The Canon of the Old Testament

I. Canon of the Old Testament

The way the word canon has been applied to Scripture has long had a special and sacred meaning. In its broadest sense it means the authorized list or the defined number of writings composed under divine inspiration and intended for the well-being of the Church, using this last word in the broad sense of the theocratic society that began with God’s revelation of himself to the people of Israel and that finds its maturity and perfection in the Catholic body. The total biblical canon, therefore, consists of the Old and New Testaments. The Greek word kanon primarily means a reed or measuring stick. By analogy that word was used by ancient writers, both secular and religious, to denote a rule or measure. We find the first application of the noun in Sacred Scripture, made by Saint Athanasius, in the 4th century. Because of its derivations, the Council of The Laodicea, in the same period, speaks of kanonika biblia. Athanasius uses the words biblia kanonizomena. The last phrase proves that the passive sense ofcanon—a defined and regulated collection—was already in use then and that it is that connotation of the word that has prevailed in ecclesiastical literature.

The terms protocanonicaland deuterocanonical, frequently used among Catholic theologians and exegetes, call for a word of caution. These words are not gratuitous nor can it be inferred from them that the Church has possessed two different biblical canons successively. We can only speak of a first and a second canon in a partial and restricted way. “Protocanonical” (from protos, first) is a conventional word that indicates those writings that have always been accepted without discussion. for Christianity. The protocanonical books of the Old Testament correspond to those of the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament recognized by Protestants. The deuterocanonical (deuteros, second) are those whose authenticity was debated for some reason, but which have long since gained a secure place in the Bible of the Catholic Church, although Protestants consider “apocryphal” those that were included in the Old Testament. Those books are seven: Tobias, Judithhhh, Baruch, Sirach, Wisdom, I and II of Maccabees. Also some additions to the books of Esther and Daniel.

It should be noted that protocanonical and deuterocanonical are modern terms that were not used until the 16th century. Since they are very long words, the last of them (most frequently used) will be abbreviated in its deutero form in this work. The object of an article regarding the sacred canon can now be seen conveniently limited to the process of

what can be stated about the process of collecting sacred writings in such bodies or groups that, from their very beginning, have been the object of a certain degree of veneration;

the circumstances and ways in which such compilations were canonized or judged to have a uniquely divine and authoritative quality;

the vicissitudes that certain compositions suffered in the opinion of people or localities before their scriptural character was universally established.

In this way we can conclude that canonicity is something correlative to inspiration, constituting the extrinsic dignity that belongs to writings that have been officially declared to have divine origin and authority. It is very likely that each book became part of a sacred collection and achieved a canonical position according to the early or late date in which it was written. From there come the traditionalist or critical appraisals (without implying that traditionalists cannot be critical) regarding the parallelism of the canon, which are also influenced by their respective hypotheses about the origin of the elements that compose it.

A. The canon of Palestinian Jews

(The protocanonical books)

It has already been hinted that there is a minor, or incomplete, Old Testament, and a major, or complete, Old Testament. Both were passed down to us from the Jews. The first, for the Palestinian Jews; the second, by the Alexandrians or Hellenists.

The current Jewish Bible is composed of three divisions, whose combined titles form the full name of the scriptures of Judaism: Hat-Torah, Nebiim, wa-Kethubim, that is, the Law, the Prophets and the Writings. This is a very old triad; It is believed to have been established long ago in the Mishnah, or Jewish code of unwritten sacred laws, and was finally written around 200 AD. A similar grouping is mentioned in the words of Christ himself in the New Testament, in Luke. 24,44: “All things that were spoken concerning me must be fulfilled, which are written in the Law of Moses, in the Prophets and in the Psalms.” If we go to the prologue of Ecclesiasticus, which was set in it around the year 132 BC, we find that “the Law, the Prophets and others who have succeeded them” are mentioned. The Torah, or law, consists of the five Mosaic books: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The Prophets were subdivided by the Jews into Earlier Prophets (i.e. the prophetic-historical books: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, [Kings I and II], and Kings [Kings III and IV], and Later Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the twelve minor prophets, which the Hebrews count as a single book). The Writings, better known by a title borrowed from the Greek Fathers, Hagiographa (sacred writings), encompass all the remaining books of the Hebrew Bible. Named in the order in which they appear in the current Hebrew text, they are: Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, or Ezra II, Paralipomenon.

Traditional position of the canon of Palestinian Jews.

Proto-canon.

Contrary to the more recent views of some scholars, conservatives do not admit that the Prophets and the Hagiographa represent two successive stages in the formation of the Palestinian canon. According to the old school, the guiding principle of the separation between the Prophets and the Hagiographa was not of a chronological nature, but something found in the very nature of the respective sacred compositions. This literature was grouped in the Kéthubim, or Hagiographa, none of which was a direct production of the prophetic order, that is, of the characters included in the Later Prophets, nor did it contain the history of Israel interpreted by the master prophets themselves: narratives classified as Previous Prophets. The prophet Daniel was relegated to the Hagiographa as if he were only a work of the gift of prophecy, but not as the work of the permanent office of prophet. The same conservative scholars of the canon – today with little representation outside the Church – defend, regarding the inclusion in Israelite literature of the documents that make up these groups, dates much earlier than those generally accepted by critics. For them, the practical, not formal, completion of the Palestinian canon is located in the era of Ezra (Ezra) and Nehemiah, in the middle of the 5th century BC. C., although on the other hand, always faithful to the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, they insist that the canonization of the five books occurred shortly after their composition.

