How We Got the Old Testament

Most Christians today are woefully ignorant of the Old Testament. The Scripture says some very profound things about the Old Testament. In 2 Timothy 3:15-17 ^NASB “and that from childhood you have known the sacred writings which are able to give you the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.” Paul is writing to Timothy and he reminds him of how he through his mother and his grandmother was taught the Scriptures from infancy. Notice he refers to the Scriptures as the “scared writings.” Throughout the Scriptures in the New Testament we see this emphasis that there is a body of literature called sacred writings, called the Scriptures, the holy Scriptures and the Word of God.

At the time that Timothy was a child nothing in the New Testament had been written, so when Paul says “from childhood … sacred writings” he is talking about the Old Testament canon that was available to Timothy. The very fact that he uses the phrase “sacred writings” indicates that there was an assumed canon of Scripture at that time that was authoritative. He said in verse 15 that these scared writings were “able to give you the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.” So he says of the Old Testament that it is able to give all the information he needed to be saved and that it pointed to Jesus Christ. Then he says that all Scripture is inspired, the Greek word theopneustos [qeopneustoj] which means breathed out by God. All Scripture in this context refers not just to the New Testament but when we realize that Paul wrote this in about 62 AD only approximately 16 of the 27 New Testament books had been written the primary application of this is to the Old Testament canon, not to the New Testament. It certainly has application to the New Testament but in terms of interpretation, which is what he had in mind when he wrote it, he was referring mostly to what was available in the Old Testament canon.

Then we go to 2 Peter 1:20, 21 ^NASB “But know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is {a matter} of one’s own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.” When he is talking about the prophecy of Scripture here he is writing he is writing a little after Paul so a little more of the New Testament has been written but the canon of the New Testament has not been completed. So in his mind when he writes of the prophecy of Scripture he has in mind Old Testament canon, not New Testament canon. Then he goes on to make the phenomenal statement related to the mechanics of inspiration, i.e., these are not man’s writings about God or his experiences with God but it is God so governing the individual human authors of Scripture that under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit God guaranteed that what they wrote was the absolute truth and He preserved it from error. So this gives us a clear statement of divine inspiration and inerrancy related to Old Testament revelation. The fact that he uses the term “scripture” assumes that between himself and his audience there is a body of literature that is considered authoritative for the Christian life. Certain books and writings were included within that and certain ones were excluded. The very use of this term, as we will see, by Jesus, by the disciples and by the apostles assumes during the New Testament period that there was a closed canon of the Old Testament and that it was common knowledge what that canon was.

What we want to do first is look at the foundation which, really, is understanding the canon of the Old Testament. We want to ask how this came about and exactly what is the extent of the Old Testament canon, and how well it has been transmitted to us. The Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, was written by Moses about 1400 BC, almost 3500 years ago. How well has that been communicated to us and has the text been preserved? We should ask basic questions about understanding the text and how accurate it is.

The unifying concept in the Old Testament is the kingdom of God and its glorification. We see that God steps into a sinful cosmos, a universe that has already been judged for sin because of the fall of Satan and the fallen angels, and the Old Testament begins with the redemptive act of God. Even from the starting point in Genesis chapter one we see that the work of God, the outworking of the kingdom of God, in human history is redemptive and there is a salvation theme working throughout the Old Testament from its very inception. We see that in creation begins His first act of salvation and the entire Old Testament works out that redemptive plan. Psalm 74:12 ^NASB “Yet God is my king from of old, Who works deeds of deliverance in the midst of the earth.” God is the one who took the initiative to redeem creation after the angelic fall and he continually takes the initiative in human history to redeem mankind, to provide a gracious solution to man’s problem.

A common misunderstanding is the idea that there is no missionary thrust in the Old Testament. What we will see is that Israel is a missionary thrust. In the New Testament we have the church, and our Lord’s command to the church was to move from Jerusalem to Judea and then to the uttermost parts of the world, but Israel was to stay in one location. They were to be a missionary agency to the world and God would bring the world to Israel, and by them taking a stand for the Lord and teaching the truth Gentiles who came from all over the world would take the message back with them to the various countries. Israel continually failed in that and that is one reason God disciplined them by scattering them out among all the nations.

