetime of reflection and biblical interpretation to bear on questions and confusion surrounding the Christian canon of Scripture. Adept in both Old and New Testament studies, he brings a rare comprehensive perspective to the task. Though some issues have shifted since the initial publication of this classic book, it remains a significant landmark and touchstone for further studies.
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Other Works by F. F. Bruce
THE BOOKS AND THE PARCHMENTS
THE SPREADING FLAME
TRADITION OLD AND NEW
NEW TESTAMENT HISTORY
PAUL: APOSTLE OF THE HEART SET FREE
JESUS AND CHRISTIAN ORIGINS OUTSIDE THE NEW TESTAMENT
THE NEW TESTAMENT DOCUMENTS
THE HARD SAYINGS OF JESUS
ISRAEL AND THE NATIONS
JESUS: LORD & SAVIOR
TO THE DEPARTMENTSOF HUMANITY AND GREEKIN THE UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEENFOUNDED 1497AXED 1987WITH GRATITUDE FOR THE PASTAND WITH HOPEOF THEIR EARLY AND VIGOROUS RESURRECTION
Contents
Preface
When I taught in the University of Manchester I lectured in alternate years on the Text and Canon of the Old Testament and the Text and Canon of the New Testament. My lectures on the text, I hope, served the needs of the students who listened to them, but they do not call for further publication. The subject-matter of my lectures on the canon, however, has continued to engage my attention, as regards both its historical aspect and its relevance today.
It will be plain in what follows that I am more concerned about the New Testament canon than about the Old Testament canon. The collapse of the century-old consensus on the Old Testament canon—namely, that the process of canonization is indicated by the traditional threefold division of books in the Hebrew Bible—has been underlined in two important works of recent date: Roger Beckwith’s The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church and John Barton’s Oracles of God. Attacks have been made on the consensus on the New Testament canon—namely, that its main structure was substantially fixed by the end of the second century. It continues to stand, however, because it is supported by weighty evidence, as is shown in Bruce Metzger’s magnificent work on The Canon of the New Testament. When a consensus is attacked, it has to be carefully reassessed, and that is all to the good: there is no point in pretending that we know more than we do.
With works like those mentioned now available, it may be asked, what need is there for this book? Perhaps the author needs to get it out of his system, but it may justify its appearance as an attempt to communicate the present state of knowledge to a wider public.
I am most grateful to the University of London for permission to reproduce my Ethel M. Wood Lecture (1974) as Appendix 1, and to the Epworth Review and its editor, the Revd John Stacey, for permission to reproduce my A. S. Peake Memorial Lecture (1976) as Appendix 2.
My first introduction to this subject was effected through the original edition of The Text and Canon of the New Testament, by my revered teacher Alexander Souter, Regius Professor of Humanity in the University of Aberdeen. My indebtedness to him and to the Department over which he presided with high distinction, together with its sister Department of Greek, is acknowledged in the dedication.
F.F.B.
Part OneIntroduction
Chapter OneHoly Scripture
THE WORD ‘CANON’
When we speak of the canon of scripture, the word ‘canon’ has a simple meaning. It means the list of books contained in scripture, the list of books recognized as worthy to be included in the sacred writings of a worshipping community. In a Christian context, we might define the word as ‘the list of the writings acknowledged by the Church as documents of the divine revelation.’1 In this sense the word appears to have been first used by Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, in a letter circulated in AD 367.2
The word ‘canon’ has come into our language (through Latin) from the Greek word kanōn.3 In Greek it meant a rod, especially a straight rod used as a rule; from this usage comes the other meaning which the word commonly bears in English—‘rule’ or ‘standard’. We speak, for example, of the ‘canons’ or rules of the Church of England. But a straight rod used as a rule might be marked in units of length (like a modern ruler marked in inches or centimetres); from this practice the Greek word kanōn came to be used of the series of such marks, and hence to be used in the general sense of ‘series’ or ‘list’. It is this last usage that underlies the term ‘the canon of scripture’.
Before the word ‘canon’ came to be used in the sense of ‘list’, it was used in another sense by the church—in the phrase ‘the rule of faith’ or ‘the rule of truth’.4 In the earlier Christian centuries this was a summary of Christian teaching, believed to reproduce what the apostles themselves taught, by which any system of doctrine offered for Christian acceptance, or any interpretation of biblical writings, was to be assessed. But when once the limits of holy scripture came to be generally agreed upon, holy scripture itself came to be regarded as the rule of faith. For example, Thomas Aquinas (c 1225-1274) says that ‘canonical scripture alone is the rule of faith’. From another theological perspective the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), after listing the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments, adds: ‘All which are given by inspiration of God, to be the rule of faith and life.’5 These words affirm the status of holy scripture as the ‘canon’ or ‘standard’ by which Christian teaching and action must be regulated. While the ‘canon’ of scripture means the list of books accepted as holy scripture, the other sense of ‘canon’—rule or standard—has rubbed off on this one, so that the ‘canon’ of scripture is understood to be the list of books which are acknowledged to be, in a unique sense, the rule of belief and practice.
The question to be examined in the following pages is: how did certain documents, and these only, come to receive this recognition? Who, if any one, decided that these, and no others, should be admitted to the list of the holy scriptures, and what were the criteria which influenced this decision?