Since traditionalists infer Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch from other sources, they can find evidence of an earlier collection of these books in Deuteronomy 31:9-13, 24-26, which deals with a certain book of the law, given by Moses to the priests with the command to keep it in the Ark and read it to the people at the Feast of Tabernacles. But the effort to identify this book with the entire Pentateuch does not convince those who oppose Mosaic authorship.

The rest of the Palestinian-Jewish canon

Without being entirely sure about the issue, those who advocate ancient positions consider it very possible that several additions were made to the sacred repertoire in the period from the canonization of the Mosaic Torah, described above, to the exile (598 BC). For this they cite, especially, Isaiah, 34,16; II Paralipomena, 29.1; Daniel, 9,2. Regarding the period following the Babylonian exile, conservatives argue more confidently. This is an era of construction, a watershed in the history of Israel. The completion of the Jewish canon, through the addition of the Prophets and the Hagiographa as bodies of the Law, is attributed to conservatives such as Ezra, the priest-scribe and religious leader of that period, supported by Nehemiah, the civil governor, or at least to the school of scribes founded by the former. (Cf. II Esdras, 8-10; II Maccabees, 2, 13, in the Greek original). The formulation made by Ezra of the Hebrew Bible is much more clearly favored by the famous passage by Josephus, “Against Apionem”, I, 8, in which the Jewish historian, writing in the year 100 AD. C., establishes his conviction, and that of his coreligionists – probably based on tradition – that the writings of the Palestinian Hebrews formed a closed and sacred collection dating from the days of the Persian king Artaxerxes Longiamanus (465-425 BC), a contemporary of Ezra. Josephus is the oldest writer who numbers the books of the Jewish Bible. Its current order contains 40; Josephus artificially arrived at 22, to match the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet, through combinations partially taken from the Septuagint. Conservative exegetes found a confirmatory argument in a statement from the apocryphal book IV of Ezra (XIV, 18-47), under whose legendary cover they see a historical truth. They see yet another in a reference found in the Baba Bathra text of the Babylonian Talmud to the hagiographic activity of the “men of the Great Synagogue,” and of Ezra and Nehemiah.

But Catholic writers who admit an Esdraian canon are far from admitting that Ezra and his colleagues intended to close the sacred library to prevent any future interference. The Spirit of God could, and did, breathe into later writings, and the presence of the Deutero books in the Church canon responds to the Protestant theologians of the previous generation, who asserted that Ezra was a divine agent chosen to determine and inviolably seal the Old Testament. At least on this point Catholic writers differ from the direction of Josephus’s testimony. And although there is what could be called a consensus among Catholic exegetes of the conservative type about the Esdrian or quasi-Sdrian formulation of the canon to the extent that the existing material permitted, it is not a total agreement. Kaulen and Danko, postulating a later compilation, are the exceptions among the aforementioned scholars.

Critical visions of the formation of the Palestinian canon.

The Law, the Prophets and the Hagiographa, its three constituent bodies, represent a degree of growth and correspond to three more or less extensive periods. The Hagiographa are separated from the Prophets for purely chronological reasons. The only division indicated for intrinsic reasons is the legal element of the Old Testament, that is, the Pentateuch.

The Torah, or Law

Critical exegetes say that until the reign of Josiah and the epoch-making discovery of the “book of the Law” in the temple (621 BC), there was no written legal codex in Israel, nor any other work that was universally recognized as coming from the supreme divine authority. That “book of the Law” was practically identical to Deuteronomy, and its recognition and canonization consisted of the solemn covenant made by Josiah and the people of Judah, as described in the IV book of Kings, 23. It was demonstrated by the negative evidence of the previous prophets and by the absence of factors due to the religious reform decided by Exekiah (Hezekiah), that no sacred written Torah was previously known in Israel, while this one did constitute the main driving force of the reform carried out by Josiah. Finally, this was also demonstrated by the surprise and dismay of this last ruler upon finding such a work. This argument, in fact, is the pivot of the current system of criticism of the Pentateuch. Furthermore, the topic will be developed in greater detail in the article referring to the Pentateuch. As will also be the thesis that attacks Mosaic authorship and the promulgation of that last book in its entirety. The publication of the entire Mosaic code, according to the dominant hypothesis, did not occur until the days of Ezra, and is narrated in chapters VIII-X of the second book that bears that name. In that context, the argument from the Samaritan Pentateuch must be mentioned to establish that the Sdrian canon did not adopt anything outside the Hexateuch, i.e., the PentateuchplusJoshua. (See PENTATEUCH; SAMARITANS.)

The Nebiim or Prophets

There is no way to directly clarify the time or manner in which the second stage of the Hebrew Canon was completed. The creation of the aforementioned Samaritan Canon (c. 432 BC) may provide a terminus a quo. Perhaps a better reference point is the date of the prophecy’s termination near the end of the fifth century BC. For the other terminus the lower date is that of the prologue of Ecclesiasticus (c. 123 BC), which speaks of the “Law” and the “Prophets and the others who have followed them.” But compare the same Sirach, chapters 46-49 for an earlier date.

The Kéthubim, or Hagiographa, complete the Jewish Canon.