One of the other things we see is that when people start off with evangelism they immediately jump to Jesus Christ and start talking about the fact that they need to trust Him as their savior without laying any foundation. Think of how God evangelized the world. The incarnation did not take place at the beginning of human history. There was Adam’s sin and then God’s initial promise of salvation in Genesis chapter three. Man was not only that he would be cursed for sin but also that God would provide a solution. God says to Adam and Eve, “Your seed will crush the head of the serpent.” But it is not precise. The first few generations did not see the fulfillment of that promise. Why is it that God waited almost four thousand years plus before he provided a savior? It was because God had to lay the groundwork; He had to provide the foundation. When we are witnessing and we say they have to believe in Jesus who died for their sins we immediately start raising concepts that the hearer may not understand. We talk about the fact that Jesus is God, that He is the God-man. Well how do you know what God is? Their concept of God may not be the biblical concept of God, so the foundation is laid by going into the Old Testament and it is there, seeing how God works with the human race as a whole and then Israel specifically from Genesis 12, that we see who God is and come to understand His character. So that when Jesus comes along in the incarnation we have an understanding of His significance. But without the Old Testament as a prelude to that Jesus is rather meaningless; just another figure in human history.

The Old Testament canon and how we got it

First we will cover the arrangement of the canon, then the division of the canon, and then the extent and the transmission of the canon. The word “canon” means a rule or standard. It is from the Greek word kanon [kanwn]. It originally referred to a measuring rod or a reed used to measure things, and it came to refer to a rule or a standard. It has to do with describing that set of writings that are authoritative for the spiritual life. All of the Old Testament writers were Jewish and the Old Testament was transmitted and copied by Jews. They developed a group called the Scribes who were responsible for the transmission of the text and over the years they developed certain rules and criteria to preserve the text from error, eventually culminating in a group that became known as the Massoretes in the early middle ages.

The Old Testament writers were Jewish and the books were arranged in three divisions according to the office of the writer—that is the difference between the Hebrew canon and the English canon. For example, if the writer were a prophet what he wrote—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, etc.—he was classified among the prophets. Moses stood by himself as the author of the Pentateuch. Then there were the writings. The three divisions in the Old Testament canon were the Torah, the Nebiim, and the Kethubim. Torah basically means the law or instruction; Nebiim is from the Hebrew word for prophets, and the Kethubim is the writings. The Torah consisted of Genesis through Deuteronomy.

The Nebiim was divided into two groups: the A prophets—Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings; the latter prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and what we call the Minor Prophets were just lumped together in one group called the twelve. In the latter prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel) there was the distinction that they all had personal encounters with God and they were given tremendous revelation about the future and about God’s plan for mankind. We see that in their meeting with God it was an overwhelming experience for them.

The third division, the Kethubim, are the writings. Their authors were not prophets. Even though the Psalms were written by David who certainly had the gift of prophecy he had the office of king, he did not hold the office of prophet. The Proverbs were written by Solomon who also was a king. Job was written by someone unknown and we can’t call him a prophet. We are not even sure if he was Jewish; he probably wasn’t. Job is probably the oldest book in the Bible and the activities in it probably took place somewhere between the flood and the call of Abraham. The Song of Songs was written by Solomon the king, as was Ecclesiastes. Daniel was written by a statesman. Even though Daniel gave a tremendous amount of prophecy and was a prophet he did not hold that office. He was second in command in the Persian Empire, he was elevated to a position not unlike a Prime Minister under Nebuchadnezzar, but he did not hold the office of prophet. Ezra and Nehemiah were priests and probably wrote the books named for them, and other priests wrote the books of Chronicles. We are not sure who wrote Esther. The first book in a Hebrew Bible is Genesis and the last book in Chronicles.

In the English Bible the text is divided into five sections: Law—books of the Pentateuch; Historical books grouped according to their subject matter—Joshua through Esther; Poetic books—Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Lamentation; the major prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and in the English Bible Daniel is considered a major prophet, and the twelve Minor Prophets.

