Hi, I'm David Bercot, and we're doing another session of Q&A here on The Historic Faith. And the question submitted this week—well, there's a number of ones, but the one we're going to be answering—it's a very important question that I've been asked a lot over the last 30 years. And this is the question submitted: In light of Melito's list of the books of the Old Testament, how are we to view inclusion of the Apocrypha?
And this is a big point made by Protestants who want to argue for using the Jewish canon rather than the canon used by the early Christians. And they point to this list of books made by Melito. Now, he was Bishop of Sardis in the 2nd century, and this list probably was made about the year 180, so it's very old. Well, they say it does not include the books that Protestants refer to as the Apocrypha. It's seven books we're talking about. Now, we don't have Melito's actual writing concerning this list.
What we have is an excerpt of it quoted by Eusebius in the early 4th century. And this is what Eusebius quotes. I have shortened it just a little bit, leaving out things that aren't particularly relevant, okay? He says, "This is a letter from Melito. Melito to his brother, Brother Onesimus, greetings.
Since you have often asked, in view of your great zeal for the word, that I should make for you extracts from the law and the prophets concerning the Savior and the whole of our faith, and have further desired to learn the truth about the ancient books, especially with regard to their number and the manner in which they are arranged, I have been anxious to do such a thing. And so, going to the east, where these matters were spoken and performed, I learned there the books of the old covenant with accuracy.
Now I send you my treatise. These are their names. There are five books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. Next, Jesus, the son of Nave. Then Judges, Ruth, four books of kingdoms, two books of omissions—that's what we would call chronicles. By the way, the four books of kingdoms would be what Protestant Bibles call First and Second Samuel and First and Second Kings. But the Septuagint, it's the four books of the kingdom. All right?
The Psalms of David, Proverbs, and the wisdom of Solomon. Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, Job, and among the prophets, Isaiah and Jeremiah. There are 12 prophets in one book. That's what we know today as the minor prophets. And finally, Daniel, Ezekiel, and Esdras, the Greek name for Ezra. Okay. As you know, if you've listened to me speak, if you've read my books, you know I make a big thing about using primary sources for our source of information. And here we have kind of a primary source, okay?
If you think of a primary source as by the letter or number one, and a secondary source by the number two, okay? When you have an excerpt from a primary source, then you kind of have a 1.5. That is because you don't know what preceded it and what came after it. And so it is a primary source, but it's not the whole thing. For example, the Bible is the primary source, okay, for all spiritual revelation. And the New Testament is our main source and the primary source of Christian writings.
Primary meaning it is the original source. But now when somebody quotes a few verses, let's say from Paul, well, yeah, it's a primary source. It's Paul's words, but you only have an excerpt.
And so you might say it's a 1.5 because we've all seen this, that you can proof text, you can quote a passage here and a passage there, and you can represent Paul saying something that is very different than what you might arrive at if you read all of Paul's writings, or at least read all of that particular letter, but ideally you'd want to read all of Paul's writings. So it's the same here. We have an excerpt from Melito, but we don't know what came before and after it. We don't have any discussion.
Now, I trust Eusebius to have quoted him accurately. I'm not worried about that. Eusebius was a fine historian. It's just that we don't know what the whole story is, and so we have to kind of flesh it out ourselves. Now, Protestants pick and choose what they want to out of this list, the list that I just read you. As I mentioned when we were reading it, it's interesting that Melito uses the names from the Septuagint, not the names from the Masoretic text.
For example, when he comes to what we know as Joshua, he lists Jesus, the son of Nave. That's the Greek name for Joshua, the son of Nun. Okay? I have already pointed out he lists the four books of kingdoms. That's how it's listed in the Septuagint. It's not how it's listed in the Masoretic text. He lists the two books of omissions that from the Masoretic text we know as First and Second Chronicles. All right? And then Protestants like to make assumptions because he doesn't list the entire Protestant canon.
He lists Jeremiah, but he does not list Lamentations. And they say, well, when he lists Jeremiah, he's including Lamentations. That's very plausible. But likewise, when early Christians sometimes list Jeremiah, they're also including Baruch, the letter written by his secretary. So yeah, if you're going to make assumptions and say, well, this book includes something else, it's just as fair to say, well, he's including Baruch along with Jeremiah. Likewise, he lists Daniel. Okay?
Is he meaning the version of Daniel you find in the Septuagint or the version you find in the Masoretic text? Was he even aware that there was a difference? I don't know. Because in the Septuagint, the book of Daniel includes an account of Susannah and some other accounts that we in the King James are listed as separate books, like the book of Susannah and Bell and the Dragon. Well, these were not separate books. They were just part of the book of Daniel in the Septuagint.
So you don't know if he's including those or not because he just includes Daniel and they were part of the Daniel as it was found in the Septuagint. He lists Esdras. Okay? Does he mean the Esdras that's found in the Septuagint? Because that's a book that is called part of the Apocrypha by the Protestants, but it's simply the book of Ezra as it appears in the Septuagint, and it includes a lot of what we find in the book of Nehemiah.
