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The Jewish Canon and the
Christian Canon
The Hebrew Bible (often
called The Old Testament by Christians) was the
result of many revisions and changes over time. The
concept of a Hebrew canon probably first began to emerge
shortly
after the Babylonian Exile (587 BCE), when the Hebrew
people
were transported against their will away from the Holy
Land. The religious leaders, fearful of growing cultural
contamination, tried to create an official version of
the various scriptures and gather them into one organic
collection. It was probably at this time that
the P
text or Priestly Document
first
emerged
by
combining elements of the J
text and the E
text.
To better understand the
process of canonization, we should first explore other
important religious writings. Then we can follow this
discussion by looking at why some writings "made
the cut" and others did not. I am following Slayden
Yarbrough's organization here from his
lectures and handouts at
Oklahoma Baptist University. Yarbrough is a professor
emeritus and Dickinson Professor of Religion who outlined
the materials appearing below for the Hebrew canon. His
overview is so concise and easy to follow that I
use the same format
and order as he does, but I also add material
from Metzger and Coogan's The Oxford Companion to
the Bible to describe the canonization
of the New Testament and Jaroslav Pelikan's Whose
Bible Is It? A History of the Scriptures Through the
Ages for additional discussion of the Hebrew Bible.
Parts of the Hebrew Bible--specifically
the Torah
and some sections of the Nebhi'im--appear
to have been standardarized by about the year 300 BCE,
as evidenced
by the Dead Sea
Scrolls (Pelikan 46). The
rest was still in flux for 200 years. Sometime around 95
CE, perhaps twenty years after the Romans destroyed
Jerusalem
during the Jewish-Roman War, a council of exiled Jewish
rabbis met in Jamnia (Western Palestine). The leader
of this council was Rabbi Akiba (Pelikan 46). The council
officially "closed" the canon of the Hebrew
Bible, intending for no new works to be added. (In a
moment, we will
compare this to the
way a church council near the end of the 4th century
decided to close the Christian Canon by limiting it to
a set number of books.) Before this time, the Song of
Solomon, and Koheleth (Ecclesiastes) had been
considered doubtful as sources. The council at Jamnia
asserted that
these should be considered "real" scripture.
They formally divided the Hebrew Bible into three sections
as the Torah,
Nebhi'im, and Kethubhi'm, but they apparently
excluded the Old Testament Book of Daniel.
However, many rabbis
could not agree completely about which books should be
in
this canon in
spite of the Jamnian Council.
Some Jewish communities
raised questions over Ezekiel, the Song of Solomon, and
Esther,
for instance. Many Jewish communities accepted some of
these texts, but rejected others. In general, however,
only a few versions of the official cannons were approved
across the ancient world.
The
first is what scholars call The Hebrew Canon or
the
Palestinian Canon (i.e, the one from
Jamnia around 95 CE). This first canon contains 24
books in the Old Testament. It appears as a reaction
to the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE and responds to the
rising Christian movement by "closing of the ranks"
in the Jewish community (Pelikan 47). Christians
later took the 24-book model and altered it--chopping
the collection into
39 books in several ways--such
as cutting Samuel into 1st and 2nd Samuel, or dividing
the book of minor prophets into twelve separate books).
Hebrew scribes prefer
in general to classify the Hebrew Canon into three sections
(1) The Torah (the
Law), (2), the Nebhi'im (the Prophets),
and (3) the Kethubi'im (the
Writings.) A quick chart illustrates
the distinctions here. Protestant Christians divide the
Hebrew Canon instead
into five groupings: Law,
History, Poetry
and
Wisdom,
and
the
Prophets, a quite different schemata.
The Alexandrian
Canon arose in Alexandria,
Egypt, where many Jews resided during
the Greek period (c. 330-30 BCE). It was
probably about this time that the Jewish tradition developed
the idea of an immortal soul. Previously, older books
of the Bible often stressed sheol ("the
grave"),
and did not dwell on a potential afterlife. This material
doctrine reflected a more traditional religious
perspective that persisted even
unto
the time
of Christ, where we still find the Sadducees embracing
the older beliefs. Initially, the Alexandrian Jews accepted
the Torah (Law) and the Prophets. However,
they
gradually expanded
the canon to include fifteen extra writings. Modern
Protestants typically reject these additional
books as
being apocryphal.
