How We Got the Bible · Page 2 of 6

The Old Testament canon

Recognized over centuries in three parts, and counted more than one way. The Jamnia story, told as the debate it is.

Jesus and the apostles did not receive a book with a contents page. They received the Scriptures of Israel, already old, already treated as God's word, and already arranged in three parts. Speaking of everything written about himself, Jesus names all three:

Counted three ways, the same books

Writing after AD 93, the Jewish historian Josephus counts the books held divine among his people as twenty-two: five of Moses, thirteen written by the prophets, and four of hymns and instruction for life. His point is the settled state of the list. In all the ages since the books were written, he says, no one had been bold enough to add to them, take anything from them, or change anything in them. The Hebrew Bible today counts the same books as twenty-four, and the Christian Old Testament as thirty-nine. The differences are grouping, not content: the twelve minor prophets ride on one scroll, and books like Samuel, Kings and Chronicles are counted once instead of twice.

Recognized, over centuries

Roger Beckwith's study of the Old Testament canon traces how the recognition happened: the Law of Moses first, as Israel's founding gift; then the Prophets, the books that spoke God's word into Israel's history; then the Writings, gathered last. No surviving document records a meeting at which the list was voted in. What the record shows is use: books read in worship, quoted as authority, argued from, and copied at cost, across centuries.

What about Jamnia?

You may be told that a Council of Jamnia, about AD 90, closed the Jewish canon and settled the list. Treat that as a debated theory, because that is what it is. Rabbis did gather at Yavneh (Jamnia) after the Temple fell in AD 70, and the Mishnah records them debating whether the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes 'render the hands unclean', their way of asking about a book's sacred status. The theory that this was a canon-closing council was first proposed in 1871 by Heinrich Graetz. In 1964 Jack P. Lewis examined it in 'What Do We Mean by Jabneh?' and showed that it rests on inference: no ancient source describes such a council, or any decision it made. The debate was real. The council, as usually described, is not in the sources.

The Greek books

Many Jews of Jesus' day read Scripture in Greek, in the translation called the Septuagint, and copies of it carried further books: Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch and the books of Maccabees among them. Whether those books counted as Scripture in the same way was argued about then, and it is the seed of the one real difference between Christian Bibles today. Page 5 takes it up.

Sources

• Berean Standard Bible (BSB)
• Josephus, Against Apion 1.8
• Roger T. Beckwith, The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church (1985)
• Jack P. Lewis, What Do We Mean by Jabneh? (1964)

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