The opinions of critics regarding its date of writing vary from the year 165 BC. to the middle of the second century AD (Wildeboer). The Catholic scholars Jahn, Movers, Nickes, Danko, Haneberg, Aicher, without sharing the opinions of the more advanced exegetes, consider that the Hebrew Hagiographa were not definitively finished until after Christ. It is indisputable that the sacred character of certain parts of the Palestinian Bible (Esther, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs) was still questioned by some rabbis as late as the second century of the Christian era (Mishna, Yadaim, III,5; Babylonian Talmud, Megilla, fol. 7). Despite the differences in dates, critics agree that the distinction between the Hagiographa and the Prophetic Canon is essentially chronological. It is because the Prophets had already formed a closed collection to which Ruth, Lamentations and Daniel did not have access, although they naturally belonged to them and, consequently, they had to accept a place in the newest formation, the Kéthubim.

The Protocanonical Books and the New Testament

The absence of quotations from Esther, Ecclesiastes and Canticle can reasonably be explained by their little usefulness for the purposes of the New Testament, and is further justified by the absence of the two books of Ezra. Obadiah, Nahum, and Zephaniah, although not directly honored, were included in the quotations of the other minor prophets thanks to the traditional unity of that collection. On the other hand, very frequent terms such as “the Scripture”, the “Scriptures”, “the Holy Scriptures”, applied in the New Testament to other sacred writings, could make us think that these already formed a fixed collection. But, for its part, the reference in Saint Luke to “the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms”, although it demonstrates the fixation of the Torah and the Prophets as sacred groups, does not guarantee the same fixation for the third division, the Judeo-Palestinian Hagiographa. If, as appears to be the truth, the exact content of the comprehensive catalog of Old Testament Scriptures (which encompassed the books of Deutero) cannot be established from the New Testament, there is no a fortiori reason to expect that it would reflect the extent of the smaller Jewish canon. We are sure that all the Hagiographa were at some point, before the death of the last apostle, divinely given to the Church as sacred writings. Of course we know this as a truth of faith, by theological deduction, not by the documentary evidence of the New Testament. This fact has force against the Protestant position that affirms that Jesus approved and transmitted in pad the already previously defined Bible of the Palestinian synagogue.

Authors and standards of canonicity among Jews

Although the Old Testament does not reveal any formal notion of inspiration, the Jews of later times must at least have possessed a similar idea (cf. II Tim, 3,16; II Pet. 1,21). The case is mentioned in which a Talmudic doctor distinguished between a composition “delivered by the wisdom of the Holy Spirit” and another, presumably created by simple human wisdom. But regarding our clear concept of canonicity we must say that it is a modern concept, for which not even the Talmud has any evidence. In order to define a book that had no recognized place in the divine library, the rabbis spoke of it as “spots on the hands,” a very curious technical term perhaps coming from the desire to prevent any profane touching of the sacred scroll. However, although the formal idea of canonicity did not exist among the Jews, the fact did exist. As to the source of canonicity among the ancient Hebrews, we are forced to assume an analogy. There are both psychological and historical reasons for rejecting the assumption that the Old Testament canon arose spontaneously from a kind of public recognition of the inspired books. True, it seems reasonable to think that the prophetic office in Israel had its own credentials, and that these extended largely to their written compositions. The problem is that there were many pseudo prophets in the country, which made it necessary for there to be some authority to separate genuine prophetic writings from false ones. In the same way, a final tribunal was necessary to put its seal on the extremely varied and confusing literature included in the Hagiographa. Jewish tradition, as described by the aforementioned Josephus, Baba Bathra and the data of the pseudo-Ezra, indicates the existence of an authority that functioned as the final arbiter of what was scriptural and what was not. The so-called Council of Jamnia (c. 90 AD) is said to have already resolved the dispute between rival rabbinic schools over the canonicity of the Canticle. So, while intuition and the increasingly reverent awareness of the faith element of Israel could and probably did give a general impetus and direction to authority, we must conclude that it was the voice of official authority that really set the boundaries of the Hebrew canon, and here, speaking very generally, conservative and advanced exegetes found common ground. Whatever it may have been in the case of the Prophets, the evidence overwhelmingly favors a later period for the case of the closure of the Hagiographa. A period in which the body of scribes dominated Judaism, sitting on the “chair of Moses”, and alone held the authority and prestige of such activity. The term “body of scribes” has been used cautiously, under serious suspicion and sometimes outright rejection by contemporary scholars, to denote the “Great Synagogue” of rabbinic tradition, but this matter falls outside the jurisdiction of the St.hedrin. The key to discriminating canonical from non-canonical works was influenced by the Law of the Pentateuch. This was always the canonpar excellenceof the Israelites. For the Jews of the Middle Ages, the Torah was the most intimate sanctuary, the Holy of Holies, while the Prophets were the Holy Place and the Kéthubim constituted only the outer courtyard of the biblical temple, and this medieval conception found its foundation in the preeminence that the rabbis of the Talmudic era gave to the Law. Since the time of Ezra, the Law, as it was the oldest part of the canon and the formal expression of the commands of God, received the highest degree of veneration. The Kabbalists of the second century after Christ, and other later schools, saw in the other part of the Old Testament a mere expansion and interpretation of the Pentateuch. Therefore we can be sure that the greatest proof of canonicity, at least in the case of the Hagiographa, was its conformity with the canon par excellence, the Pentateuch. It is also evident that no book that had not been composed in Hebrew, and that did not possess the characteristics of antiquity and prestige of the classical age, or at least some renown, was not admitted. Such criteria are negative and exclusive, rather than directive. The push of religious sentiment and liturgical use must have been the decisive factor in the decision. But the negative criteria were partially arbitrary and simple intuition cannot be definitive proof of divine certification. It was not until much later that the infallible Voice spoke, and it was to declare that the synagogue canon, while unadulterated, was incomplete.