What is the canon’s extent? Are we sure that these are the only books that should be included in the canon, or should there be other book? First we need to define canon. The canon is those books which authoritatively reveal the plan, the purposes and the priorities of God for the human race. We say it that way because frequently we hear it defined as the books that are authoritative for faith and practice. When we hear that we ought to be aware of what is not said and not what is said. Faith and practice is restrictive. What about history? What about biology? What about the military and other things that may not relate to faith and practice that are somewhat tendential to the text? What we are saying is it is the Word of God because it is inspired by God, it is infallible, it authoritatively reveals the plans, the purposes and priorities of God in every arena of life for the human race. This is the basic difference between liberalism/liberal theology and conservative theology. Liberalism basically says that the Bible is not the Word from God but is the human Word about God. So in the liberal concepts man decided what would be in the canon. The conservative view is that man recognized the books that had inherent authority. If we take the time to read some of the books in the Apocrypha we can immediately see the differences. In the canon of Scripture the books are recognized as having authority, they are not given authority by a group of people.

There has never been a consensus among all Christians as to what should be in the canon. For example, Roman Catholics also include a group of books called the Apocrypha. Eastern Orthodox and Syrian churches also include various books that are not included as part of the Protestant canon of Scripture. The term “apocrypha” means hidden, obscure or spurious. Regarding the Apocrypha, one scholar who was the head of the New Testament department at Princeton University, and was a fairly well-known textual critic and scholar, writes in the Introduction to the Oxford Annotated Apocrypha: “At the end of the fourth century Pope Damasus commissioned Jerome, the most learned Biblical scholar of his day, to prepare the standard Latin version of the Scriptures [the Vulgate]. In the Old Testament Jerome followed the Hebrew canon and by means of prefaces called the readers attention to the separate category of the apocryphal books…”

So he recognized clearly that there was an Old Testament canon, he accepted only as canonical only the Hebrew Old Testament canon, and yet by means of a preface he said, these other books had been included because they do give some helpful information, were good to read but are not part of the canon. So even though Jerome translated the Vulgate and included the Apocrypha by means of his preface he rejected it as canonical; he wrote: “anything outside of these must be placed within the Apocrypha.”

“… Subsequent copies of the Latin Bible, however, were not always careful to transmit Jerome’s prefaces….” In other words, over the years those prefaces that excluded them from the canon dropped out, so that it looked for every reader that these were part of the canon of the Old Testament. “…and during the medieval period the western church generally regarded these books as part of the holy Scripture. One of the long sessions which occurred at the Council of Trent in 1536 with only 53 prelates present, and not one of those was a scholar distinguished for his historical learning, the Council of Trent decreed that the canon of the Old Testament includes all of the Apocrypha.”

What is significant about that is that at the end of their deliberations the Council of Trent anathematized anyone who does not accept these entire books with all their parts, as they have customarily been read in the Catholic church, and are found in the ancient versions of the Latin Vulgate, as sacred and canonical. So these unlearned scholars decided that because the Apocrypha was in the Latin Vulgate it was authoritative. That is how the Apocrypha came to be included in the Old Testament canon.

What are the problems with the Apocrypha?

1. They were written predominantly in Greek. Some were not.

2. They were written late after the Old Testament canon was already closed. It is clear from Jewish writings that the Old Testament canon that the Jews believed that the Old Testament canon was closed by about 275-300 BC. The Apocryphal books were written about 175-100 BC after the Jews had already recognized the closing of the canon.

3. There are a number of historical, geographical and chronological errors in these books. For example, in Tobit 1:4, 5 we read that the division of the kingdom under Jeroboam I which occurred in 931 BC occurred when Tobit was a young man. But Tobit is also said to have been a young Israelite captive living in Nineveh under Shalmaneser in the late eight century, 200 years later. According to Tobit 14:11 Tobit died when he was 158 years old, and it says 102 in the Latin. In Judith 1:1 there is the declaration that Nebuchadnezzar reigned over the Assyrians at Nineveh at the time when Arphaxad reigned over the Medes. The problem with that is that Nebuchadnezzar never reigned over the Assyrians at Nineveh and he was the second king of the neo-Babylonian empire and wasn’t an Assyrian, and this person Arphaxad is totally unknown to history.