PEOPLE OF THE BOOK
Many religions have sacred books associated with their traditions or their worship. There was a once-famous series of volumes entitled The Sacred Books of the East.6 But Jews, Christians and Muslims have come to be known as ‘people of the book’ in a special sense. This is a designation given repeatedly in the Qur’ān to Jews and Christians. Among ‘people of the book’ the ‘book’ has a regulative function: conformity to what the book prescribes is a major test of loyalty to their religious faith and practice.
For Jews the ‘book’ is the Hebrew Bible, comprising the Law, the Prophets and the Writings (from the initials of these three divisions in Hebrew the Bible is often referred to among Jews as the TeNaKh).7 For Christians it is the Hebrew Bible, which they call the Old Testament (amplified somewhat in certain Christian traditions),8 together with the New Testament. Muslims recognize the Hebrew Bible, the tawrat (the Arabic equivalent of Heb. tôrāh, ‘law’), and the Christian New Testament, the injil (from Gk. euangelion, ‘gospel’), as earlier revelations of God, but these find their completion in the revelation given through the Prophet, the Qur’ān (literally ‘recitation’ or ‘reading’), the ‘book’ par excellence.
THE TWO TESTAMENTS
Our concern here is with the Christian Bible, comprising the Old and New Testaments. The word ‘testament’ in English normally means a will (someone’s ‘last will and testament’); but this is not the sense in which it is used of the two parts of the Christian Bible. Our word ‘testament’ comes from Latin testamentum, which similarly means a will, but in this particular context the Latin word is used as the translation of the Greek word diathēkē. This Greek word may indeed mean a will,9 but it is used more widely of various kinds of settlement or agreement, not so much of one which is made between equals as of one in which a party superior in power or dignity confers certain privileges on an inferior, while the inferior undertakes certain obligations towards the superior. It is used repeatedly in both Old and New Testaments, both in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible and in the original Greek of the New Testament. It is usually rendered by our word ‘covenant’, and its most distinctive usage relates to an agreement between God and human beings. Here, of course, there can be no question of an agreement between equals.
In the earliest books of the Old Testament God makes a covenant with Noah and his descendants (Gen. 9:8-17), and again with Abraham and his descendants (Gen. 15:18; 17:1-4). The external token of the covenant with Noah was the rainbow; the external token of the covenant with Abraham was the rite of circumcision. Later, when Abraham’s descendants (or at least one important group of them) had migrated to Egypt and were drafted into forced labour gangs there, God remembered his covenant with Abraham and brought about their deliverance. Having left Egypt under the leadership of Moses, they were constituted a nation in the wilderness of Sinai. Their national constitution took the form of a covenant into which the God of their fathers entered with them, making himself known to them by his name Yahweh.10 The terms of this covenant were, very simply, ‘I will be your God, and you shall be my people.’ Yahweh undertook to make various kinds of provision for them; they undertook to worship him exclusively and to obey his commandments. These undertakings were recorded in a document called ‘the book of the covenant’. According to the narrative of Exodus 24:4-8,
Moses wrote all the words of Yahweh. And he rose early in the morning, and built an altar at the foot of the mountain, and twelve pillars, according to the twelve tribes of Israel. And he sent young men of the people of Israel, who offered burnt offerings and sacrificed peace offerings of oxen to Yahweh. And Moses took half of the blood and put it in basins, and half of the blood he threw against the altar. Then he took the book of the covenant, and read it in the hearing of the people; and they said, ‘All that Yahweh has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient.’ And Moses took the blood and threw it upon the people, and said, ‘Behold the blood of the covenant which Yahweh has made with you in accordance with all these words.’
This narrative is summarized in the New Testament, in Hebrews 9:18-20, where the covenant thus ratified is qualified as ‘the first covenant’. This is because the writer to the Hebrews sets it in contrast with the ‘new covenant’ promised in Jeremiah 31:31-34. Over six hundred years after the ratification of the covenant of Moses’ day at the foot of Mount Sinai, the prophet Jeremiah announced that, in days to come, the God of Israel would establish a new covenant with his people to replace that which he had made with the Exodus generation when he ‘took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt’ (Jer. 31:31-34). That ancient covenant made the divine will plain to them, but did not impart the power to carry it out; for lack of that power they broke the covenant. Under the new covenant, however, not only the desire but the power to do the will of God would be imparted to his people: his law would be put within them and written on their hearts. ‘In speaking of a new covenant’, says the writer to the Hebrews, ‘he treats the first as obsolete’ (Heb. 8:13). And he leaves his readers in no doubt that the new covenant has already been established, ratified not by the blood of sacrificed animals but by the blood of Christ, a sacrifice which effects not merely external purification from ritual defilement but the inward cleansing of the conscience from guilt.
