Judeo-Christian in Charlotte

 The Biblical Canon: Where Do We Stand?

Despite what even many inside the Jewish and Christian faiths might say, the inerrancy of the Bible is probably the most important issue surrounding the Jewish and Christian faiths, because the Bible’s trustworthiness as the Word of God is the only reliable foundation for the Judeo-Christian worldview. If a person can’t come to the conclusion that the Bible can be trusted, then there’s no point in entertaining any real discussion about the Judeo-Christian faith, because its claims would be inherently false. What can be scary for many Evangelical Protestant Christians in particular is that the road to proving these claims, while trustworthy, is anything but straight. There are a lot of factors that one must understand in order to see how the Bible can be considered inerrant: the history and context of both the text itself and the events surrounding its adoption; the language and cultural differences between the writers, the original recipients, those who later determined whether a book should be canonical, and us—who are far removed in history from all of these events; and the commitment one must take to climb over the obstacles presented by the fact that God used imperfect men in the preservation of the Bible. The power of the testimony of Scripture is that it has been preserved as God’s Word in spite of His own people—not because of them.

This article focuses more on the formation of the differing Biblical canons and where we as Judeo-Christians stand rather than on defending the textual and historical reliability of Scripture—although the latter is very important. We simply need to tackle those issues separately.

Addressing the Major Myths Surrounding the Canon

Many Christians are unaware that there are two different Jewish canons—the ‘standard’ Western Jewish Tanakh, and the canon of Beta Israel—the Ethiopian Jewish Tanakh, as well as four major Christian canons in operation today: the Ethiopian Orthodox, the Eastern Orthodox, the Roman Catholic, and the Protestant canons. (There are others, which are minor variations of these four.) The Ethiopian Jewish Tanakh largely mirrors the Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Old Testament, while the Western Jewish Tanakh mirrors the Protestant Old Testament. You can see these canon lists here.

When we understand this, we can begin to take on some of the major myths surrounding the Biblical canon that persist, particularly among Protestants:

Critics of the Bible in general like to overblow the idea that Christian canonicity was very late in history, and not universal. The truth is that with the death of the Apostles, the Apostolic Writings began to be gathered and read along with the Scriptures of the Tanakh; local bishops determined which books would be read in their congregations, and there were differences—but they were generally minor and not radically diverse, contrary to how the argument is put forward. There has never been any considerable disagreement about the books which serve as the foundation of the Bible. All of the books accepted in the western Jewish Tanakh are also included in the Ethiopian Tanakh as well as in every Christian Old Testament; and all of the books included in the Protestant New Testament are also accepted by all of the other branches of the Christian Church. So, there is universal agreement concerning the 66 books that make up the Protestant canon today: all Jews and all Christians accept the material of the western Tanakh as divinely inspired, and all Christians everywhere accept the 27 books of the Apostolic Writings (New Testament) as divinely inspired. The majority of what is in dispute are the books that are outside the western Tanakh.

The same critics might answer, “But what about the Antilegomena?” In his History of the Church published in 325, Eusebius of Caesarea gave a short description of what he called the Antilegomena, which included the now universally accepted books of James, 2 Peter, 2 & 3 John, Jude, and Revelation (which he admitted “were recognized by many”), along with other books that he specifically rejected, namely The Acts of Paul, The Shepherd of Hermas, The Apocalypse of Peter, the Epistle of Barnabas, The Didache, and The Gospel According to the Hebrews (not the letter of Hebrews, though some claim this). However, he greatly overstated the disputed nature of the universally accepted books in particular, as the vast majority of Christians accepted these books from the beginning. In addition, many of the Church Fathers also included and taught from The Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, and The Shepherd of Hermas. The Apocalypse of Peter was also accepted by a scant minority of Church Fathers, including Clement of Alexandria.

By the time of the regional Third Council of Carthage in 397, no such dispute was in play; all the aforementioned books which are now in the Protestant canon were included as authoritative, and this remained the case for over 1000 years of church history. However, when Luther produced his Bible in 1534 (the New Testament in 1522), he initially wanted to take the books of Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 & 3 John, Jude, and Revelation out of the Bible because he didn’t like their apparent teaching against salvation through grace by faith alone. In particular, he called James ‘an epistle of straw’, and said that he could not see how Revelation was inspired by the Holy Spirit. So he reached all the way back in history to Eusebius and said, “See! These books don’t belong in the Bible,” calling them his Antilegomena. Thankfully, his collaborators on the project got him to soften his animosity toward these books, and so he included them at the very end of his Bible with a preface before each stating his opinions.