The Alexandrian Canon
powerfully influenced the medieval/patristic scholar
Saint Jerome, who in the late fourth and early fifth
century
of this era translated the Greek Septuagint (a Greek
translation of the Hebrew Bible according to the Alexandrian
Canon)
into the Latin Vulgate, adding to it the New Testament.
The Apocrypha
includes fifteen books--1, 2 Esdras; Tobit; Judith; the
additions to the
Book of
Esther; The Wisdom of Solomon; Ecclesiasticus of the
Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach; the Letter of Jeremiah;
the Prayer of Azariah and the song of the Three Young
Men; Susanna; Bel and the Dragon; the Prayer of Manasseh;
and 1, 2 Maccabees. These were a standard parat of the Bible
until Protestant groups rejected them--and this rejection
did not take place until the 16th and 17th
centuries.
Even
editors as late as Martin Luther and the original 1611
King James translation included the Apocrypha, and the
Catholic Church still
retains
them, as witnessed by the contents of any Douay-Rheims
Bible from a Catholic bookstore.
The Pseudepigrapha (Greek,
"false writings") are a collection of writings
composed between 200 BCE and 200 CE. They include a number
of
apocalypses, legendary histories, psalms, and wisdom
writings. Often they are attributed to ancient figures
such as Adam, Moses, Isaiah, and so on. None of these
writings is currently held as canonical by any orthodox
Jews or Christians (though the texts may be reverenced
in the Coptic church and other groups with more unorthodox
beliefs).
The Dead Sea Scrolls:
These writings were discovered in 1947 near Qumran, a
community not far from Jericho located near the Dead
Sea. They contain
fragments and (in some cases) complete scrolls of every
book in the
Old Testament except the
Book of Esther.
Additionally, they contain a number of non-canonical
Jewish writings. Essenes, a separatist Jewish sect, wrote
the Dead Sea Scrolls,
hid
them
in sealed clay jars, and deposited the containers
in
caves
so they would survive the destruction of Qumran when
the Roman army attacked in A. D. 68. (The Romans were
en route to destroy Jerusalem during the Jewish-Roman
War, and stopped briefly to demolish the Essene community.)
With the exception of a short fragment from Proverbs,
the
Dead
Sea Scrolls
are
the
oldest biblical
manuscripts
available as physical artifacts.
The Process of
Canonization:
Yarbrough describes the process of Hebrew (Old Testament)
Canonization as occuring in three stages, but Metzger
and Coogan break
the canonization of early Christian (New Testament)
texts into four stages. Let us deal with the Hebrew
Bible
first.
(1) The Torah (Law),
the first five books of the Old Testament, appeared
as a
collection possibly as early as the Babylonian
captivity. It was probably accepted as authoritative
sometime after
the Babylonian exile, perhaps during the time
of Ezra (5th century BCE). For the Sadducees and the
Samaritans,
the canonization process stopped here. They argued
that none of the later additions to the Hebrew Bible
were
legitimate.
(2) The Prophets,
for the Hebrew editors, existed as a collection
by at least the
second century BCE. The apocryphal book of Ecclesiasticus,
the Wisdom of Jesus, the Son of Sirach, had a prologue
attached to the work. Sirach's grandson probably
did this about 132 BCE. He refers to the "the law
and the prophets" and the "others" or
the "other books." (See
"Prologue," Sirach, RSV Apocrypha,
p. 128). This is the earliest evidence we have
that the first two parts of the Old Testament Canon
had been linked
together and anthologized and that the first half
of the Canon was on its way to becoming accepted
as authoritative.
(3) The Writings are the
third division of the Hebrew Canon. By the time of Jesus
and the early church, we can see the Jews accepted them
as authoritative. Luke 24:44 and Matthew 23:35 contain
statements strongly indicating the authors already had
some vague idea of an authoritative collection--one
covering the range from Genesis to Chronicles, the entire
range
of
Old Testament Scripture. Hence, the Old Testament or
the Hebrew Bible had gained recognition as official by
90 CE, and it would receive official sanction in the
Council of Jamnia.