This interpretation of the promise of the new covenant is fully in line with Jesus’s own words. During the evening before his death, sitting with his disciples round the supper-table, he gave them bread and wine as memorials of himself. When he gave them the wine, according to Mark’s record, he said, ‘This is my blood of the covenant (my covenant blood), which is poured out for many’ (Mark 14:24). The echo of Moses’ words, ‘Behold the blood of the covenant. . . ’, can scarcely be missed. That the covenant associated with the blood of Jesus (his voluntary offering himself up to God) is Jeremiah’s new covenant is implied; the implication is explicit in Paul’s record: ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood’ (1 Cor. 11:25).11
Each of these covenants—the ancient covenant of Sinai and the new covenant inaugurated by Jesus—launched a great spiritual movement. Each of these movements gave rise to a special body of literature, and these bodies of literature came to be known in the Christian church as ‘the books of the ancient covenant’ and ‘the books of the new covenant’. The former collection came into being over a period of a thousand years or more; the latter collection has a more inaugural character. Its various parts were written within a century from the establishment of the new covenant; they may be regarded as the foundation documents of Christianity. It was not until the end of the second century AD that the two collections began to be described, briefly, as the Old Covenant (or Testament) and the New Covenant (or Testament). These short titles are attested in both Greek and Latin almost simultaneously—in Greek, in the works of Clement of Alexandria;12 in Latin, in the works of Tertullian of Carthage.13
It has been suggested that the expression ‘the New Covenant (or Testament)’ is first used to denote a collection of books in AD 192, in an anti-Montanist work in Greek by an unknown writer, addressed to the Phrygian bishop Avircius14 Marcellinus, from which Eusebius quotes some extracts. This work speaks of ‘the word of the new covenant of the gospel, to which nothing can be added by any one who has chosen to live according to the gospel itself and from which nothing can be taken away’.15 It is unlikely, however, that this is a reference to the New Testament in our sense of the term;16 the anonymous writer is a little disturbed by the possibility that his own work might be viewed as an addition to ‘the word of the new covenant of the gospel’.
A CLOSED CANON
The words ‘to which nothing can be added. . . and from which nothing can be taken away’, whatever they precisely meant in this context, seem certainly to imply the principle of a closed canon. There are some scholars who maintain that the word ‘canon’should be used only where the list of specially authoritative books has been closed; and there is much to be said in favour of this restrictive use of the word (a more flexible word might be used for the collection in process of formation), although it would be pedantic to insist on it invariably.
Such language about neither adding nor taking away is used in relation to individual components of the two Testaments. To the law of Deuteronomy, for example, the warning is attached: ‘You shall not add to the word which I command you, nor take from it’ (Deut. 4:2; cf12:32). A fuller warning is appended to the New Testament Apocalypse: ‘I warn every one who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if any one adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book, and if any one takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book’ (Rev. 22:18 f.).17
The author of the Didachē (an early manual of church order) echoes the warning of Deuteronomy when he says, ‘You shall not forsake the commandments of the Lord, but you shall keep the things you received, “neither adding nor taking away”.’18 Around the same time (end of the first century AD) Josephus uses similar language about the Hebrew scriptures: ‘Although such long ages have now gone by, no one has dared to add anything to them, to take away anything from them, or to change anything in them.’19 This language can scarcely signify anything other than a closed canon.20
LITURGICAL RECOGNITION
The status of the scriptures is symbolically acknowledged in various traditions of public worship. Special veneration is paid to the scrolls of the law in a synagogue service as they are carried from the holy ark, where they are kept, to the bimah, from which they are read to the congregation. In the liturgy of the Orthodox Church the gospel book is carried in procession, and the reading from it is preceded by the call: ‘Wisdom! All stand; let us hear the holy gospel.’ The veneration thus paid to the gospel book is not paid to the materials of which it is composed nor to the ink with which it is inscribed, but to the Holy Wisdom which finds expression in the words that are read. In the Catholic liturgy the gospel is treated with comparable veneration and the reading from it is preceded and followed by special prayers. In the Anglican communion service the people stand while the gospel is read, and when it is announced they commonly say, ‘Glory to Christ our Saviour’, while at its conclusion, when the reader says, ‘This is the gospel of Christ’, they respond, ‘Praise to Christ our Lord.’
In churches of the Reformed order (such as the Church of Scotland and other Presbyterian churches throughout the world) the first formal action in a service of public worship takes place when the Bible is carried in from the vestry and placed on the reading desk. Someone, of course, must carry it (the beadle, perhaps, or ‘church officer’), but the person who does so has no liturgical significance (even if, in earlier days, he thought it proper to ‘magnify his office’); it is the Bible that has liturgical significance. The Bible is followed at a respectful distance by the minister. And why? Because he is the minister—that is to say, in the original sense of the term, the ‘servant’ of the Word. No letters indicating academic achievement or public honour can match in dignity the letters V.D.M., appended to the pastor’s name in some Reformed churches—Verbi Divini Minister, ‘servant of the Word of God.’ When the time comes in the service for the audible reading of the Bible, this lesson is underlined by the introductory exhortation: ‘Let us hear the Word of God.’
It is from the contents, the message, of the book that it derives its value, whether we think of the gospel in particular or the Bible as a whole. It is therefore important to know what its contents are, and how they have come to be marked off from other writings—even holy and inspired writings. That is the point of examining the growth of the canon of holy scripture.
Part TwoOld Testament
Chapter TwoThe Law and the Prophets
JESUS’ APPEAL TO THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES
The Christian church started its existence with a book, but it was not to the book that it owed its existence. It shared the book with the Jewish people; indeed, the first members of the church were without exception Jews. The church owed its distinctive existence to a person—to Jesus of Nazareth, crucified, dead and buried, but ‘designated Son of God in power. . . by his resurrection from the dead’ (Rom. 1:4). This Jesus, it was believed, had been exalted by God to be universal Lord; he had sent his Spirit to be present with his followers, to unite them and animate them as his body on earth. The function of the book was to bear witness to him.