B. The canon among the Jews of Alexandria

(The deuterocanonical books)

The most notable difference between the Catholic and Protestant Bibles is the presence in the former of certain writings that are missing both in this and in the Hebrew Bible, which became the Old Testament of Protestantism. These writings are seven: Tobias, Judithhhh, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, I and II of Maccabees and three documents added to the protocanonical books. These are: the supplement of Esther, from verse 4 of chapter 10 to the end, the Song of the Three Young Men in Daniel, 3, and the stories of Susanna and the elders and of Bel and the dragon, which form the final chapters of the Catholic version of that book. Of those works, Tobit and Judithhhh were originally written in Aramaic, perhaps Hebrew; Baruch and Maccabees I, in Hebrew; Wisdom and Maccabees II were definitely composed in Greek. The odds favor Hebrew as the original language of Esther’s addition, and Greek as the language of Daniel’s addition.

The old Greek Old Testament known as the Septuagint was the vehicle that brought those additional scriptures to the Catholic Church. The Septuagint was the Bible of the Greek-speaking Jews, or Hellenists, whose literary and intellectual center was in Alexandria (see SEVENTY). Among the existing copies of that version, the oldest date from the 4th and 5th centuries AD, which tells us that they were made by Christian hands. However, researchers generally admit that such copies faithfully represent the Old Testament as it was known among the Hellenists or Alexandrian Jews of the era immediately before Christ. The venerable manuscripts of the Seventy vary somewhat with respect to the Palestinian canon, thereby showing that in the circle of the Alexandrian Jews the admissible number of extra books was not specifically determined by tradition or authority. While the Maccabees are absent from the Codex Vaticanus (the oldest copy of the Greek Old Testament), all of the entire manuscripts contain all of the deutero writings. Where the manuscripts of the Septuagint show differences from each other, with the exception already mentioned, is in certain excesses that go beyond the deutero books. It is still significant that in all the Alexandrian Bibles the traditional Hebrew order is broken by the insertion of additional literature among the other books, illegally, thus ensuring the extra writings an important equality of rank and privilege. It is worth asking about the motives that led the Hellenistic Jews to canonize, virtually at least, this considerable amount of literature. Some of it is very recent and is very radically separated from the Palestinian canon. Some believe that it was not the Alexandrians but the Palestinians who separated from the biblical tradition. The Catholic writers Nickes, Movers, Danko and, more recently, Kaulen and Mullen, have defended the position that originally the Jewish canon contained all the deuterocanonical books and that it remained so until the time of the apostles (Kaulen, c. 100 AD) when, in consequence of the Septuagint having become the Old Testament of the Church, it was banned by the scribes of Jerusalem, moved by their hostility to Hellenistic largesse (according to Kaulen, especially) and for the Greek redaction of our deuterocanonical books. These exegetes give much emphasis to Saint Justin Martyr’s statement that the Jews had mutilated the Holy Scripture. Such a claim does not rest on positive evidence. They argue that certain Deutero books have always been cited by Palestinian and Babylonian doctors with veneration and even as if they were part of the Scriptures. But the particular assertions of some rabbis cannot outweigh the constant Hebrew tradition of the canon, attested by Josephus – although he leaned towards Hellenism – and by the Jewish-Alexandrian author of the IV book of Ezra. We are forced to admit that the leaders of Alexandrian Judaism showed a clear independence from the tradition and authority of Jerusalem by allowing the breaking of the sacred limits of the canon, already fixed by the Prophets, by inserting an expanded book of Daniel and the epistle of Baruch. If it is assumed that the boundaries of the Palestinian Hagiographa remained undefined until a relatively late date, then there was much less innovation in adding the other books, but the elimination of the lines of the triple division reveals that the Hellenists were prepared to expand the Hebrew canon or to create a new one themselves.

These innovations can be humanly explained by the free spirit of the Hellenistic Jews. Under the influence of Greek thought they had conceived a much broader vision of divine inspiration than their Palestinian brothers and refused to restrict the literary manifestations of the Holy Spirit to a time limit and to the Hebrew form of language. The Book of Wisdom, decidedly Hellenistic in its character, presents us with a divine Wisdom that flows from generation to generation sanctifying souls and prophets. (7:27, in its Greek version). Philo, a typically Judeo-Alexandrian thinker, even has an exaggerated notion of the diffusion of inspiration (Quis rerum divinarum hæres, 52; ed. Lips., III, 57; De migratione Abrahæ, 11,299; ed. Lips. II, 334). But even Philo, although he denotes a certain familiarity with Deutero literature, never cites it in his voluminous writings. It is true that there are several books of the Hebrew canon that he does not use, but it can be naturally assumed that if he had considered the additional works as if they were on the same level as the others, he would not have failed to cite a work as stimulating and pleasant as the Book of Wisdom. Not only that, but, as several authorities on the matter have noted, the independent spirit of the Hellenists could not have gone so far as to establish an official canon different from that of Jerusalem without leaving a trace of it in history. So, from the data we have, we can fairly conclude that although the deuterocanonical books were accepted as sacred books by the Alexandrian Jews, they always had a lower degree of sanctity and authority than those that had been accepted before, i.e., the Hagiographa and the Palestinian prophets, which were lower, in turn, than the Law.