The New Testament
Tradition,
however, awaited Saint Jerome's loving care and the Council
of Nicea's influence (about 323-325 CE). It took a few
hundred years to finalize. The four stages are roughly
as follows according to Metzger and Coogan's The
Oxford Companion to the Bible (pages 101-04):
(1) During
the first phase (c. 90 CE-96 CE), the young Christian
church discovered
that Christ had not yet returned as predicted,
but the generation of the apostles and those who had
directly
encountered Christ was rapidly dying out. Originally,
knowledge of Christ had been transmitted orally. At
this point,
the church fathers wrote down the early Gospels
and preserved the Pauline letters as ways to give
pastoral guidance to new churches. The writers (who
still expected
Christ's return any day) probably did not imagine
that their writings would be part of a future
"canon," and
they probably did not seek to normalize or standardize
any of their texts
against other
versions.
The Gospel
of
Mark was probably written
first. Scholars date it most commonly to circa 70
CE--the year year Titus and his Roman armies
destroyed
Jerusalem.
Mark is generally (though not universally) thought
to be the oldest of the Gospels, with the others appearing
in
later
decades
after the
year 90-150 CE, about sixty to a hundred-twenty
years after Jesus' crucifixion.
(2) From
96 CE until about 150 CE, the written gospels gradually
replace the oral traditions. Initially, early Christians
relied on oral tradition alongside (and even
in preference to)
the written Gospels,
but as the
reliability of the former declined, the four
Gospels replaced them. In 1 Clement, the Didache, Ignatius,
and
Papias, we read of how "the living voice" (as
Papias calls it) of the oral tradition
is superior to that of
the written word. As late as the 350s, many church
fathers still opposed writing down the Gospel
stories. For instance, Bishop Cyril of Jerusalem
told his flock, "This summary I wish you
both to commit to memory when I recite it, and
to
rehearse it with all dilligence among yourselves, not
writing it out on paper, but engraving it
by the memory of your heart" (quoted in
Pelikan 18, italics his). However, in Polycarp's
letter
to the Philippians (c. 135
CE), for the
first
time we see the
argument made that the Gospel texts are more
reliable than word of mouth, and more to be trusted.
In 2 Clement
(c. 140 CE), twice as many quotations come from
the written Gospels than from any other source.
It is clear, however,
that many of the oral traditions and alternative written
accounts once existed.
It is also clear that the early church treated
them at least as respectfully as the texts
that survived to the modern day. For instance, in Saint
Paul's letter to the elders of the church in Ephesus,
as recorded in Acts 20:35, Saint Paul warns, "we should
keep in mind the words of the Lord Jesus, who himself
said,
'Happiness lies more in giving than in receiving.'"
The question then becomes, when or where did Christ
say this? If dutiful students search the rest of the
Bible
for this quotation, they will not find it in any of
the Gospels--not even Luke or John--but Saint Paul
quotes this lost version of the Gospel narratives (either
written or oral), and he is apparently confident
his audience will recognize his quotation and acknowledge
it as authoritative. That strongly indicates the
early church relied on some scriptures or traditions
later lost to the ravages of time.
We see a similar phenomenon
in the account of Judas' death. In Matthew 27:5, we
read how Judas hangs himself after betraying
Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. However, in Acts 1:18,
Saint Paul recounts that Judas stumbled in Akeldema,
fell, and "burst
open in the middle and all his entrails gushed out." Some
Christians seek to harmonize the two accounts by arguing
that Judas either (1) fell to his death after a failed
suicide attempt, i.e., that he flung himself off a cliff
or tree
with a nose around his neck, and the rope broke, so he
fell and his body ruptured, or (2) that he successfully
hanged himself and later on his dead body somehow fell
and split open.
That explantion seems
unlikely given that both the Greek and
later the
Latin Vulgate grammar--through verb tense and case--suggest
in the first account the death occurs instrumentally,
i.e., through the means of hanging,
and
it occurs instrumentally
through a fall
in the second account. Instead, most biblical scholars
see
this apparent
discrepancy
as indicating two different
textual
traditions competing
during the period of "canon wars." What is their evidence?
Other early Christian writers.
