How did the canon come together into what we know as the Old and New Testaments?
This text is from a transcript of a talk by David Gooding, entitled ‘Key New Testament Themes’ (1996).
That's a very interesting question, and of practical importance. If you're interested in getting people studying the Bible, then underneath somewhere, these are matters of very big practical concern. Nowadays, the United Bible Societies have taken to the practice of publishing Bibles with the Old Testament Apocrypha attached. That has been a very big change in policy and it raises some very big questions. For example, the Apocrypha teaches purgatory. If you're going to witness to people who hold to the doctrine of purgatory, you're going to have a very difficult job to show it isn't in the Bible if your Bible has the Apocrypha in it!
Secondly, who decides whether this Apocrypha should be in the Bible or not? Some will say the church decides it. That is false of course, for the reasons we have already considered. If you accept the Old Testament Apocrypha in your Bible, you may do it because a church or denomination somewhere said so, but do you really want to accept that? That has very far-reaching implications. And thirdly, do just imagine coming to an atheist with a Bible that includes the Apocrypha with all those stories—Bel and the Dragon and such like—and having to argue to your atheist friends that these are inspired. What absolute nonsense and piffle it is, with one of the chaps saying, as he does at the end of 2 Maccabees, 'I fear I've made a lot of mistakes, but I've done the best I could. Don't criticize me too badly.' Imagine that kind of thing in the Bible—the inspired word of God! So we need to inform ourselves on these matters.
Why there has been this big move is a complicated thing, but it's been made much easier because, in the liberal sections of the Protestant Church, the question of what is or isn't in the Bible has become almost irrelevant. About thirty years ago, I sat in Queen's University and listened to a theologian, Professor C. F. Evans of London University, discoursing on the Bible. He told the gathered assembly that the Bible was like an electric light hanging down from the ceiling. At the centre of the room, it was very bright, but as you moved out from the centre, it was not quite so bright. Presently, you got to a distance, near the edges, when it was more dark than it was bright, and in the end, you couldn't distinguish the light from the darkness. That was what the Bible was and therefore, the question of what the canon is, was nowadays irrelevant, because the Bible itself was light in its central bits, wherever they might be placed, and progressively darker and darker as you get to the edges of the Bible. The audience in Queen's clapped his lecture. I'm afraid I didn't clap. If the canon of Scripture is like that, if the Bible itself is like that, you don't need to bother whether the Apocrypha is in it or out of it, do you? That is serious.
The Jewish canon of Scripture never included the Apocrypha, and Jesus never quoted from them
The question of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha—or what are now called the Deuterocanonicals in theological circles, because it sounds more elevated—is easy to answer. The Jews of our Lord's time never did recognize what are now called the Deuterocanonical, or Apocryphal books. They're not likely to have done either. Some of the books in the Apocrypha are a translation of Hebrew works, but some are written straight in Greek. No Jew of our Lord's day would have accepted a book that was composed straight in Greek as part of the canon of the Old Testament. And if you follow our Lord and his idea of the canon, it is the canon that we now have. You see that from various observations. Our Lord in his resurrection, Luke 24, preached to them all things that were written in Moses, in the Prophets and in the Psalms. They are the three divisions of the Hebrew canon. Moses has the first five books, the Prophets are the former prophets and the latter prophets.
The former prophets are the historical books—Joshua, Judges, First and Second Samuel, First and Second Kings. The Jews regarded them as prophetic writings. They are prophetic interpretations of history, of course. The latter prophets being the big prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the minor prophets, as we call them, though Daniel isn't included in that lot, and all of Lamentations. Then the third division, called the Psalms sometimes, because the psalms were the biggest component, or the writings, Kethuvim, and they contained the rest of the canonical books, including First and Second Chronicles. So our Lord is witness to this. Likewise in his remark about the blood of the martyrs, from Abel to Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the house. Abel of course comes in Genesis and in the Jewish canon, Second Chronicles is the last book of the third division, and it is Chronicles that tells us of the assassination of the prophet Zechariah in the court of the house of the Lord. So our Lord is quoting the martyrs from one end of the canon to the other, so to speak, so that is very important.