It is incredibly interesting to me that the man who coined the term Sola Scriptura is the man who wanted to remove the most books from his Biblical canon. At least the rest of the Protestant Reformers did not share Luther’s disdain, and affirmed the canonicity of these works.

A point of argument that is often used by those claiming that the ‘standard’ Jewish Tanakh has always been as it currently exists is, ironically, the later prologue to the Wisdom of Yeshua ben-Sirach (a.k.a. Sirach), which was added to the book around 132 B.C. This prologue gives us the first hint of an actual canon structure, where the editor of the later version, the grandson of Yeshua ben-Sirach, loosely categorizes the Tanakh—the Torah, the Nevi’im, and the Ketuvim (the Law/Instruction, the Prophets, and the Writings respectively). However, he doesn’t say which books belong to these categories—only that the categories exist, meaning that the ‘extra’ books found in the Septuagint could simply have appeared as part of the Tanakh prior to 90 A.D. when the Pharisees reduced their canon—and this is exactly what we see reflected in the Ethiopian Jewish Tanakh and the Greek Septuagint.

The grandson of Yeshua ben-Sirach also stated that the translations in Greek “do not have the same effect” as the original Hebrew, which lets us know that the Biblical books were in fact originally written in Hebrew; but he did not say that the Greek translations were faulty—just that there were certain passages that didn’t translate well.

Furthermore, in response to Talmudic Jews and Protestants who would say Sirach was never included in the canon because of this prologue, the grandson of Yeshua ben-Sirach said he had found a copy among the Ptolemies of Egypt that ‘required little instruction’, (presumably the Septuagint) and that his hope was others would read his grandfather’s words as part of the existing sacred writings of his people. (Jesus, The Didache, and the Talmud all quote from Sirach as authoritative, so we could reasonably assume that his wish was granted.) Given that the author of the prologue was writing in 132, but found an existing copy of his grandfather’s work, this means the body of Sirach is older.

It was not until 90 A.D. that the Pharisees made the determination on the material that forms the canon of the western Tanakh. All of the other western groups including the Sadducees and the Essenes had been wiped out twenty years earlier with the destruction of the 2nd Temple by the Romans, leaving the Pharisees as the leading party to determine religious practice for the remaining body of western Jews. Because they were upset that the Christians were using the Septuagint to prove that Jesus was the Messiah, the Jewish leadership decided that this ‘Greek Bible’ was no longer any good; they kicked the Messianic believers out of the synagogue, they got rid of those books they believed taught more directly about Jesus as the Messiah, and they commissioned a group of translators (later called the Masoretes) to produce a new Hebrew version of the Bible from existing sources (some of which are now lost; others may have included the oldest Targums, noted earlier).

The Masoretes actually admitted that they changed a small number of passages of the Tanakh: they obscured prophecies related to Jesus as the Messiah, the Watchers narrative, the supremacy of Israel over the nations, and the conflict of Israel with the rest of the nations (the probable reason for them changing the latter two is that they were now in the diaspora among the nations: they didn’t want to invite persecution from those they were living among as a minority community).

Now, it must be stated that the number of passages deliberately changed was small; where the content is shared, the overwhelming majority of verses are identical between the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint, and the differences between the two can often can be chalked up to either scribal mistakes including misspellings, concepts that didn’t translate well from Hebrew to Greek, or words added or changed to clarify a minor point. Very few passages of the Masoretic Text have a meaning that is actually different from the Septuagint in a significant theological way. That said, they do exist…

When Constantine the Great became Emperor of Rome in 312 A.D. and Christianity became the Roman state religion several decades later, the Church began to coalesce around certain books while ignoring others like Jubilees and Enoch (which fell out of favor due to the supernatural aspects of the Watchers narrative). While Jerome later reported that the Book of Judith was found to be canonical at the Council of Nicaea, it’s misinformation that ‘the canon’ was determined there; nothing official was produced along these lines, although with the power of the military state backing those bishops who were in its good graces, European Christianity suddenly got very political.

Two things that did occur during this time were that Constantine the Great commissioned fifty copies of the Bible to be produced in 331 for authorized bishops to study, which contained the Septuagint; Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, two of the surviving ancient copies of the Bible containing the Septuagint, may be two of these copies, as they date from around this time period; also, Jerome produced the Latin Vulgate for Latin speakers in the west around 380 A.D. in accordance with the burgeoning Masoretic Text, which is believed to have been finished around 400 A.D. (see the historical summary section below).