Jesus, according to all the strata of the gospel tradition, regularly appealed to the Hebrew scriptures to validate his mission, his words and his actions. According to Mark, he began his ministry in Galilee with the announcement: ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand’ (Mark 1:14). This was the good news which he proclaimed, inviting his hearers to believe it. Those of them who were familiar with the book of Daniel can scarcely have missed the reference in his words to the prophecy in that book concerning a coming day in which ‘the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed’ (Dan. 2:44cf7:14, 18, 27). The kingdom was to be bestowed on ‘the saints of the Most High’; Daniel in vision saw how ‘the time came when the saints received the kingdom’ (Dan. 7:22). The implication of Jesus’ announcement was that this time had now arrived. So, according to another evangelist, he encouraged his disciples with the assurance: ‘it is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom’ (Luke 12:32). What was actually involved in this kingdom was spelled out in his teaching (especially his parables) and in his general ministry.
Luke records how, in the synagogue of his home town Nazareth, Jesus set out the programme of his ministry by reading from Isaiah 61:1f. the declaration of the unnamed prophet that God, by placing his Spirit on him, had anointed him ‘to preach good news to the poor,. . . to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord’ (Luke 4:18f.). His reading of those words was followed by the announcement: ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing’ (Luke 4:21). This emphasis on scripture characterized Jesus’ ministry right on to the time when (again according to Luke) he appeared in resurrection to his disciples and assured them that his suffering and rising again, together with the consequent proclamation of the gospel to all the nations, formed the subject-matter of what was ‘written’ (Luke 24:46f.).
The church’s use of those writings was based on Jesus’ use of them: as his followers searched them further, they discovered increasingly ‘in all the scriptures the things concerning himself (Luke 24:27). The Old Testament, as Christians in due course came to call these writings, was a book about Jesus. Here was the church’s Bible. Here was the Bible of the Jewish people also; but so differently did the two communities read the same writings that, for practical purposes, they might have been using two different Bibles instead of sharing one.1
THE CANON OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
Our Lord and his apostles might differ from the religious leaders of Israel about the meaning of the scriptures; there is no suggestion that they differed about the limits of the scriptures. ‘The scriptures’ on whose meaning they differed were not an amorphous collection: when they spoke of ‘the scriptures’ they knew which writings they had in mind and could distinguish them from other writings which were not included in ‘the scriptures’. When we speak of ‘the scriptures’ we mean ‘the sacred writings’ as distinct from other writings: to us ‘scripture’ and ‘writing’ are separate words with distinct meanings. But in Hebrew and Greek one and the same word does duty for both ‘writing’ and ‘scripture’: in these languages ‘the scriptures’ are simply ‘the writings’—that is to say, ‘the writings’ par excellence. As we shall see, sometimes this involves a measure of ambiguity: does the word in this or that context mean ‘scripture’ in particular or ‘writing’ in general?2 But when ‘the scriptures’ or ‘the writings’ are mentioned, there is usually no ambiguity. Similarly in English ‘the book’ can be used in a special sense (indicated perhaps by the tone of voice or by the use of a capital initial) to denote the Bible—the Book as distinct from all other books.
The books of the Hebrew Bible are traditionally twenty-four in number, arranged in three divisions. The first division is the Tôrāh (‘law’ or ‘direction’), comprising the five ‘books of Moses’ (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy). The second division is the Neḇî’îm (‘prophets’): it is further subdivided into the four Former Prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings) and the four Latter Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Book of the Twelve Prophets)3. The third division is called the Keṯuḇîm (‘writings’): it comprises eleven books. First come the Psalms, Proverbs and Job; then a group of five called the Meǥillôt or ‘scrolls’ (Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther); finally Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah (reckoned as one book), Chronicles.4 This is the arrangement regularly followed in printed editions of the Hebrew Bible.
One of the clearest and earliest statements of these three divisions and their respective contents comes in a baraitha (a tradition from the period AD 70-200) quoted in the Babylonian Talmud, in the tractate Baba Bathra.5 This tradition assigns inspired or authoritative authors to all twenty-four books, and discusses their order. The order of the five books in the first division is fixed, because they are set in a historical framework in which each has its chronological position; this is true also of the four Former Prophets. But the order of the books in the Latter Prophets and in the Writings was not so firmly fixed. This is inevitable when separate scrolls are kept together in a container. It is different when a number of documents can be bound together in a volume of modern shape—a codex, to use the technical term. Here the first must precede the second and the second must precede the third, whether there is any logical or chronological basis for that sequence or not. The codex began to come into use early in the Christian era, but even after its introduction religious conservatism ensured that the Jewish scriptures continued for long to be written on scrolls. If the eleven books making up the Writings—or, to take one subdivision of them, the five Meǥillôṯ—were kept in one box, there was no particular reason why they should be mentioned in one order rather than another.
But it cannot be by accident that, in the traditional arrangement of the books, Chronicles follows Ezra-Nehemiah. This is a quite unnatural sequence, which could not have been adopted without some substantial reason. Ezra-Nehemiah takes up the history of Israel where Chronicles leaves off, whether or not Ezra-Nehemiah was originally part of the same work as Chronicles—‘the work of the Chronicler’, as it is often called.6 Practically every edition of the Old Testament, therefore, apart from the Hebrew Bible (and versions which follow its order), makes Ezra-Nehemiah come immediately after Chronicles (which is the logical and chronological sequence). Why then should the Hebrew Bible place Chronicles after Ezra-Nehemiah, which is properly the sequel to Chronicles? One answer to this question is that, when the canon of Old Testament scripture was in course of formation, Chronicles was ‘canonized’ (included in the canon) after Ezra-Nehemiah. There is no firm evidence that this is how it happened, but it is difficult to think of a more probable answer.
