Chapter 4: How the Old Testament Canon Was Recognized

What is a canon?

The word canon comes from the Greek kanōn, a measuring reed, then a rule or standard. The canon of Scripture is the list of books that are recognized as inspired and authoritative, the books that rule the church’s faith. It raises an essential question: how do we know which books belong?

The first principle is this: the church did not make the Scriptures authoritative; it recognized the authority they already had. A book is not inspired because a council voted for it. It was inspired the moment God gave it, and the community of God’s people came to recognize what was already his Word. Jesus said, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:27).

The Old Testament testifies to its own recognition

From the start, God’s people treated the writings of the prophets as binding. The book of the law was laid beside the ark (Deuteronomy 31:26), the king was to copy it and read it all his days (Deuteronomy 17:18-19), and nothing was to be added to it or taken away (Deuteronomy 4:2; 12:32). When the book of the law was found in the temple in Josiah’s time, the king tore his clothes and led the nation in covenant renewal (2 Chronicles 34:14-31). Daniel, in exile, “understood by books the number of the years, whereof the word of the LORD came to Jeremiah the prophet” (Daniel 9:2). That is to say, a prophet’s writings were already gathered in “books,” and were being read as the Word of God. Zechariah looked back on “the law, and the words which the LORD of hosts hath sent in his spirit by the former prophets” (Zechariah 7:12). Paul wrote that “unto them were committed the oracles of God” (Romans 3:2).

Jesus and the apostles settle the question for Christians

For Christians, the strongest testimony is that of Jesus himself. He quoted the Old Testament as the Word of God, referred to its three-part structure (Luke 24:44), and treated its events as true history: Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Sodom, Jonah, and others (Matthew 19:4-5; 24:37-39; Luke 17:28-32; Matthew 12:39-41). He summarised the whole Old Testament’s story of martyrdom in the words, “From the blood of Abel unto the blood of Zacharias, which perished between the altar and the temple” (Luke 11:51). Abel is in Genesis; the Zacharias he mentions is generally understood to be the one killed in 2 Chronicles 24:20-21. In the Hebrew order, Chronicles is the last book. So Jesus’ phrase is the equivalent of “from Genesis to Chronicles,” a sweep over the whole Hebrew Bible as his contemporaries had it (Beckwith 1985).

The New Testament quotes from or clearly alludes to most of the books of the Old Testament, and it introduces its quotations with the formulas “it is written” and “the Scripture saith.” It does not quote any of the later Jewish books known as the Apocrypha with such a formula.

Jewish testimony outside the Bible

Several non-biblical Jewish sources speak of a closed body of Scripture before the time of Christ.

The Prologue to Sirach (written about 132 BC by the translator, the grandson of the author) speaks three times of “the Law, the Prophets, and the other books” or the like, which shows a threefold collection already well known.

Josephus, the Jewish historian writing in the AD 90s, gives the clearest statement. “We have not an innumerable multitude of books among us, disagreeing from and contradicting one another,” he wrote, but only twenty-two, containing the record of all time: five of Moses, thirteen of the prophets, and four of hymns and rules of life. He adds that books written after the reign of Artaxerxes were not held to be of equal authority with the earlier ones, because the exact succession of the prophets had ceased. And he says that it is “natural to all Jews, immediately and from their very birth, to esteem these books to contain Divine doctrines, and to persist in them, and, if occasion be, willingly to die for them” (Josephus, Ag. Ap. 1.37–43, trans. Whiston).

Melito, bishop of Sardis (c. AD 170), travelled to the East to learn accurately the books of the Old Testament and sent back a list of the Old Testament books, which Eusebius preserved (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 4.26).

Origen (c. AD 230) gave a list of twenty-two books, which he said was the number the Hebrews had handed down (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 6.25).

The “Council of Jamnia”

An older theory held that a Jewish council at Jamnia (Yavneh) about AD 90 fixed the Hebrew canon. Most scholars now doubt that a formal council closed the canon. The sages at Yavneh debated the status of some books, for example whether Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes “defile the hands” (that is, are Scripture; m. Yadayim 3.5), but these debates were about books already widely accepted, and the Scriptures that Jesus and the apostles used were already in place by then.

The Septuagint and the Apocrypha

Around the third century BC, Jews of Alexandria began translating the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. The tradition in the Letter of Aristeas tells of seventy-two translators brought by King Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285–246 BC) to make the translation of the Law (Aristeas 301–308); the translation was called the Septuagint (LXX), “the seventy.” The apostles often quoted it, which shows that the Word of God remains the Word of God in translation.

The Greek manuscripts of the Septuagint that survive from the fourth and fifth centuries AD (Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus) contain additional books such as Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch, and 1–2 Maccabees. These are the Apocrypha (Protestant term) or deuterocanonical books (Catholic term). Their status has been disputed:

Jerome (c. AD 400), who translated from the Hebrew, held that the church should recognise the Hebrew canon. He said the extra books may be read “for the edification of the people” but not “for the confirming of the authority of ecclesiastical doctrines” (Jerome, Pref. Sol.; see also his Prologus Galeatus, which sets out the twenty-two books of the Hebrew canon).

Athanasius in AD 367 set certain of these books apart as useful for those new to the faith but not part of the canon (Athanasius, Festal Letter 39).

The Council of Trent (Session 4, 8 April 1546) declared them canonical for the Roman Catholic Church. The Eastern Orthodox churches have their own somewhat larger canons.

The Protestant Reformers returned to the Hebrew canon. The Westminster Confession states that the books “commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the canon of the Scripture” (Westminster Confession 1.3). The 1611 King James Version printed them in a separate section between the Testaments, and later editions dropped them.

The reasons Protestants and most evangelicals give for keeping the Hebrew canon are: Jesus and the apostles never cite the Apocrypha as Scripture; the Jewish community, “to whom were committed the oracles of God” (Romans 3:2), never received them; and several of these books themselves disclaim prophetic status (1 Maccabees 9:27). These books remain valuable for history and devotion, and many Christians still read them, but they are not placed on the same level as the Scriptures.

Summary. The Old Testament canon was recognized, not created. Its authority rests on God’s own word, on the use of these books by Israel, and above all on the authority of Christ, who confirmed the Scriptures of the Jews as the Word of God.