Meanwhile, the Ethiopians were not affected by what was occurring in Jerusalem and the western part of the Roman Empire, as they were isolated geographically and politically from both the western Jewish community and the Western Church—especially after the Council of Chalcedon—and so they had no reason to change their canon; they simply continued to use what they had always been using.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, in my opinion, drive the final nail in the coffin surrounding the myths of Masoretic originality, because many books considered apocryphal or pseudepigraphical by Protestants and western Jews were not only found among the writings of the Qumran community, but were shown to be documents of great reverence and influence on the practices of the community. The dating of all the documents that were found placed these books within the right window of time (oldest around 250 B.C.; latest was around 68 A.D.), and what was fascinating is that the Dead Sea Scrolls gave legitimacy to both the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint in different and very important ways. What do I mean by this?

Well, when the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls was matched up with the Masoretic Text, it was found that the Masoretes did an extraordinary job in preserving the Hebrew—very little variation had occurred…except for those passages that we know were deliberately changed. In these cases, the Dead Sea Scrolls matched with the Septuagint and/or the Samaritan Pentateuch (where applicable) exactly. So each version is corroborated in its own way: many of the books of the Septuagint were found, showing that these were not ‘extra’, and the Orthodox Christians were proven right in that the Septuagint translation was faithful with regard to content; but the Masoretic was faithful with regard to the Hebrew translation.

Contrary to Protestant opinion, Jesus and the other New Testament writers quote many times from the deuterocanonical books; what is often missed is that most are indirect references, and so Protestants don’t like to count them. Some very easy examples are Matthew Chapter 6:19-21 and Sirach Chapter 29:10-13; Wisdom 15:7 and Romans 9:20-21; Matthew 7:12 and Tobit 4:15; Matthew 7:20 and Sirach 27:6; Wisdom Chapter 2 prophesies of the crucifixion, and verses 16-18 mirror Matthew 27:43; Mark 9:48 is the same description of torment as Judith 16:17; Luke 13:29 and Baruch 4:37; 1 Corinthians 10:20 and Baruch 4:7; Wisdom 5:17-20 and Ephesians 6:13-17; Hebrews 11:5 and 2 Maccabees 7:1-42; 2 Peter 2:4 and Jude verse 6 describe the fate of the Watchers spoken of by 1 Enoch 10:1-15 and Jubilees 5:1-7; Jude verses 8-9 quote from The Testament (Assumption) of Moses; Jude verses 14-15 are a direct, word for word quote of 1 Enoch 1:9. There are many, many more quotes and references that I could give. Here is a site that lists some.

What this argument boils down to, like many other issues, is that people repeat what they have been taught; they are biased toward what they already believe, and they don’t want to be proven wrong. In this particular case, many Protestants don’t want to believe that what they have been taught about the canon isn’t exactly accurate, and they want to find good, substantial reasons why they can ignore the deuterocanonical books. So they dismiss any references of influence there might be from these books, and they tend to look for anything they can use to discredit these books as heretical. They call books like 1 Enoch and Jubilees pseudepigraphical, meaning that the author is falsely ascribing authorship to another earlier and more famous Biblical character. However, the standards used to place a work in these categories are highly subjective and applied selectively. We could very easily say that some of the universally accepted books are actually pseudepigraphical in nature.

In the case of 1 Enoch, it may be that some of its content is original, while other parts were added over time; with Jubilees, it appears that the historical content may have been an original form or alternate form of Genesis, while the ‘angelic’ commentary may have been that of a later rabbi from the 2nd Temple period—we don’t know for sure. Similarly, Leviticus and Deuteronomy show evidence that later writers may have edited portions of what they had previously received—this doesn’t mean that the content is unoriginal and spurious. Obviously, Moses could not have written about his own death after he himself had died; this was a later addition by another writer—perhaps Joshua. We simply don’t know; but this doesn’t mean that the bulk of the Torah’s content was unoriginal to Moses and should be discarded.

If we believe that the Holy Spirit guided the minds and hands of the men who wrote the Scriptures, we should accept that He could guide the hands of later unknown editors as well.

Furthermore, what is fascinating is that the books in the other canons don’t affect the overall Protestant message of Scripture any more than the books within the ‘Protestant 66’ contradict each other. It’s just that Protestants don’t give the theological leeway to these books that they provide to their canonical works.