II. The canon of the Old Testament in the Catholic Church

The most explicit definition of the Catholic canon is that given by the Council of Trent, in its IV session, in 1546. Its catalog of the Old Testament is as follows:

The five books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy), Joshua, Judges, Ruth, the four books of Kings, two of the Paralipomena, Ezra I and II (later called Nehemiah), Tobias, Judithhhh, Esther, Job, the psalter of David (which has 150 psalms), Proverbs, Esclesiates, The Song of the Song of Solomon, Wisdom, Sirach, Isaiah, Jeremiah, with Baruch, Ezekiel, Daniel, the twelve minor prophets (Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi), two books of the Maccabees, I and II.

The order of the books follows that of the Council of Florence, 1442, and the general plan of the Seventy. The divergence of the titles from those found in the Protestant versions is due to the fact that the official Latin Vulgate retained the forms of the Septuagint.

A. The Old Testament canon (Including the Deuteros) in the New Testament

The Tridentine decrees from which the list mentioned above was obtained constituted the first infallible and effective pronouncement of the canon addressed to the universal Church that was promulgated. Being dogmatic in nature, it implies that the apostles transmitted the same canon to the Church as part of thedepositum fidei. But this was not carried out by making a formal decision. It will be in vain to look for a sign of such an action in the pages of the New Testament. The broad canon of the Old Testament passed tacitly through the hands of the apostles to the Church based on its use and the general attitude of the faithful towards its components. It was an attitude that is revealed in the New Testament, in the case of most of the sacred writings of the Old Testament, and in the case of the rest, it must have manifested itself in oral expressions or in the tacit approval of the special reverence of the faithful. If we reflect on the state in which we find the books of Deutero in the earliest stages of post-apostolic Christianity, it can be correctly stated that such a state of affairs suggests apostolic approval which, in turn, must have rested on revelation, whether that of Christ or that of the Holy Spirit. Because of the complexity and inadequacy of the data provided by the New Testament, we must resort to this legitimate prescriptive argument at least in relation to the deuterocanonicals. All the books of the Hebrew Old Testament are cited in the New, except those that have been properly called the antilegomena of the Old Testament, namely: Esther, Ecclesiastes and Song. Furthermore, Ezra and Nehemiah are also not used. The well-known absence of any explicit citation of the deuterocanonical writings does not prove, therefore, that they should be seen as inferior to the works mentioned above for the characters and authors of the New Testament. Deuterocanonical literature was generally unsuitable for their purposes. It should even be remembered that not even in its place of origin, Alexandria, was this literature widely cited by Jewish authors, as was already seen in the case of Philo. The negative argument obtained from the lack of citations of the deuteros in the New Testament is minimized by the indirect use that the same testament does make of them. This usage takes the form of allusions and reminiscences and clearly shows that the apostles and evangelists were familiar with the Alexandrian increase, considered their works as sources worthy of at least respect, and wrote under some influence from them. If chapter 11 of the letter to the Hebrews is compared with chapters 6 and 7 of the Second Book of Maccabees, an unmistakable reference to the latter is evident when the first of the glorified martyrs speaks. There is a lot of affinity of thought, and even of forms of language, between I Pe. 1, 6-7 and Sab. 3.5-6; Heb. 1,3 and Sab.7,26-27; I Cor. 10:9-10 and Jude. 8, 24-25; I Cor. 6.13 and Ecco. 36.20. However, the force of the direct and indirect use of the Old Testament in the New is slightly diminished by the disconcerting truth that at least one of the New Testament authors explicitly cites the “Book of Enoch,” long recognized as apocryphal. See verse 14. And in verse 9 he quotes from another apocryphal narrative, the “Assumption of Moses.” The mentions that the New Testament makes of the Old are characterized by a certain freedom and elasticity in form and source, which tends to further diminish its evidentiary power regarding its canonicity. But at least as far as the vast majority of the Palestinian Hagiographa are concerned – and a fortiori, the Pentateuch and the Prophets – any lack of conclusivity in the New Testament is outweighed by the abundance of support for its canonical stature that exists in Jewish sources, to name just a few. These begin with the Mishnah, passing through Josephus and Philo, and arriving at the translation of said books by the Hellenistic Greeks. As for the deuterocanonical literature, only the last testimony serves as Jewish confirmation. There are signs, however, that the Greek version was not seen by its readers as a completed Bible, of sacredness defined in all its parts, but as something that in its variable contents gradually lost brilliance in the eyes of the Hellenists and passed from the Law, eminently sacred, to works of questionable divinity, such as the Third Book of Maccabees. This factor must be weighed when considering a certain argument. A large number of Catholic authorities perceive a canonization of the deuterocanonicals in a supposed massive approval, by the Apostles, of the Greek Old Testament, obviously of greater length. The argument does not lack strength. The New Testament shows a certain preference for the Seventy: of the 350 texts taken from the Old Testament, 300 prefer the language of the Greek version to that of the Hebrew. However, there are considerations that invite us to hesitate before admitting the apostolic adoption of the Seventyen bloc. As already noted above, there is reason to believe that this was not a fixed amount at that time. The oldest and most representative manuscripts that exist are not completely identical in the books they contain. Furthermore, it must be remembered that at the beginning of our era, and for a time afterward, it was very rare to find collections as voluminous as the Seventy in manuscript form. This version must have been found more commonly in separate books or groups of books, which favored some variation in the compass. So neither a fluctuating Seventy nor an inexplicit New Testament can give us the exact extension of the pre-Christian Bible that was transmitted by the apostles to the Early Church. It is more tenable to conclude that there was a selective process under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and that such a process was completed at such a late date in the apostolic age that the New Testament cannot reflect its ripe fruit with respect to the number or sanctity of books admitted from outside Palestine. In order to historically understand the apostolic canon of the Old Testament, we must interrogate other later, although less sacred, books that more clearly express the faith of the early periods of Christianity.