It's also to be noted why those non-canonical books came to be included with the Scriptures in some places. Among the Jews, as you know, their books of Scripture were each written on individual scrolls, and the Jews went on writing their Scriptures in scrolls for quite a while, even in the Christian era. The early Christians, however, partly because they were poor, I suspect, and maybe for other reasons, began to use the book form—what we call a codex. That's much handier, and you can get far more in a book than you can in a scroll. Now when they came to write the Scriptures in a book, they had to produce each scroll and copy it into the book. In some parts of Christendom, in the century after the apostles, there were circulating all these other bits of literature. Just like if I came to your library, I might well see a Bible on your shelf and beside it, there'd be a prayer book maybe, and then beside it there would be a book by John Stott, and here would be John Bunyan. The fact that they stood side-by-side on your bookshelf wouldn't mean you gave them all equal authority, but some of the Christians began including all these other things in the codex. It is the fact that now, if you look at the big manuscript codices containing the New Testament and the Old Testament, you will not find two that have the same list of Apocryphal books: they all have a different list. And in the big manuscripts, like Vaticanus B and Alexandrinus A, there are far more of these other books than are commonly accepted even in the Apocrypha. It's very complicated. It happened in part because, by that time, very few Christians knew Hebrew any more. Even great scholars like Saint Augustine didn't know any Hebrew and he couldn't check the thing. Eventually, the Old Testament in Hebrew was translated into Greek, before the Christian era, and when the Christian missionaries went to Greek-speaking countries, they took with them these Greek translations already in existence and used them in their missionary work.
So then these books got incorporated into the Greek Old Testament and from that, they were translated into Latin in countries like North Africa and Italy. So the first Latin Bible, the Old Latin Bible, was a translation of a Greek translation of the Hebrew, and a pretty pickle the translation turned out to be, absolute gibberish in some parts. The missionaries used it as the best translation they had and, God be praised, he very often uses the poorest of translations. There's enough of the gospel in it to see folk converted.
But then one of the popes got dissatisfied with this situation and he asked Jerome to revise the Old Latin, which was in a terrible state, because people had started to revise it in bits and pieces all over the place. Now Jerome was a very good Hebrew scholar. He lived in Bethlehem in Palestine, and learnt Hebrew from the Jewish rabbis: a very unusual type was Jerome, to keep that contact with the Jews. He tried to revise the Old Latin and gave up in despair—it was such an impossible mess. So he decided to translate the Bible, the Old Testament, straight from the Hebrew into Latin, which he did. And that became eventually known as the Vulgate, the great Roman Catholic Latin translation of the Old Testament and of the New, accepted thereafter for centuries by the Roman Catholic Church.
Jerome would not have the Apocrypha as part of his translation and called it by some very unparliamentarily names—he was a rather irritable old boy! There arose a colossal dispute between him and St. Augustine, who was all for the Apocrypha. If you are that way minded and you have a spare Thursday afternoon, you could go down to Queen's and get out the correspondence between Jerome and St. Augustine and read it still. Augustine's arguments are pitiful, compared to the scholarly arguments of Jerome. But there was also a practical side to it. St. Augustine was concerned that bishops could be in an embarrassing situation if, because they didn't know Hebrew, they couldn't tell their congregation what was or was not part of the Old Testament and would have to appeal to the Jews to tell them! Well I suppose that's a consideration. These are things to be remembered.
We need to remember our church history; and if you remember back to yesterday, I was pointing out how that after the initial paragraphs, when Paul establishes his authority as apostle, he goes off into a large wodge of church history. Not in the modern, conventional sense of the church fathers, etc. but what happened right from the first days onwards. It's important that we know that bit of church history. The question with the New Testament canon is a bit more complicated, but worth exploring. It's worth getting it under our belts one of these days. There are some knowledgeable individuals who have a genuine reverence for the Apocrypha and the issue might come up, even in an evangelistic session, and you would need to have some factual knowledge about it.