4. There are various false doctrines in the Apocrypha. There are prayers and offerings for the dead in 2 Maccabees 12:33, 45; giving money makes atonement for sin and also justifies cruelty to slaves in Ecclesiasticus 3:36, 38; the pre-existence of souls in Wisdom of Solomon 8:18-20; various emanations from God which also came in as part of Gnosticism in Wisdom of Solomon 7:25. There is also support for the doctrine of purgatory and various other doctrines that are unique to Roman Catholicism in the Apocrypha.

So if the Apocryphal books are to be accepted into the Old Testament canon it can be seen that really change our theology and set of doctrines.

How do we resolve all of this? We have to understand that the Jewish community consistently recognized either 22 or 24 book, depending on how they were divided up. There were three communities of Jews in the ancient world? There was one community in Babylon that never returned after the Babylonian captivity, and in the Babylonian Talmud which was written about 200 AD but reflects oral traditions that go back much earlier (at least the time of Christ if not to 100 BC)—from Ginsberg’s Introduction to the Massoretical Text: “The most ancient record with regard to the sequence of the books in the Hebrew Scriptures is that given in the Babylonian Talmud. Passing over the Pentateuch, over which there has never been any doubt, it is here laid down in the highest authority that the order is Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Samuel, Kings, the basic order we have in the Hebrew Bible, and consists of 22 or 24 books. And that is the earliest listing among the Jewish community”—so the Babylonian community of Jews recognized the same 22 or 24 books which we have in our Old Testament canon.

The second major community of Jews was in Palestine (Judea). This community was represented by Josephus who affirmed that there were 22 books, and in 1^st Esdras which was also an apocryphal book that was written about the same time, towards the end of the first century. Josephus in the book Contra Apion—a defense of Judaism to a Gentile—written about 70-80 AD writes: “But we have not an innumerable multitude of books among us that contradict and disagree with other, like the Gentiles have, but only 22 books which contain the records of all the past times which we justly believe to be divine. Of them five belong to Moses, which contain his laws and traditions of the origin on mankind, a little more than three thousand years, but as to the time of the death of Moses until the reign of Artaxerxes, king of Persia who reigned after Xerxes, the prophets who after Moses wrote down what was done in their time in thirteen books. The remaining four books contain hymns to God, and precepts for the conduct of human life.” So he divides the books up differently but he still has the same basic Old Testament that we have. In Contra Apion 1:8 he writes that the exact succession of prophets was broken at about 300 BC.

The third major Jewish community was located in Alexandria. Philo, a Jewish historian who lived in Alexandria and represents that Egyptian community and lived at about the same time as our Lord, recognized the same 22 or 24 books.

So here we have three distinct Jewish communities in the inter-Testament period, geographically separated, who comes to the same conclusion that there are only 22 or 24 books that are authoritative from God.

Next we need to see how Jesus and the disciples handle the Old Testament canon. First of all, they presuppose a definite canon of Scripture by what they say. They use phrases like “it is written” and “the Scriptures, the holy Scriptures, the sacred writings”—all presuppose a set group of writings for the Old Testament that are canonical. This was the same group that was accepted by the Jewish community, they never dispute with the Pharisees and the Sadducees over what consists of Scripture; all believe in the same group of books that are the Scriptures. They simply assumed that some books were authoritative and other books were not authoritative, and they further assumed that everyone knew what they were talking about. So there is no reason to debate the canon as far as Jesus and the disciples are concerned.

Jesus recognized the same threefold division in Luke 24:44 ^NASB “Now He said to them, ‘These are My words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things which are written about Me in the Law of Moses [Torah] and the Prophets [Nebiim] and the Psalms [Kethubim] must be fulfilled’.” These are the three divisions of the Hebrew canon. In the Kethubim the first book was Psalms, and that whole section was often referred to simply as the Psalms. The Apocryphal books, incidentally, were never listed in any Jewish compilation of the Old Testament. In Matthew 23:35 Jesus is confronting the Pharisees and He makes a very interesting statement. ^NASB “so that upon you may fall {the guilt of} all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar.” Why does Jesus say from Abel to Zechariah? Zechariah is not the last prophet who was martyred chronologically in the Old Testament. The record of the assassination of Zechariah is found in 2 Chronicles 24:20, 21 and occurred about 825 BC. Uriah was slain in 600 BC, 225 years later, according to Jeremiah 26:20-23. So why does Jesus focus on Zechariah? Because He is looking at the list in terms of the canon. The Hebrew Old Testament canon began with Genesis but the last book was 2 Chronicles. So Jesus is saying that from the beginning of the Old Testament to the end of the Old Testament they (the Pharisees) had consistently rejected His prophets and killed them. This, again, indicates that Jesus accepted the Jewish canon as it stood at that particular time.