For example, Bishop
Papias of Hierapolis, was a "hearer" of Saint
John. He lived c. 125 CE, and he also discusses Judas'
death. He
refers to Judas' "ruptured
entrails" as
part of a gruesome traffic accident in which Judas
falls beneath
a chariot when he is too fat to avoid it. He makes
no mention of hanging as he describe's Judas fall
beneath a chariot's wheels: "Judas
walked about in this world a sad example of impiety;
for his body having swollen
to such an extent that he could not pass where a chariot
could pass easily, he was crushed by the chariot, so
that his bowels gushed out" (Papias,
Fragment III, lines 1742-44). Given the close similarity
in wording
when it comes to the ruptured entrails, scholars find
it simpler to assert that Saint Paul and
Papias
were
familiar
with
the "fall-and-get-crushed-until-your-guts-pop-out" tradition
of Judas' death that was still in circulation as late
as 125 CE, and that was what Paul alludes to in Acts
1:18, while Matthew knew and alluded to a different
tradition that focused on death-by-hanging.
In any case, after 150
CE, the written Gospels have clearly become predominant
over word-of-mouth transmission. By the time of the
Apocryphal Gospel of Truth, the author clearly
knows all four of the Orthodox Gospels, but
only uncertain, faded remnants persist of alternative
oral traditions. About this
time, the Pauline correspondence begins to
appear
in a collected form rather than as scattered,
independent
letters. The fact that these texts all have
Paul's name attached to them by tradition help them
survive as a group when anonymous texts tend to fall
by the wayside.
(3) From
150 CE to 190 CE, the canon wars begin in earnest.
The earliest attempt
at a canonical collection (or at least the first
writer to actually visualize the idea of a New Testament
collection
to match the canonicity of the old Testament)
actually comes from a heretical author. The Gnostic
Christian,
Marcion, creates an "official" canon.
This new Bible deliberately excludes the Old
Testament, and the New
Testament is limited to Luke and ten Pauline
letters (from which Marcion removed certain Jewish
traits). In reaction,
the orthodox church emphasized the normative
qualities of all four Gospels and all thirteen
letters ascribed
to Paul, but their version did not include the
writings of John of Patmos (i.e., they did not
include Revelation as canonical). Bishop Irenaeus
reflects this stance in his writings by excluding
Revelation, but he broadens
his idea
of
the Canon to include all of the other current
New Testament books
and he also includes the Wisdom of Hermas as
an additional text. Irenaeus also reacts positively
to 1 Clement and
the Wisdom of Solomon, but it is not clear if
he regarded them as "holy scripture." Clearly,
the idea of the canon has appeared, but the church
cannot yet agree
as to what parts should go into this canon. What
is holy scripture? What is not? A broad base
of consensus exists
for a core collection (Luke, certain Pauline
epistles), but the peripheral works remain contested.
(4) The
period from about 190-400 CE is the time Andrie Du
Tott calls "The
Closing of the Canon." During these centuries,
many heretical groups had prophets who declared
they had received new
revelations from God. The Montanists, in particular,
called for a clear limitation of the canon since
their sect stressed apocalyptic and prophetic
movements. Origin
and Eusebius in the Eastern church and an anonymous
author of the Canon of Muratori together argued
that the scriptures
should be classed into the three groups (1) the
texts nearly all Christians accept, (2) the uncertain
texts about which
Christians are mostly undecided, and (3)
works that should definitely be excluded because
only small,
isolated groups of often heretical Christians
hold them to be scripture.
It is during this time
that readers appear to start thinking of the "Bible"
as a single work. Note that the title Biblia in
Greek is originally neuter plural, meaning "little
books." That very title harkens back to the older
time period when Christians thought of their text as the
scriptures (plural--multiple independent entities)
rather than the
scripture (singular--one unified entity).
In particular, many Eastern
churches questioned the status of Revelation as the
one prophetic-apocalyptic
book in the canon. (They disapproved of it primarily
because heretical Montanists embraced it so fervently
rather than for any particular point about its content
or any textual evidence.) In the same way, in the Western
church, anti-Montanist
sentiment
reacted against the book of Hebrews because of passages
found in Hebrews 6:4-6. Accordingly, mainstream Christianity
rejected the book of Hebrews, accordingly, until the
fourth century.
Uncertainty persisted also in some quarters regarding
the Didache, the Shepherd of Hermas, and the Wisdom
of Solomon, which a significant number of churches considered
important.
