Okay, Jonathan asked," I would love to hear David's take on the canon of Scripture." I think this will just take half a minute to answer probably. Do the Anabaptists include broader canon in what they consider Scripture? What books should I use in my study?
Okay, when we talk about the canon, what comes as such a surprise to most Christians, unless they've grown up Catholic or Orthodox, something like that, is we are used, well, even Catholics should be used to the Old Testament being translated from the Masoretic text. But the apostles, when they quote the Old Testament, they nearly always quote from the Septuagint, and likewise, the early Christians.
Now, why this is important, I've already mentioned how it comes up with Jehovah, but the canon of the Septuagint was slightly different than the canon of the Masoretic text.
The canon of the Masoretic Text, I don't know what it would have been in the early centuries, but when it was formed by the Jewish leaders around the year 100, the Jewish religious leaders, they narrowed the canon down and eliminated certain books that they didn't particularly like, or that maybe had not been accepted by some of the rabbis in Palestine. Their canon was missing some of the books in the larger canon of the Septuagint.
But because the early Christians used the Septuagint as their Old Testament, their Old Testament canon was a little bit different than what Protestants have grown up being used to. Now, usually, if you ask a Protestant, certainly a Catholic, okay, what is the canon of the Scripture? Most reference books go to the Third Council of Carthage. I have A.D. 419 up there.
I think it's actually three-something, 390 or something like that, but it starts off saying that besides the canonical scriptures, nothing be read in church under the name of divine Scripture, and the canonical scriptures are as follows. Now this is a council, like I say, it was actually in the late 300s, and this is the canon that they listed.
The New Testament, the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the epistles of Paul, and they include Hebrews in that, the epistles of Peter, the epistles of John the Apostle, and there's two of Peter, three of John, Epistle of James, of Jude, and then the Book of Revelation, 27 books. Protestants all point to that. Yep, we follow the historic canon. But look at what the historic canon is for the Old Testament.
It says the canonical scriptures talking about the Old Testament are as follows: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, all what we would expect. Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Kings, that's four books because what we know as First and Second Samuel in English Bibles, it was 1st and 2nd and 3rd and 4th Kings. And then two books are the Chronicles. The Psalms are Psalter. Five books of Solomon.
Those would be the three we know, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, but also the wisdom of Solomon, and then the wisdom of Sirach, which was not even remotely attributed to Solomon, but it was grouped with the wisdom books which were under the heading of Solomon. Then the 12 books that we would know as the Minor Prophets, then Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Tobit, Judith, Esther, Ezra, two books of Ezra, and then I can't see the screen there, Malachi. Maccabees.
Maccabees, I'm sorry, in two books of the Maccabees. Yeah, this shocks most Christians. They think they're using what the historic canon is. This would be what the historic canon was, what we just saw on the screen. It's what the early Christians used as their canon. Now, there wasn't perfect uniformity among the early Christians, either on the New Testament canon or the Old Testament.
The apostles never handed down a list to the church and said," Okay, here's the canon of Scripture." You would think that they would have done that, but they didn't. Maybe they figured they had been on Earth long enough that people knew what scriptures they used, or they died. Many of them died unexpectedly soon. They got arrested, were martyred, and they didn't have time to do that. But even John, who was alive at the end, did not leave a canon of Scripture.
There wasn't uniformity among all the churches, but I'd say there was general agreement. And so In the 300s, when they started having councils and let's decide this or that, let's nail this down, they looked at the books that the church had been using for the previous 200 or 300 years, and that's the canon that they came up with. I mean, that is the historic canon.
It came as a great surprise to me because I had grown up being taught that the books of the so-called Apocrypha, this is something the Catholic Church added to the Bible. Well, actually, if there's anything, it's the other way around. These were the books the early Christians used. It was actually Jerome who had been commissioned by the Pope to do a new Latin translation of the Bible, who gave them the name of Apocrypha. And yeah, he didn't want them in the Scripture.
So, the Catholic Church actually kind of downplayed those books rather than inventing them. It was, like I say, the opposite.
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