For example, the writings of Paul literally contradict the rest of Scripture concerning the validity of the Torah—the perfect illustration is a comparison of Paul to Matthew 5:17-20, where Jesus says the Torah would not disappear until heaven and earth disappear, and that anyone who sets aside one of the least of the Torah’s commandments is least in the kingdom of heaven; but Paul appears to say in Ephesians 2:15 that Jesus set aside the Torah with its commandments and regulations in His flesh, and in Galatians 5:18 he says that if we are led by the Spirit, we are no longer under the Torah, and indeed, in Galatians 3:11 he says that one who relies on the Torah is under a curse. At face value, these are clearly contradictory messages. But because Paul’s writings are ‘accepted’ books, we dig through the context, asking ourselves how Paul’s words can match up with what Jesus says, rather than just simply dismissing Paul as a heretic. (In my view, the Church has not done a very good job; see my article Paul Misinterpreted? here on the website, or my YouTube video of the same name for more details. I do believe that Paul is an authentic apostle, and that his writings are part of sacred Scripture, BTW.)

The point is that we make allowances and interpret our theology based upon the collective context of Scripture. One can easily do the same thing with the deuterocanonical books included and still find theological cohesion. Furthermore, the really weird traditions of the various Orthodox and Catholic branches (Marian veneration, saint veneration, transubstantiation, Purgatory, icons, the continuation of a professional priesthood in the New Covenant, etc.) are all extra-Biblical inventions—they don’t come out of Scripture, except for some loose, out-of-context application at times. A famous example here is that Protestants don’t like 2 Maccabees 12:42, and therefore say 2 Maccabees must be excluded, because the Catholics teach that the doctrine of Purgatory is proven from this passage, in which the Maccabean soldiers are praying that the idolatrous sins of those who have already died will be forgiven. However, this can easily be explained in that the sins of these people were not yet atoned for by Jesus’ suffering and death; Sheol is now empty of the covenanted dead, because these captives were led out of Sheol and into the presence of God when Jesus rose from the dead (Psalms 68:18, Matthew 27:52, Ephesians 4:8, and Revelation 1:18). One does not have to believe in Purgatory to explain this verse in 2 Maccabees.

Yet, Protestants find no problems with the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Sheol in Luke 16:19-31 and 1 Corinthians 15:29, where Paul speaks of being baptized for the dead, even though the Catholic Church uses these same passages to teach Purgatory. We simply find contextual arguments against this teaching to support our theology.

Even in a few cases where a deuterocanonical passage does have an unresolvable conflict with our theology at face value, there are often explanations: a relevant example is the Prayer of Manasseh, in which Manasseh declares that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob never sinned (in clear violation of Romans 3:23, which states that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God”). There are two explanations for this: the first is that Manasseh lived his whole life as an evil king, only repenting at the very end of his life. He doesn’t have his theology in order. If we accept this argument, then the book is deuterocanonical for the reason that the Prayer of Manasseh is historically reliable (it is the actual prayer that Manasseh prayed at the end of his life), but it is not divinely inspired from a theological point of view.

The second explanation is that he is simply making this statement in comparison to himself—he’s not literally stating that the patriarchs were completely without sin. In either case, Manasseh is speaking off the cuff from the heart and is pleading to God for forgiveness. Protestants don’t give the same allowance to the Prayer of Manasseh that they do to 2 Samuel 22:23-24, where David says, “His laws are clearly known to me, and I have not failed to observe his decrees. I was blameless in his sight, and I kept myself free from sin.”

One thing to note is that even though the Talmudic Jews narrowed their canon, they still currently read from the books of the Maccabees and Judith during Hanukkah; they recognize the Greek portion of Esther and Daniel as tradition; the Talmud quotes several times from books like Sirach and the Wisdom of Solomon; and they teach Jubilees’ account of Abraham’s early days as an idolater in the land of Canaan as true history. The irony is that they have to borrow from the Christian Church to do this, because the Church was the group that preserved these books!