B. The Canon of the Old Testament in the Church of the first three centuries

The sub-apostolic writings of Clement, Polycarp, the author of the Epistle of Barnabas, the pseudo-Clementine homilies, and the “Shepherd” of Hermas, contain implicit quotations or allusions from all the deuteros, except Baruch (who was formerly often found united with Jeremiah), the First Book of Maccabees, and the additions to David. No counterargument can be drawn from the implicit, loose character of those citations since the Apostolic Fathers cite the deuterocanonical scriptures in exactly the same way.

Going down to the next era, that of the apologists, we find Baruch cited as a prophet by Athenagoras. Saint Justin Martyr was the first to realize that the Church possessed a version of the Old Testament scriptures that differed from those of the Jews. He was also the first to hint at the principle, later promulgated by later writers, of the self-sufficiency of the Church in establishing the canon; its independence from the synagogue regarding that matter. The full understanding of this truth took time to mature, at least in the East, where there is no shortage of indications that for a long time on some fronts the influence of the Judeo-Palestinian tradition could not be avoided. Saint Meliton, bishop of Sardis, was the one who first made the list of the canonical books of the Old Testament. He says that in this task, although he maintained the family order of the Seventy, he verified his catalog by questioning the Jews. By this time, the Jews had almost everywhere discarded the Alexandrian books, so Melito’s canon consists exclusively of the protocanonical minusEsther. It should be emphasized, however, that the document to which this catalog was prefixed could have been interpreted as oriented towards anti-Jewish controversy, in which case the restricted canon would be understood in a different light. Saint Irenaeus, a first-class witness given his extensive knowledge of ecclesiastical tradition, affirms that Baruch was judged by the same criteria as Jeremiah, and that the stories of Susanna and Bel and the dragon were attributed to Daniel. The Alexandrian tradition is represented by the enormous weight of Origen. This, undoubtedly influenced by the practice of the Alexandrian Jews of accepting in practice the extra writings while maintaining in theory the minor canon of Palestine, has a catalog of the writings of the Old Testament that only contains the protocanonical books, although it follows the order of the Septuagint. However, Origen uses all the Deutero books as Holy Scripture, and in his letter to Julius Africanus he defends the sacred character of Tobias, Judithhhh and the fragments of Daniel. It implicitly affirms, furthermore, the autonomy of the Church to determine the canon (see references in Cornely). In his Hexapla edition of the Old Testament all the books of Deutero find a place. The biblical manuscript known as “Codex Claromontanus”, from the 6th century, contains a catalog to which both Harnack and Zahn attribute an Alexandrian origin, almost contemporary with Origen. That document at least dates back to the period we are examining and includes all of the Deutero books, including Maccabees IV. Saint Hippolytus (d. 236) may well be considered the representative of the early Roman tradition. He comments on the chapter of Susanna, frequently quotes Wisdom as the work of Solomon, and uses Baruch and the Maccabees as Holy Scripture. In the Church of West Africa there are two strong witnesses of the major canon: Tertullian and Saint Cyprian. The works of these fathers handle biblically all of the Deutero except Tobit, Judithhhh, and the addition to Esther. (In relation to the use of apocryphal writings at that time see APOCRYPHAS).