There is evidence that Chronicles was the last book in the Hebrew Bible as Jesus knew it. When he said that the generation he addressed would be answerable for ‘the blood of all the prophets, shed from the foundation of the world’, he added, ‘from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary’ (Luke 11:50f). Abel is the first martyr in the Bible (Gen. 4:8); Zechariah is most probably the son of Jehoiada, who was stoned to death ‘in the court of Yahweh’s house’ because, speaking by the Spirit of God, he rebuked the king and people of Judah for transgressing the divine commandments (2 Chron. 24:20-22). Zechariah (c 800 BC) was not chronologically the last faithful prophet to die as a martyr; some two centuries later a prophet named Uriah was put to death in Jerusalem because his witness was unacceptable to King Jehoiakim (Jer. 26:20-23). But Zechariah is canonically the last faithful prophet to die as a martyr, because his death is recorded in Chronicles, the last book in the Hebrew Bible.7
How old is the threefold division? It is widely believed, and perhaps rightly, that it is referred to for the first time by the grandson of Jeshua Ben Sira when, shortly after emigrating from Palestine to Alexandria in Egypt in 132 BC, he translated his grandfather’s book of wisdom (commonly called Ecclesiasticus or Sirach8) from Hebrew into Greek. Repeatedly in the prologue to his translation he speaks of his grandfather as a student of ‘the law and the prophets and the other books of our fathers’, ‘the law itself, the prophecies and the rest of the books’. Here we may indeed have a reference to the Law, the Prophets and the Writings. But it is just possible to understand that Ben Sira is being described as a student of the holy scriptures (the law and the prophets) and of other Jewish writings not included among the scriptures.9
There is one place in the New Testament which may reflect the threefold division. In Luke’s acccant of the appearance of the risen Lord to his disciples in Jerusalem, they are reminded how he had told them ‘that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled’ (Luke 24:44). Here ‘the psalms’ might denote not only the contents of the Psalter10 but also the whole of the third division—the Writings—of which the Psalter was the first book. We cannot be sure of this; in any case, the Hebrew scriptures are more often referred to in the New Testament as ‘the law and the prophets’. Jesus said that the golden rule sums up ‘the law and the prophets’ (Matt. 7:12); Paul claims that God’s way of righteousness set forth in the gospel which he preaches is attested by ‘the law and the prophets’ (Rom. 3:21). No problem was felt about including books of the third division among the ‘prophets’: David is called a prophet in Acts 2:30, Daniel in Matthew 24:15, and even Job, by implication, in James 5:10f.
Sometimes the whole Hebrew Bible, or any part of it, is referred to as ‘the law’: in John 10:34 Jewish disputants are told that part of Psalm 82 is ‘written in your law’; in 1 Corinthians 14:21 a quotation from Isaiah 28:1 1f. is similarly said to be written ‘in the law’, while in Romans 3:10-19 a chain of quotations from the Psalms and Isaiah is included in ‘whatever the law says’. Less often the whole collection is described as ‘the prophets’: when Jesus on the Emmaus road spoke of the two disciples’ being so ‘slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken’ (Luke 24:25), it is plain from the context that Moses is included among ‘the prophets’ (he was, in fact, the greatest of them).
THE EVIDENCE OF JOSEPHUS
A rather different threefold division of the same books is mentioned by Josephus, the Jewish historian, in the first volume of his treatise Against Apion, written in the nineties of the first century AD. Josephus contrasts the reliable sources for early Jewish history with the many conflicting accounts of origins given by Greek historians:
We have not myriads of books, disagreeing and conflicting with one another, but only twenty-two, containing the record of all time, and justly accredited.
Of these, five are the books of Moses, containing the laws and the history handed down from the creation of the human race right to his own death. This period falls a little short of three thousand years. From the death of Moses to the time of Artaxerxes, who was king of Persia after Xerxes, the prophets who followed Moses have written down in thirteen books the things that were done in their days. The remaining four books contain hymns to God and principles of life for human beings.
From Artaxerxes to our own time a detailed record has been made, but this has not been thought worthy of equal credit with the earlier records because there has not been since then the exact succession of prophets.11
When he says that since Artaxerxes’ time there has been no exact succession of prophets, Josephus does not mean that the gift of prophecy itself died out. He mentions its exercise among the Essenes,12 he says that the Jewish ruler John Hyrcanus I (134-104 BC) was divinely enabled ‘to foresee and foretell the future’,13 and he claims to have had the gift himself.14 But in the period between Moses and Artaxerxes (465-423BC) he appears to envisage an unbroken succession of prophets, guaranteeing the continuity and trustworthiness of the records which they were believed to have produced.
When Josephus speaks of twenty-two books,15 he probably refers to exactly the same documents as the twenty-four of the traditional Jewish reckoning, Ruth being counted as an appendix to Judges and Lamentations to Jeremiah. His three divisions might be called the Law, the Prophets and the Writings. His first division comprises the same five books as the first division in the traditional arrangement. But his second division has thirteen books, not eight, the additional five being perhaps Job16, Esther, Daniel, Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah. The four books of the third division would then be Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs. It is impossible to be sure, because he does not specify the books of the three divisions one by one.
It is unlikely that Josephus’s classification of the books was his own; he probably reproduces a tradition with which he had been familiar for a long time, having learned it either in the priestly circle into which he was born or among the Pharisees with whose party he associated himself as a young man.
