Who Compiled the Old
Testament?
The Church does not deny that there are ancient writings which are
"apocryphal." During the early Christian era, there were scores of
manuscripts which purported to be Holy Scripture but were not. Many
have survived to the present day, like the Apocalypse of Peter and
the Gospel of Thomas, which all Christian churches regard as
spurious writings that don't belong in Scripture.
During the first century, the Jews disagreed as to what constituted
the canon of Scripture. In fact, there were a large number of
different canons in use, including the growing canon used by
Christians. In order to combat the spreading Christian cult, rabbis
met at the city of Jamnia or Javneh in A.D. 90 to determine which
books were truly the Word of God. They pronounced many books,
including the Gospels, to be unfit as scriptures. This canon also
excluded seven books (Baruch, Sirach, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Tobit,
Judith, and the Wisdom of Solomon, plus portions of Esther and
Daniel) that Christians considered part of the Old Testament.
The group of Jews which met at Javneh became the dominant group for
later Jewish history, and today most Jews accept the canon of
Javneh. However, some Jews, such as those from Ethiopia, follow a
different canon which is identical to the Catholic Old Testament
and includes the seven deuterocanonical books (cf. Encyclopedia
Judaica, vol. 6, p. 1147).
Needless to say, the Church disregarded the results of Javneh.
First, a Jewish council after the time of Christ is not binding on
the followers of Christ. Second, Javneh rejected precisely those
documents which are foundational for the Christian Church -- the
Gospels and the other documents of the New Testament. Third, by
rejecting the deuterocanonicals, Javneh rejected books which had
been used by Jesus and the apostles and which were in the edition
of the Bible that the apostles used in everyday life -- the
Septuagint.
The Apostles & the
Deuteros
The Christian acceptance of the deuterocanonical books was logical
because the deuterocanonicals were also included in the Septuagint,
the Greek edition of the Old Testament which the apostles used to
evangelize the world. Two thirds of the Old Testament quotations in
the New are from the Septuagint. Yet the apostles nowhere told
their converts to avoid seven books of it. Like the Jews all over
the world who used the Septuagint, the early Christians accepted
the books they found in it. They knew that the apostles would not
mislead them and endanger their souls by putting false scriptures
in their hands -- especially without warning them against
them.
But the apostles did not merely place the deuterocanonicals in the
hands of their converts as part of the Septuagint. They regularly
referred to the deuterocanonicals in their writings. For example,
Hebrews 11 encourages us to emulate the heroes of the Old Testament
and in the Old Testament "Women received their dead by
resurrection. Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, that
they might rise again to a better life" (Heb. 11:35).
There are a couple of examples of women receiving back their dead
by resurrection in the Protestant Old Testament. You can find
Elijah raising the son of the widow of Zarepheth in 1 Kings 17, and
you can find his successor Elisha raising the son of the Shunammite
woman in 2 Kings 4, but one thing you can never find -- anywhere in
the Protestant Old Testament, from front to back, from Genesis to
Malachi -- is someone being tortured and refusing to accept release
for the sake of a better resurrection. If you want to find that,
you have to look in the Catholic Old Testament -- in the
deuterocanonical books Martin Luther cut out of his Bible.
The story is found in 2 Maccabees 7, where we read that during the
Maccabean persecution, "It happened also that seven brothers and
their mother were arrested and were being compelled by the king,
under torture with whips and cords, to partake of unlawful swine's
flesh. . . . [B]ut the brothers and their mother encouraged one
another to die nobly, saying, 'The Lord God is watching over us and
in truth has compassion on us . . . ' After the first brother had
died . . . they brought forward the second for their sport. . . .
he in turn underwent tortures as the first brother had done. And
when he was at his last breath, he said, 'You accursed wretch, you
dismiss us from this present life, but the King of the universe
will raise us up to an everlasting renewal of life'" (2 Macc. 7:1,
5-9).
One by one the sons die, proclaiming that they will be vindicated
in the resurrection. "The mother was especially admirable and
worthy of honorable memory. Though she saw her seven sons perish
within a single day, she bore it with good courage because of her
hope in the Lord. She encouraged each of them . . . [saying], 'I do
not know how you came into being in my womb. It was not I who gave
you life and breath, nor I who set in order the elements within
each of you. Therefore the Creator of the world, who shaped the
beginning of man and devised the origin of all things, will in his
mercy give life and breath back to you again, since you now forget
yourselves for the sake of his laws,'" telling the last one, "Do
not fear this butcher, but prove worthy of your brothers. Accept
death, so that in God's mercy I may get you back again with your
brothers" (2 Macc. 7:20-23, 29).
This is but one example of the New Testaments' references to the
deuterocanonicals. The early Christians were thus fully justified
in recognizing these books as Scripture, for the apostles not only
set them in their hands as part of the Bible they used to
evangelize the world, but also referred to them in the New
Testament itself, citing the things they record as examples to be
emulated.
The Fathers
Speak
The early acceptance of the deuterocanonicals was carried down
through Church history. The Protestant patristics scholar J. N. D.
Kelly writes: "It should be observed that the Old Testament thus
admitted as authoritative in the Church was somewhat bulkier and
more comprehensive than the [Protestant Old Testament] . . . It
always included, though with varying degrees of recognition, the
so-called Apocrypha or deutero-canonical books. The reason for this
is that the Old Testament which passed in the first instance into
the hands of Christians was . . . the Greek translation known as
the Septuagint. . . . most of the Scriptural quotations found in
the New Testament are based upon it rather than the Hebrew.. . . In
the first two centuries . . . the Church seems to have accept all,
or most of, these additional books as inspired and to have treated
them without question as Scripture. Quotations from Wisdom, for
example, occur in 1 Clement and Barnabas. . . Polycarp cites Tobit,
and the Didache [cites] Ecclesiasticus. Irenaeus refers to Wisdom,
the History of Susannah, Bel and the Dragon [i.e., the
deuterocanonical portions of Daniel], and Baruch. The use made of
the Apocrypha by Tertullian, Hippolytus, Cyprian and Clement of
Alexandria is too frequent for detailed references to be necessary"
(Early Christian Doctrines, 53-54).
The recognition of the deuterocanonicals as part of the Bible that
was given by individual Fathers was also given by the Fathers as a
whole, when they met in Church councils. The results of councils
are especially useful because they do not represent the views of
only one person, but what was accepted by the Church leaders of
whole regions.
The canon of Scripture, Old and New Testament, was finally settled
at the Council of Rome in 382, under the authority of Pope Damasus
I. It was soon reaffirmed on numerous occasions. The same canon was
affirmed at the Council of Hippo in 393 and at the Council of
Carthage in 397. In 405 Pope Innocent I reaffirmed the canon in a
letter to Bishop Exuperius of Toulouse. Another council at
Carthage, this one in the year 419, reaffirmed the canon of its
predecessors and asked Pope Boniface to "confirm this canon, for
these are the things which we have received from our fathers to be
read in church." All of these canons were identical to the modern
Catholic Bible, and all of them included the
deuterocanonicals.
This exact same canon was implicitly affirmed at the seventh
ecumenical council, II Nicaea (787), which approved the results of
the 419 Council of Carthage, and explicitly reaffirmed at the
ecumenical councils of Florence (1442), Trent (1546), Vatican I
(1870), and Vatican II (1965).