Further, New Testament writers never quote from the disputed books. Jude quotes from a book called Enoch. This was never disputed. Nobody ever considered including Enoch in the canon, but that is not the issue. Jude simply quotes from Enoch just as we would quote from any piece of literature to illustrate a point.

When we look at the transmission of the canon we need to look at some of the remarkable ways that God has preserved the canon and how he has made it clear to us. To the time of the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls most Protestant (liberal) theologians questioned the accuracy of the Massoretic Text. They much preferred the Septuagint or some of the other translations that could be dated back to about the time of Christ. There is a gap of about 100 years between the Old Testament canon and the Dead Sea scrolls. It is also interesting to note that in some of the apocryphal works, for example Judas Maccabees in 2 Maccabees, there is a recognition of the canon of the Old Testament as closed. That was written about 175 BC.

What did we learn from the Dead Sea scrolls? Weston Fields, Director of The Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation, wrote:

With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls we are brought back almost within a generation of the writing of the last book of the Bible. In fact, some Dead Sea scrolls scholars push the date back to 300 BC which is just a few years of the closing of the canon. The oldest scroll is considered to be dated at 250 BC and some would date the oldest one as early as 300 BC. There is probably only 25 years or less between the time the last book was written and our earliest copies of the Hebrew Old Testament. This gives us a great deal more confidence about the text and the way it was passed along because we are able to compare what has been passed to us, which are later copies and represent a very early text, with what we have in the scrolls, however fragmentary they might be. The scrolls revealed a number of interesting things about the accuracy of the Massoretic Text. Suddenly we had copies of the Old Testament that were a thousand to twelve hundred years earlier than what we already had, so we could compare them with one another. The importance of Qumran and the Dead Sea scrolls is that, first of all, it shows the history of the transmission of the text. We learn that there is a liberal as well as a conservative philosophy among the Jews in copying the text. In the Babylonian community they believed that if you understand it or not you still keep it the same. You don’t change anything; you don’t tamper with the text. In Palestine and in Egypt the view was to continually modernize the text—change the grammar, modernize the vocabulary, remove archaisms, smooth over any apparent discrepancies. The point is that by AD 100 the conservative philosophy won out. They were sanctioned y one of the most famous rabbis at the time … and so it was the conservative copies of the text that became the basis eventually for the Massoretic Text, and all of the copies of the Old Testament that reflected the liberal view, the looser view of copying the text, were destroyed and only the conservative ones were maintained.

The Qumran discoveries authenticate the Massoretic Text. M. Burrows, head of the American School of Oriental Research, wrote in a book called Light on the Dead Sea Scrolls:

In this state of affairs the discovery of the biblical manuscripts centuries older than the standard medieval manuscripts of the Old Testament is an event of major importance to textual criticism. Even though the discussion is somewhat technical we must assess the value of the Dead Sea Scrolls in this respect. The scroll which came to be known as the great Isaiah scroll is the only scroll that contains a whole book of the Bible, and with the exception of some of the small fragments it is the oldest of the manuscripts found in the caves. We may note the following: The age of the MSS does not indicate its importance. It may be older but that does not mean it is a good copy.

In the Isaiah scroll, which was written about 200 BC, when compared to the Massoretic Text there are about 200 variances. After comparing the 200 differences between the Qumran text and the Massoretic text all but thirteen of the differences were rejected.

Five years after the publication of the RSV Burrows wrote that he doubted the veracity, now, of most of those thirteen. This should give us confidence in the way God works in the preservation of the Old Testament to keep it free from error.