DISCUSSIONS AT JAMNIA
About the same time as Josephus wrote his work Against Apion, the Hebrew scriptures were among various subjects debated by the rabbis who set up their headquarters at Jabneh or Jamnia in western Judaea, under the leadership of Yohanan ben Zakkai, to discuss the reconstruction of Jewish religious life after the collapse of the Jewish commonwealth in AD 70.17 Jewish life had to be adapted to a new situation in which the temple and its services were no more. So far as the 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.18 It is probably unwise to talk as if there was a Council or Synod of Jamnia which laid down the limits of the Old Testament canon.
They discussed which books ‘defiled the hands’19—a technical expression denoting those books which were the product of prophetic inspiration. One had to wash one’s hands after handling them, just as one did after ‘defiling’ the hands (whether materially or ritually). One might explain this practice in terms of Mary Douglas’s ‘purity and danger’;20 but by the time we are dealing with the idea may simply have been that if people had to wash their hands every time they touched a sacred book they would be deterred from handling it casually.21
At any rate, the rabbis at Jamnia discussed whether certain books did or did not ‘defile the hands’ in this sense. Did Jeshua ben Sira’s wisdom book (Ecclesiasticus) defile them or not? It was a work which inculcated true religion; objectively it was not easy to distinguish it in point of sacredness from Proverbs or Ecclesiastes. The conclusion, however was that it did not defile the hands. But what of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes? Proverbs seems to contradict itself in two adjacent verses: ‘Answer not a fool according to his folly,. . . Answer a fool according to his folly. . .’ (Prov. 26:4f.). (It was easily explained that in some circumstances the one precept, and in some circumstances the other precept, should be followed.) Ecclesiastes, on the face of it, was a much less orthodox book than Ben Sira’s work: is it really fitting to believe that ‘there is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and find enjoyment in his toil’ (Eccles. 2:24)? (It was pointed out that this could be read as a question expecting the answer ‘No’—‘Is there nothing better for a man. . .?’)
Neither Esther nor the Song of Songs contains the name of God—unless indeed his name be concealed in Cant 8:6, where ‘a most vehement flame’ might be literally ‘a flame of Yah’.22 Both works might appear to be non-religious in character, but Esther provided the libretto for the popular festival of Purim, and if the Song could be allegorized so as to become a celebration of Yahweh’s love for Israel, it could continue to be recognized as an inspired scripture. As for Ezekiel, the prescriptions in its closing chapters for the new temple and its services could with difficulty be made to agree with those in the Pentateuch, and the chariot vision of chapter 1 gave rise to mystical speculations and exercises which some rabbis believed to be spiritually dangerous. The opinion was expressed that Ezekiel ought to be ‘withdrawn’ (withdrawn, probably, from the synagogue calendar of public readings). Other pious souls were content to wait until Elijah came at the end of the age: the problems of Ezekiel would be among those which he was expected to solve. Happily, it was not necessary to wait so long: one Hananiah the son of Hezekiah sat up night after night burning the midnight oil to the tune of 300 measures until he had worked out a reconciliation between Ezekiel and Moses.23 But this simply means that the rabbis of Jamnia, like religious disputants of other ages, enjoyed a really tough subject for theological debate; it does not mean that at this late date the status of Ezekiel was in serious jeopardy.
From the same period as Josephus and the Jamnia debates comes an independent reference to twenty-four as the number of books of holy scripture. The Apocalypse of Ezra (otherwise called 4 Ezra and 2 Esdras)24 was written after the destruction of the temple in AD 70, but purports to record revelations made to Ezra after the destruction of Solomon’s temple centuries before. Ezra tells how, by divine illumination, he was enabled to dictate to five men over a period of forty days the contents of ninety-four books. ‘And when the forty days were ended, the Most High spoke to me, saying, “Make public the twenty-four books that you wrote first and let the worthy and the unworthy read them; but keep the seventy that were written last, in order to give them to the wise among your people”’ (4 Ezra 14:45f). The twenty-four books accessible to the public appear to be the twenty-four books of the Hebrew Bible; the other seventy were esoteric or apocalyptic works which yielded their secret meaning to an inner circle (such as, for example, the Qumran community).
A THREE-STAGE CANON?
A common, and not unreasonable, account of the formation of the Old Testament canon is that it took shape in three stages, corresponding to the three divisions of the Hebrew Bible. The Law was first canonized (early in the period after the return from the Babylonian exile), the Prophets next (late in the third century BC). When these two collections were closed, everything else that was recognized as holy scripture had to go into the third division, the Writings, which remained open until the end of the first century AD, when it was ‘closed’ at Jamnia.25 But it must be pointed out that, for all its attractiveness, this account is completely hypothetical: there is no evidence for it, either in the Old Testament itself or elsewhere.
We have evidence in the Old Testament of the public recognition of scripture as conveying the word of God, but that is not the same thing as canonization.
When, on the occasion already referred to, Moses read ‘the book of the covenant’ to the Israelites at the foot of Mount Sinai, they responded with an undertaking to keep the divine commandments: to them what Moses read was the word of God (Exod. 24:3-7). When, at a later date, the law-code of Deuteronomy was put ‘beside the ark of the covenant of Yahweh’ (Deut. 31:26), this was to be a token of its sanctity and a reminder to the people of the solemnity of their obligation to continue in the way which God had commanded them. When the same law-code, probably (‘the book of the law’), was found in the temple in the reign of Josiah, it was read by the king’s decree to a great concourse of the people of Judah and Jerusalem; the king entered into a solemn undertaking ‘to perform the words of the covenant that were written in this book; and all the people joined in the covenant’ (2 Kings 23:1-3). Again, after the return from the Babylonian exile, Ezra and his associates read publicly from ‘the book of the law of Moses’ which he had brought from Babylon to Jerusalem, and the national leaders made a firm covenant to order their lives from then on in accordance with the commandments which it contained (Neh. 8:1-9:38).