C. The Old Testament canon during the fourth and first half of the fifth centuries

In that period the position of deuterocanonical literature is not as secure as in the early period. The doubts that arose can be attributed mostly to the reaction against the apocrypha or the pseudo-biblical writings with which heretics and other writers had flooded the East. On the other hand, the situation became possible precisely due to the lack of an apostolic or ecclesiastical definition of the canon. The work of unalterably defining the sacred sources, as is the case with all Catholic doctrines, was left to the divine economy, to be carried out gradually under the stimulus of questions and opposition. With its flexible writings, Alexandria had from the beginning been a fertile field for apocryphal literature, and Saint Athanasius, the vigilant shepherd of that flock, wanting to protect it from pernicious influences, prepared a catalog of books indicating in it the values ​​that had to be given to each one. First, the strict canon and authoritative source of truth is the Jewish Old Testament, excluding the book of Esther. There are, furthermore, certain books to which the Fathers pointed out as a source of edification and instruction for catechumens. They are: the Wisdom of Solomon, the Wisdom of Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), Esther, Judithhhh, Tobias, the Didache or Doctrine of the Apostles and the Shepherd of Hermas. All the rest are apocryphal and inventions of heretics (Festal Epistle, para 367). Following the precedent of Origen and the Alexandrian tradition, the holy doctor recognized no formal canon of the Old Testament other than the Hebrew. However, faithful to the same tradition, in practice he admitted a scriptural dignity for the deuterocanonical books, as can be seen in the way he uses them. In Jerusalem there was then a revival, or perhaps a survival, of Jewish ideas, the tendency of which was clearly unfavorable to the deuterocanonicals. From the same episcopal seat, Saint Cyril, who defends the right of the Church to establish the canon, places the latter among the apocrypha, and also prohibits the private reading of any book that is not read in the temple. The attitude was a little more favorable in Antioch and Syria. Saint Epiphanius shows no doubt about the rank of the Deuterus: he esteems them, but in his eyes they do not occupy the same level as the Hebrew books. The historian Eusebius attests to the breadth with which doubts had spread in his time. He classifies the deuterocanonicals among the antilegomena, or disputed books, and along with Athanasius places them in an intermediate category between the books accepted by all and the apocrypha. Canon number 59 (or 60) of the provincial council of Laodicea (whose authenticity is sometimes the subject of debate) proposes a catalog of Scripture that is completely in accordance with the ideas of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem. On the other hand, the Eastern versions and Greek manuscripts of that period are more liberal. Those that still exist contain all the deuterocanonicals and, in some cases, certain apocrypha. The influence of the narrow canon of Origen and Athanasius spread naturally to the West. Saint Hilary of Poitiers and Rufinus followed in their footsteps by theoretically excluding the deuteros from the canonical rank, although they admitted them in practice. The last of them he calls “ecclesiastical books”, although of less authority than the rest of the Scriptures. Saint Jerome threw his considerable weight towards the side unfavorable to the books discussed. When evaluating his attitude we must remember that Jerome lived for a long time in Palestine, in an environment in which everything that was not part of the Hebrew canon was automatically an object of suspicion and that, in addition, he felt an exaggerated reverence towards the Hebrew text, the “hebraica veritas”, as he called it. In his famous “Prologus Galeatus,” or preface to his translation of Samuel and Kings, he declares that everything that is not Hebrew must be classified among the Apocrypha. He explicitly states that Wisdom, Sirach, Tobit, and Judithhhh do not belong in the canon. He adds that these books are read in the temples for the edification of the faithful but not to confirm the revealed doctrine. If we carefully analyze Jerome’s expressions, in his letters and prefaces, about the Deutero, we can see the following results: first, he seriously doubts their divine inspiration; second, the fact that he occasionally cites them and has translated some of them as a concession to ecclesiastical tradition, is an involuntary testimony on his part to the high recognition they enjoyed in the Church in general, and to the force of the practical tradition that prescribed their use in public worship. Obviously, the lower rank to which authorities such as Origen, Athanasius and Jerome relegated them was due to a very rigid conception of canonicity, which required that a book, to be elevated to that supreme dignity, must be recognized by all, have the sanction of Jewish antiquity and be suitable not only to edify but to “confirm the doctrine of the Church”, to use a phrase of Jerome’s.

But while eminent scholars and theorists continued to despise the additional writings, the official attitude of the Latin Church, always in favor of them, preserved the majestic tenor of its position. Two documents of capital importance in the history of the canon constitute the first pronouncement of papal authority on the matter. The first is the so-called “Decretales of Gelasius”, De recipiendis et non recipiendis libris, whose essential part is attributed today to the synod convened by Pope Damasus in the year 382. The other is the canon of Innocent I, sent in 405 to a Gallic bishop in response to a request for information. Both documents contain all the deuterocanonicals, without any distinction, and are identical to the catalog of Trent. The African Church, which had always been an enthusiastic defender of the disputed books, found itself in complete agreement with Rome on this issue. Its ancient version, the Latin Vetus (or, less correctly, the Itala), had admitted all the writings of the Old Testament. Saint Augustine seems to theoretically recognize various degrees of inspiration, but in practice he uses the protos and deuteros without any discrimination. In his “De doctrina Christiana” he lists the components of the entire Old Testament. The synod of Hippo (393) and the three of Carthage (393, 397 and 419), in which Augustine was undoubtedly the leading spirit, found it necessary to deal explicitly with the problem of the canon, and they prepared identical lists, without excluding any sacred book. These councils based their canons on tradition and liturgical use. Valuable testimony about the issue in the Spanish Church is found in the work of the heretic Priscillian, “Liber de fide et apocryphis.” This work assumes a well-defined dividing line between canonical and non-canonical works, and that the canon accepts all deuterans.

D. The canon of the Old Testament from the middle of the fifth century to the end of the seventh century

This period reveals a curious exchange of opinions between the East and the West, while ecclesiastical usage did not undergo modifications, at least in the Latin Church. During this intermediate age, the use of the new version of the Old Testament of Saint Jerome (the Vulgate) was widely disseminated in the West. Included with the text were Jerome’s prefaces in which he criticized the Deuteros, and under the influence of his authority that part of the world began to distrust them and show the first symptoms of a current hostile to their canonicity. On the other hand, the Eastern Church imported a Western authority that had canonized the disputed books, namely the decree of Carthage, and from then on there began a growing tendency among the Greeks to place the deuteros on the same level as the others. This tendency, however, was due more to the forgetting of the ancient distinction than to a concession towards the council of Carthage.

E. The Old Testament canon during the Middle Ages

The Greek Church.

The result of this tendency among the Greeks was that near the beginning of the 12th century they had a canon identical to the Latin one, with the only difference that they did accept the apocryphal Book III of Maccabees. The “Syntagma Canonum” of Photius points out that, in the era of the schism of the 9th century, all the deuterocanonicals were liturgically recognized in the Greek Church.