In the East, Saint Athanasius,
a well-respected and powerful figure in the church
hierarchy, wrote the thirty-ninth Paschal Letter in which
he instructed
pastors under his metropolitan supervision concerning
which scriptures to teach. His choice of texts was powerfully
influential, and gradually it
became
widely approved in the East. This Athanasian canon included
all the books
of the present New Testament and also
the Hermas, the Didache, and the Wisdom of Solomon, and
certain Old Testament Apocrypha. His canon
was possibly approved at the Synod of Rome in 382 and
papal
declaration made it official in the year 405--but
the historical evidence here is a bit murky. Saint Augustine,
that powerhouse and dynamo of the patristic
period, influenced
the North African Church to accept these standards
at the Synods of Hippo Regius (393 CE) and Carthage (397).
Unfortunately, persistent squabbles over the
adoption of Hebrews, James, and Jude forced the church
at
Carthage
to reiterate and reinforce its decision again in
419, given the uncertainty of the later texts and the
degree of local resistance.
The standards set here
gained almost universal Christian acceptance in later
centuries. Some exceptions included, as Du Tott notes,
the Syrian Church, the Nestorian Church, and the
Ethiopian Church, where there was strong local rejection
of the
general epistles
and
to the book of Revelation and the Christian tradition
tended toward Coptic and Gnostic beliefs. In the
case of the Syrian Church, the church rejected the four
Gospels in favor of the Diatessaron of
Tatian.
This
work
was
a second-century harmonization of the Gospels designed
to remove inconsistencies
between the Gospel accounts--especially minor matters
like what color Christ's robe was before the crucifixion,
or the various responses Christ gives in the Gospels
when the crowd demands a sign, or what Christ's
last words were on the cross. The Ethiopic Church also
included the Gospel of Hermas, the
two
Clementine epistles, and the Apostolic Constitutions,
which are
left out of most modern Protestant bibles.
The clincher was Saint
Jerome and his translation of the Vulgate Bible.
The work was enormously popular because an increasing
number
of Christians spoke only Latin in the west--not Greek.
When Jerome decided to exclude works like the
Gospel of Thomas or the Shepherd of Hermas in his anthology,
leaving them untranslated, it tolled an ecclesiastical
death knell for the spurned texts. They were doomed
to obscurity in future decades.
Other Tinkerings:
The above process covers canonization for the most
part. Some medieval groups argued for the addition of
one obscure
text or the removal of another, but such small heretical
movements gathered little speed against the inertia
of the canon. By the Protestant
Reformation, many Christians completely rejected the
Apocrypha. This
is why modern Protestant bibles lack 1st and 2nd
Maccabees
and similar texts still found in Catholic bibles.
Interestingly, Martin Luther also rejected the book of
James, calling
it "a right strawy epistle." He felt that
it did not emphasize faith in Christ sufficiently
as the sole basis
of salvation, and he found its emphasis on works
to be suspiciously Jewish and Catholic since it contradicted
his Protestant doctrine of "salvation by faith
alone." Regardless
of Luther's statements, the mainstream Protestant
churches
refused
to excise this text from the canon.
Groups like the
Latter-Day-Saints also advocate expanding the canon.
For instance, Mormons consider The
Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ to
be additional sacred books overlooked
by other Christian sects. It is unlikely in the
near future that the canon will be further altered,
however,
due to four reasons: (1) the inertia of mass-produced
texts (2) their general acceptance in modern day
Christianity, (3) the rise of
literalist readings of the Bible appearing in Harvard
Seminary in the late nineteenth-century, and (4) the
publication in America of The Fundamentals (1910-1915).
This influential series of writings started the
new-fangled American Fundamentalist movement, which
departed
from traditional "fourfold
theories of interpretation"
and argued for literal readings of scripture
and biblical inerrancy. This belief in inerrant,
perfect accuracy excludes the possibility of addition
or
excision of any texts, and its advocates typically
argue that the current edition or translation has
reached perfection through divine intervention in
the editorial
process
over many centuries, or else they dismiss the process
of earlier revisions as irrelevant.
Works Cited:
-
Metzger,
Bruce M. and Michel D. Coogan. The Oxford Companion
to the Bible. Oxford, Oxford U P, 1993.
-
Pelikan,
Jaroslav. Whose
Bible Is It?: A History of the Scriptures
Through the Ages. New York: Penguin Books,
2005.
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