Historical Summary

So here is the history of the canon in summary; other historical facts also impacted this, particularly the events which split Judaism from Christianity, which I have on a timeline here:

Our Official Stance

In order to teach at a Judeo-Christian assembly, one must adhere to the following beliefs about the canon of Scripture:

Why do we land here? We’ve just explored why the Protestant arguments for the complete rejection of the deuterocanonical books are lacking; why do we then accept the Protestant list as our protocanon? On the other hand, why not go further—what keeps us from adding or subtracting whatever books we like? There are a few reasons:

The varying Orthodox and Catholic branches of the Christian Church have canonized books based on their traditional reception by the Church through history; it is only the Protestants who are virulently adamant about ‘the’ canon, taking an ‘all or nothing’ approach. To a degree, this makes sense because of the Protestant doctrine of Sola Scriptura: they were far more concerned about canonicity based upon perceived agreement with Protestant teaching, and less about what was historically canonized. However, one cannot simply strike out books of the Bible that one does not like because of a perceived disagreement with one’s personal theology, as Protestants have done. On the other hand, the varying Orthodox and Catholic branches of the Church have mostly taken the Scriptures as they were received; however, these older branches of the church also believe that the Church has greater authority than the Bible, and so tradition has become the final rule of faith and practice rather than the Scriptures. This is also a mistake: the Church must gain any theological opinion from the Scriptures, taking its whole message into account.

As Judeo-Christians, our approach to the canon is a balance between the Protestant concept and that of the rest of the Church. Having a Prima Scriptura view, we understand the importance that the Scriptures play in forming our doctrine, and to that end, we conversely resist the temptation to shape the Scriptures to fit our doctrinal narrative, as our Protestant brothers have done. Neither do we allow our own thoughts and traditions to rise above what the Scriptures teach, as our Orthodox and Catholic brothers have done. So we agree with the Protestants that the final rule of faith and practice is the Bible; but we must let the Scriptures speak for themselves rather than ignoring messages we do not like, and we must include those works that we have traditionally received from our spiritual ancestors, and which have influenced the Body of Messiah from its Biblically Jewish and Apostolic roots.

Also taken into account is the vast amount of textual evidence for the reliability of the 66 books included in the Protestant canon. It is irrefutable that there has been little change in these documents over time; they have been carefully preserved, and we can have great confidence in their authenticity. The same can be said about some of the deuterocanonical books, but not all.

The product of this approach is that we accept the 66 books of the Protestant Bible as the protocanon of Scripture, being that these 66 books have received universal acceptance within the Body of Christ. However, the complete Judeo-Christian Bible, including both protocanonical and deuterocanonical books, contains 84 books altogether: 55 books in the Tanakh (including 16 deuterocanonicals), and 29 books in the Apostolic Writings (including 2 deuterocanonicals). The full canon list is the last column of the table referenced earlier. This looks very similar to that of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Christian Church, which has 81 books. The main differences between the Ethiopian canon and the Judeo-Christian canon are that:

As for the textual content of the Tanakh: generally speaking, we follow the Dead Sea Scrolls first, followed by the Septuagint for content, then the Masoretic Text for translation. We also evaluate the Samaritan Pentateuch, and the Syriac Peshitta, particularly for difficult passages. What this means is that the Dead Sea Scrolls is our ‘go-to’ variant, as it is most likely the oldest version we have. Beyond this, the core of our translation is Septuagint-based; but we use the more familiar Anglicized Hebrew people- and place-names rather than Greek.

With regard to the Apostolic Writings (‘New Testament’), we take into account all the major textual variants; we include as much of all of their content as possible, and notate significant differences, which are few.

With regard to the deuterocanonical books, we begin with the most qualified source texts available—whether that be the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint, or other manuscripts.

Some Final Thoughts

Critics of the Bible assume that men are driving the process of canonicity and not God. But as worshipers of YHWH, we should understand He has preserved and provided the books that He wanted to be in the Bible; it is men who have argued to reduce it to no avail. In particular, I’m thinking about the books of Jubilees and 1 Enoch: all the other Churches and Jews outside of Ethiopia wanted to get rid of these books for various reasons; but God allowed their whole attempt to be up-ended by one boy who threw a rock into a cave while looking for his goat. This discovery was the greatest treasure trove of Scripture ever found—and center stage in the find at Qumran were the books of Jubilees and 1 Enoch. So now people are reading these and talking about them again, even though most of the Jews and subsequently most of the Church had previously removed them. Even when His own people tried to steer the message to their advantage, God preserved the evidence from the destructive hands of men, and revealed it at just the right time in history to prove the critics wrong.

It is precisely the choice to believe that God is driving the process of canonicity that allows us to understand how the Bible can be divinely inspired in spite of the fallible humanity in the Church. The fact that the Bible’s message stands out with moral clarity above and apart from those who strive to keep its message should lend credibility to its message—not detract from it. It should be reasonably evident that the message of the Bible could only have been written by God and not men; and it has been preserved by God in spite of men.

The List of Deuterocanonical Books

Since many Protestants will not be familiar with the deuterocanonical books, I have included a list of them below with a summary of their content: