Wednesday after Pentecost 5
July 4, 2012
The Lord be with you
This is now the
third (and final) post about the Old Testament canon and how it came to be
recognized as the inspired word of God by Christians. As mentioned earlier,
during the days of Jesus the Old Testament documents were not contained in a
book but on scrolls. The development of books was actually advanced by
Christians who wanted an easier way to reference their scriptures. (Imagine how
hard it would be to find Jeremiah, chapter 33, or Psalm 101, if you had to keep
rolling through a scroll!).
Rome conquered Jerusalem in 70 ad, destroying the Temple and sending the Jews into exile. The
Christian Church had been around for about 40 years. The Jewish scriptures
survived for several reasons. First, the Jews of the Diaspora had copies
of the LXX. Second, many Jews saw the handwriting on the wall and fled before Rome
attacked. Some of these took copies of the scriptures in Hebrew with them.
Third, Hebrew copies of the scriptures could be found in at least some of the synagogues.
Fourth, the Christians had inherited the Jewish attitude of accepting the
scriptures of the Old Testament as the word of God, and so had many copies of
the LXX. Of course, as indicated earlier, there was still some debate as to
which of the scrolls should be considered the inspired word of God and which
were written by deeply devout authors, but not exactly inspired.
With the destruction
of the temple, the position of the Sadducees, that only the first five
books of the Bible had authority as the word of God, was lost. The temple was
their power base. They were the ones who offered the sacrifices. The Pharisees
of Jesus’ day had a canon that included what we call the Old Testament. Depending
on whether you were a Palestine Jew or a Jew of the Diaspora determined what
books were included in your scriptures. However, the LXX was considered on
equal footing with the Hebrew Scriptures. The story about its origin
underscored the assumed divine affidavit. When Jews and Christians engaged in
conversations about the Old Testament and how it should be understood, it was
based on the LXX.
The leaders of the Jews became acutely aware of several
things. One, based on the LXX translation of the Old Testament, many passages
were congenial to the Christian understanding of their history. Two, several
books of the LXX were originally written in Greek. There was no Hebrew
original. Third, there were additions to some of the books that were not represented
in existing Hebrew texts and they were unknown to the Jews in Palestine.
So, over a couple of hundred years, a group of Jews known as the Massorites,
produced a Hebrew text known today as the Massoritic Text. This text came to be
regarded as the authoritative text for Jews. Christians, however, continued to
use the LXX. This translation continues to be the source for the Old Testament
for the “Orthodox” or “Eastern” Churches to this day. They have the largest
number of books in their Old Testament.
Moving over to the West, Rome
made their presence known in Palestine
during the days of the Maccabees. Once invited in, they never left. With Rome
came the Latin language. Christianity spread throughout the Roman
Empire. As it moved west, it moved into areas where Latin was the
dominant language. To accommodate the Christians in these areas, Latin
translations were made of the Old Testament by various people. The quality was
uneven and they were based on the LXX.
Pope Damasus I, in 382, commissioned Jerome (347 – 420) to
make a revision of the old Latin translations so the Latin-speaking church
could have a dependable translation. It was expected that Jerome would also
base his translation on the LXX. However, Jerome learned Hebrew to make his
translation. He discovered the same thing that the Massorites had discovered. Jerome,
though, had far too great a respect for the LXX and the role it had in the
Christian Church to just dump the portions of the LXX that didn’t have a
background in existing Hebrew texts. Who’s to say that God couldn’t inspire
something in the Greek language? He did it with the New Testament. Who’s to say
that the translators of the LXX didn’t have earlier copies of Hebrew manuscripts
that had been lost in the 500–plus years between the development of the
Massoritic Text and the LXX translation?
Jerome hit upon a compromise, of sorts. He translated the
Old Testament from the Hebrew. (This is that portion of the Bible used by Jews
today and called the Tanakh.) Then he translated the portions not found in his
Hebrew text, but found in the LXX, and put those in a separate section between
the Old and the New Testaments. His translation is known today as the Vulgate,
from Latin meaning “common.” The Vulgate was the Bible for the “common man.”
Skip ahead a thousand years. The books in this middle
section of the Vulgate, while greatly prized, had lost some of their authority.
In other words, in the West, they were not considered inspired by God. This was
the attitude that Jerome had and, over time, it carried the day. The Church in
the West was basically using the same books as Jews for the Old Testament
Canon. Something was about to happen that would change that.
In the 1500s, the Reformation broke out in Europe.
One of the tenants of the Reformers was that all Christian doctrine needed to
be founded on the Scriptures. A number of the doctrines of the Roman Church
came under fire because they had no scriptural support. Such things like
Purgatory and Indulgences were especially attacked as lacking support in the
Bible. The Council of Trent (December
13, 1545 to December 4,
1563) was convened to respond to the challenge of the Reformation.
One of the things they did was revisit the books Jerome had placed in-between
the Old and New Testament. In them they found several passages which, if
understood from a certain angle, could provide them with the much desired “biblical
support” for their views. So the council selected a number of these books and
declared them to be scriptural. (The Orthodox Churches had been accepting these
books all along.) Trent called them
“deutero-canonical,” meaning “second canon,” as they said their canonicity was
recognized only later. Thus the Roman Catholics have a larger Old Testament
than most Protestants, but a smaller one than Orthodox believers.
This basically concludes what I want to say on this topic.
Some may object to this ending, noting that I haven’t said which books I think
belong in the Old Testament. To make such a judgment would lead me to those
“theological” considerations I mentioned in the first post. There are plenty of
people who weigh in on this topic. As a Lutheran minister, I subscribe to the Book of Concord as a faithful expression
of my Christian Faith. This book contains a number of different documents. One
of them is the Epitome of the Formula of
Concord. On this topic it reads, “We believe, teach, and confess that the
sole rule and standard according to which all dogmas together with [all]
teachers should be estimated and judged are the prophetic and apostolic
Scriptures of the Old and of the New Testament alone”. It never numbers or
lists which books are “prophetic and apostolic.” In that spirit, I am also not
going to list “John’s official list of books in the Old Testament.”
“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and
admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual
songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Colossians 3:16).
Blessings in Christ
Pastor John Rickert
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