The Latin Church

Throughout the Middle Ages we find in the Latin Church evidence of doubts about the character of the deutero. There is a friendly current in their favor and another clearly unfavorable to their authority and sacred character, and in between the two there are a number of writers whose veneration for these books is moderated by uncertainty as to their true position. Among them we highlight Saint Thomas Aquinas. There are few who recognize its canonicity unequivocally. The prevailing authority of Western medieval authors is basically that of the Greek Fathers. The main cause of this phenomenon must be found in the influence, direct and indirect, of the critic Prologus of Saint Jerome. The compilation “Glossa Ordinaria” was widely read and highly esteemed as a treasure of sacred knowledge in the Middle Ages and embodied the prefaces in which the Doctor of Bethlehem had written of the deuteros in pejorative terms; With this he perpetuated and spread his unfriendly opinion. However, such doubts must be seen as something more or less academic. The countless manuscript copies of the Vulgate produced at that time, with one very slight, perhaps accidental, exception, uniformly encompass the ecclesiastical use of the Old Testament, and Roman tradition stood firm on the canonical equality of all parts of the Old Testament. There is sufficient evidence that during this long period the Deutero texts were read in the temples of Western Christianity. Regarding Roman authority, the catalog of Innocent I appears in the collection of ecclesiastical canons sent by Pope Adrian I to Charlemagne in the Frankish Empire. Nicholas I, in a writing of 865 to the bishops of France, uses the same decree of Innocent as the field in which all sacred books must be accepted.

F. The Old Testament canon and the general councils

The Council of Florence (1442)

In 1442, during the life, and with the approval, of this council, Eugene IV wrote several bulls, or decrees, with the aim of bringing the eastern schismatic groups into communion with Rome. And according to the common teaching of theologians, such documents constitute infallible doctrine. The “Decretum pro Jacobitis” contains a complete list of the books that the Church recognizes as inspired, but it omits, perhaps deliberately, the terms canonand canonical. The Council of Florence, therefore, taught about the inspiration of all scriptures but did not formally address the point of their canonicity.

The definition of the canon elaborated by the Council of Trent (1546)

It was the demands of controversy that first led Luther to draw a dividing line between the books of the Hebrew canon and the Alexandrian writings. In his dispute with Eck in Leipzig in 1519, when his opponent argued that the well-known text of the Second Book of Maccabees was proof of the doctrine of purgatory, Luther responded that the passage had no authority since that book was outside the canon. In the first edition of Luther’s Bible, 1543, the Deuterans were relegated, as apocrypha, to a place between the two testaments. To address this radical Protestant rupture, as well as to clearly define the inspired sources from which the Catholic Church draws its position, among the first acts of the Council of Trent was the solemn declaration, “as sacred and canonical,” of all the books of the Old and New Testaments “with all their parts, as they have been used to be read in the temples, and as found in the old Vulgate edition.” During the council’s deliberations the reception of traditional writing was never seriously disputed. Nor – and this is truly remarkable – was there any serious doubt during the work of the council about the canonicity of the disputed writings. In the minds of the Tridentine Fathers, these texts had already been virtually canonized by the same decree of Florence, and the fathers themselves felt particularly bound by the action of the preceding ecumenical synod. The Council of Trent did not enter into the study of fluctuations in the history of the canon. Nor was the authorship or character of the contents questioned. According to the practical genius of the Latin Church, it based its decisions on the immemorial tradition that was manifested in the decrees of previous councils and popes, and on liturgical reading, relying on traditional teaching and custom to determine a question of tradition. The Tridentine catalog has already been given above.

The First Vatican Council (1870)

The great builder who was the Synod of Trent had already forever placed the sacredness and canonicity of the entire traditional Bible beyond the permissibility of doubt by Catholics. By its same implication it had also defined the full inspiration of that Bible. The First Vatican Council took advantage of a recent error about inspiration to remove any shadow of uncertainty that might have remained. It formally ratified the action of Trent and explicitly defined the divine inspiration of all the books and their parts.

III. The canon of the Old Testament outside the Church

A. Among the Eastern Orthodox

The Greek Orthodox Church preserved its ancient canon in practice and theory until recent times, when, under the dominant influence of its Russian branch, it is changing its attitude towards the deuterocanonical scriptures. The rejection of these books by Russian theologians and authorities is a lapse that began early in the 18th century. The Monophysitists, Nestorians, Jacobites, Armenians and Copts, although in reality they have little interest in the canon, admit the complete catalog and also several apocrypha.

B. Among Protestants

Protestant churches continue to exclude deutero writings from their canons, classifying them as “apocryphal.” In general, the Presbyterians and Calvinists, especially since the synod of Westminster in 1648, have been the most reluctant enemies of any recognition and, because of the influence of the British and Foreign Bible Society, decided in 1826 to refuse to distribute Bibles containing the Apocrypha. Since then, the publication of the Deutero as appendices to Protestant Bibles has practically ceased in English-speaking countries. Such books are still reading materials in the liturgy of the Church of England, but their numbers have decreased because of the hostility. There is an appendix to the Apocrypha in the revised British version, in a separate volume. The deuteros are still part of appendices in German Bibles that are printed under the patronage of orthodox Lutherans.

Author: George J. Reid
Transcriber: Ernie Stefanik
Translator: Javier Algara Cossío

Source: Catholic Encyclopedia