On all these occasions the authority of the word of God was acknowledged in what was read; but there is no mention as yet of anything in the nature of a collection to which such a document might be added, or in which others might be added after it. Even in the ban on adding anything to the law-code of Deuteronomy or taking anything from it (Deut. 4:2) the law-code is envisaged as quite self-contained; there is no word of adding it to other codes, as has actually been done in the final arrangement of the Pentateuch.26 (‘Pentateuch’ is a term of Greek origin denoting the five books of the Law.)
Later prophets recognize the divine authority underlying the ministry of earlier prophets (cfJer. 7:25; Ezek. 38:17), but the idea of collecting the oracles of a succession of prophets did not occur at once. Zechariah the prophet refers to ‘the former prophets’ (Zech. 1:4; 7:7), meaning those who prophesied before the exile, but he does not imply that their words have been published as a collection. Such a collection did come into being in the following centuries, but by what agency must be a matter of speculation. The earliest reference to such a collection is probably in Daniel 9:2, where Daniel found Jeremiah’s prophecy of the duration of Jerusalem’s desolations (Jer. 25:11f.) among ‘the books’.
In the persecution under Antiochus Epiphanes many copies of the scriptures were seized and destroyed; possession of a copy of ‘the book of the covenant’ was punished with death (1 Macc. 1:56f.). It was necessary therefore to replace the lost copies when religious liberty was regained. In a letter purporting to be addressed by the Jews of Jerusalem and Judaea to the Jews of Egypt it is recalled that Nehemiah in his day ‘founded a library and collected the books about the kings and prophets, and the writings of David, and letters of kings about votive offerings’.27 Following his precedent, the letter goes on, Judas Maccabaeus also (between 164 and 160 BC) ‘collected all the books that had been lost on account of the war which had come upon us, and they are in our possession’ (2 Macc. 2:13f.).
Where these collected scriptures were housed is not stated, but it may well have been in the temple. The holy place was a fitting repository for the holy books. Josephus tells how a copy of the law formed part of the temple spoils carried in Vespasian’s triumphal procession in AD 71; it was subsequently kept in the imperial palace.28 It may have been from the temple, too, that the ‘sacred books’ came which Josephus received as a gift from Titus after the capture and destruction of the holy place.29
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE QUMRAN TEXTS
The discoveries made at Qumran, north-west of the Dead Sea, in the years following 1947 have greatly increased our knowledge of the history of the Hebrew scriptures during the two centuries or more preceding AD 70.30 The texts discovered and studied appear to represent about five hundred separate documents, about one hundred of them being copies of books of the Hebrew Bible (some books in particular being represented by several copies). A few of these copies are substantially complete, but most are very fragmentary. All the books of the Hebrew Bible are represented among them, with the exception of Esther. This exception may be accidental (it is conceivable that a copy of Esther once included in the Qumran library has perished completely), or it may be significant: there is evidence of some doubt among Jews, as later among Christians, about the status of Esther.31Esther may have been felt to have too close an affinity to the ideals of Judas Maccabaeus and his kinsfolk in the Hasmonaean family, of whom the Qumran community utterly disapproved.32
But the men of Qumran have left no statement indicating precisely which of the books represented in their library ranked as holy scripture in their estimation, and which did not. A book setting forth the community’s rule of life or liturgical practice was no doubt regarded as authoritative, just as the Book of Common Prayer is (or was) in the Church of England, but that did not give it scriptural status.
Among their books are several commentaries on books of the Hebrew Bible, explaining them according to the community’s distinctive principles of interpretation.33 The books thus commented on were certainly acknowledged as holy scripture: their words were the words of God spoken through his prophets or spokesmen, foretelling events of the commentators’ own days, when the end of the current age was believed to be impending. We may confidently say, therefore, that the ‘canon’ of the Qumran community included the Pentateuch, the Prophets, the Psalms (possibly with a few supplementary psalms). It also included the book of Daniel, who is called ‘Daniel the prophet’34 (as in Matt. 24:15), and probably Job (an Aramaic targum or paraphrase of Job was found in Cave 11 at Qumran).35
But what of Tobit, Jubilees and Enoch,36fragments of which were also found at Qumran? These were in due course to be reckoned canonical by certain religious groups; were they reckoned canonical by the Qumran community? There is no evidence which would justify the answer ‘Yes’; on the other hand, we do not know enough to return the answer ‘No’. One of the community documents—the Zadokite Work (or the Book of the Covenant of Damascus)—attaches some degree of authority to Jubilees: ‘As for the exact statement of all their epochs to which Israel turns a blind eye, it can be learned from the Book of the Divisions of the Times into their Jubilees and Weeks.’37 The ‘Temple Scroll’ from Cave 11 (which should perhaps be more accurately called the ‘Torah Scroll’) is a repromulgation of the law of Moses, set in a deuteronomic framework, which was to be put into effect when national life was restored in accordance with Qumran ideals. The first editor of this document, the late Yigael Yadin, argued that it had canonical status in the community;38 he thought that it too was referred to in the Zadokite Work as ‘the sealed book of the law’39 (but this is more probably a reference to the book found in the temple in the reign of Josiah).
From time to time the community documents indicate more explicitly which books were reckoned ‘canonical’ by quoting from them with introductory formulae which indicate their quality as divine revelation. When the Zadokite Work bases a ban on bigamy from the juxtaposition of the texts ‘male and female he created them’ (Gen. 1:27), ‘they went into the ark two and two’ (Gen. 7:9, 15), and ‘he shall not multiply wives for himself’ (Deut. 17:17),40 it is evident that the documents from which the three texts are quoted are authoritative scripture.
It is probable, indeed, that by the beginning of the Christian era the Essenes (including the Qumran community) were in substantial agreement with the Pharisees and the Sadducees about the limits of Hebrew scripture. There may have been some differences of opinion and practice with regard to one or two of the ‘writings’, but the inter-party disagreements remembered in Jewish tradition have very little to do with the limits of the canon. The idea that the Sadducees (like the Samaritans) acknowledged the Pentateuch only as holy scripture is based on a misunderstanding: when Josephus, for example, says that the Sadducees ‘admit no observance at all apart from the laws’,41 he means not the Pentateuch to the exclusion of the Prophets and the Writings but the written law (of the Pentateuch) to the exclusion of the oral law (the Pharisaic interpretation and application of the written law, which, like the written law itself, was held in theory to have been received and handed down by Moses).42 It would be understandable if the Sadducees did not accept Daniel which contains the most explicit statement of the resurrection hope in the whole of the Old Testament.43
As for the Samaritans, their Bible was restricted to the Pentateuch. They had their own edition of the book of Joshua and a number of other traditions, but these were not recognized as holy scripture. The Samaritan Bible was basically a popular Palestinian recension of the Hebrew Pentateuch, which was subjected to an editorial process to bring it into line with certain aspects of Samaritan tradition which conflicted with Jewish tradition.44 The Samaritan Bible has customarily been treated as evidence for the view that the final Samaritan schism took place at a time when the Pentateuch but not the Prophets or Writings had been ‘canonized’, but this is not necessarily so.45
When we think of Jesus and his Palestinian apostles, then, we may be confident that they agreed with contemporary leaders in Israel about the contents of the canon. We cannot say confidently that they accepted Esther, Ecclesiastes or the Song of Songs as scripture, because evidence is not available. We can argue only from probability, and arguments from probability are weighed differently by different judges. But when in debate with Jewish theologians Jesus and the apostles appealed to ‘the scriptures’, they appealed to an authority which was equally acknowledged by their opponents. This near-unanimity might suggest that some widely acknowledged authority had promulgated a decision on the matter. It is not easy, however, to identify an authority in the relevant period which would have commanded the assent of such diverse groups. But, as later with the New Testament,46 so with the Old Testament it is probable that, when the canon was ‘closed’ in due course by competent authority, this simply meant that official recognition was given to the situation already obtaining in the practice of the worshipping community.
Chapter ThreeThe Greek Old Testament
THE ORIGIN OF THE SEPTUAGINT
Almost from the time that Alexander the Great founded Alexandria in Egypt in 331 BC, there was a Jewish element in its Greek-speaking population, and this element continued to increase in the generations that followed. There were Jewish settlements in most of the other Greek-speaking cities established throughout the area of Alexander’s conquests, but none was so important as that in Alexandria. The process of Jewish settlement there was facilitated by the fact that, until 198 BC, Judaea formed part of the kingdom of the Ptolemies, who succeeded to Alexander’s empire in Egypt and made Alexandria their capital.
Before long the Jews of Alexandria gave up using the language their ancestors had spoken in Palestine and spoke Greek only. This would have involved their being cut off from the use of the Hebrew Bible and the traditional prayers and thanksgivings, had the scriptures not been translated into Greek. The Greek translation of the scriptures was made available from time to time in the third and second centuries BC (say during the century 250-150 BC). The law, comprising the five books of Moses, was the first part of the scriptures to appear in a Greek version; the reading of the law was essential to synagogue worship, and it was important that what was read should be intelligible to the congregation. At first, perhaps, the law was read in Hebrew, as it was back home in Palestine, and someone was appointed to give an oral translation in Greek.1 But as time went on a written Greek version was provided, so that it could be read directly.
In the course of time a legend attached itself to this Greek version of the law, telling how it was the work of seventy or rather seventy-two elders of Israel who were brought to Alexandria for the purpose. It is because of this legend that the term Septuagint (from Latin septuaginta, ‘seventy’) came to be attached to the version. As time went on, the term came to be attached to the whole of the Old Testament in Greek, and the original legend of the seventy was further embellished. The legend is recorded originally in a document called the Letter of Aristeas, which tells how the elders completed the translation of the Pentateuch in seventy-two days, achieving an agreed version as the result of regular conference and comparison. Later embellishments not only extended their work to cover the whole Old Testament but told how they were isolated from one another in separate cells for the whole period and produced seventy-two identical versions—conclusive proof, it was urged, of the divine inspiration of the work! Philo, the Jewish philosopher of Alexandria, relates how the translators worked in isolation from one another but wrote the same text word for word, ‘as though it were dictated to each by an invisible prompter’;2 but both he and Josephus confirm that it was only the books of the law that were translated by the elders.3 It was Christian writers who extended their work to the rest of the Old Testament and, taking over Philo’s belief in their inspiration, extended that also to cover the whole of the Greek Old Testament, including those books that never formed part of the Hebrew Bible.4