Now, Protestants, when they go over this list, you'll notice Nehemiah is not included. And they say, well, Ezra includes Nehemiah. Again, very plausible. That's not an absurd assumption, but you're having to make some assumptions. Just as plausible to say he says Esdras, that he means Esdras, the book found in the Septuagint. That is kind of a combination of Ezra and Nehemiah, but it's a little different than both, you know, what is found in the Septuagint. Okay. Now, this list clearly omits Esther.
There's no way around it. There's no way someone can say, well, here it really means Esther. Esther is not included, and that's not accidental. Esther was not included in the Jewish canon as it appeared at the close of the first century, or I should say the early second century, when the Jews, the Jewish rabbis, these were basically the scribes and Pharisees, when they got control of Judaism after the destruction of the temple, then they came up with their own canon of scripture shortly after the year 100.
And this was probably at the center of rabbinical teaching in Jamnia, there in Palestine. That initial canon that they came up with did not include Esther. It was several centuries before the Jews as a whole accepted Esther as part of their canon of scripture. So here, Esther is not included. So if you're going to point to this and say, well, this proves what the Old Testament canon is, well, then you have a real problem because Esther is not part of it.
The other thing that Protestants want to always fudge on is that it clearly lists the wisdom of Solomon, one of the seven books from the Septuagint's Old Testament canon. And they say, well, that's a reference to Proverbs. The problem with that is that Melito expressly lists Proverbs. He lists Proverbs, and then he says the wisdom of Solomon. So, you know, it's two different books. He lists Proverbs, he lists the wisdom of Solomon, he lists Ecclesiastes, and he lists Song of Solomon.
So come on, don't say wisdom of Solomon means Proverbs. So now you have another complication that if you want to claim, well, this is the official early Christian list of the Old Testament canon, then you need to accept the wisdom of Solomon as being part of that, and you need to not accept Esther as part of it. Okay, that's what we have from that list, and that's as far as Protestants ever go, and they don't even tell you the things I've just pointed out.
But we should ask ourselves, the important question is, what is this a list of? It's a list that Eusebius gives us. He's quoting different things from Melito of Sardis, and he just quotes from this letter. As I mentioned, Melito was the respected bishop of Sardis, which was one of the seven churches listed there in Revelation that received one of the letters from Jesus. So this was not a new church. This wasn't a new church, a new church plant.
It goes back to New Testament times, at least to the year, let's say, near 95. It may have been much, much earlier than that. Now, are we to believe that a respected bishop of this church, at least 80 years after this church has been planted, a well-established church, you have had a succession of bishops there and elders, and are we to believe that this bishop doesn't even know what books constitute the Old Testament? Let me just ask you, the listener, do you know which books constitute the Old Testament?
Do you know which books your church accepts as the Old Testament books? Now, you may not be able to name all of them off the top of your head. I'm guessing you can probably name most of them. If you're a Protestant, your church accepts 39 books. I'm going to guess you can probably name all 39 of those, or you might get, you might forget some of the so-called minor prophets, all right? But you've got the rest of them. And you're just, let's say you're just a member of the church.
And we're to believe this is a bishop and somebody asks him, and I don't know, I'm going to have to research that. I mean, is that believable? And is it believable that this bishop has had so little interest in that question? I mean, he's been preaching every Sunday. He studies the word of God. And yet he's had so little interest, he's never bothered to go and check, well, what books even constitute the Old Testament? And he only does it because his friend Onesimus writes him a letter and asks him.
Now, is that believable that this bishop doesn't know what books are accepted by Christians as being the Old Testament? And even worse, when his friend asks him that question, he can't simply go to his Bible because they were using Bibles at that time, you know, a codex, you know, in a bound form as a book. They were using that, Christians, you know, in the year 180, that he can't just go to his Bible and say, here's the list.
Or if somehow his church doesn't have a codex, you know, a book form of the Bible, that he can't go to the church library where they would have all of the scrolls. And certainly a church like Sardis would have all of them. He's been preaching from them. I mean, their style of preaching back then in both the synagogue and in the early church was they went through the entire Bible. They had a cycle of reading. And every Sunday in the church, somebody would get up and read a section of the Bible.
And then the bishop or another minister would preach from that section. And they would follow in chronological order through the whole Bible, Old Testament and New, and it might be like a three-year cycle, something like that. They did that in the synagogue, as I said, and in the church alike. They've been preaching from this. They've had a list to follow. And we're to believe that this bishop can't just go to that list that is like, I don't know what the books are.
But see, that's what the Protestants, if what they're telling us, the way they present it, if that's what he's doing is giving us a list of the books that Christians accept as the Old Testament canon, then that's what we have to believe that this bishop, he's well respected. He's part of an old, ancient, established church, and he doesn't even know. And his whole church doesn't know because he can't even go to his church library or to the copy of the Bible that they have there in his church.
So what's he been preaching from all of this time? Has he just been guessing what books are part of the Old Testament? They've been going on for at least 80 years there in Sardis. Again, is that believable? I would argue no, there is that is not even remotely believable. Now, but let's just imagine for sake of argument that all these things I've mentioned, these absurd things are somehow true. This bishop has no idea of what constitutes the Christian Old Testament. No one else in his church knows.
They don't have a Bible that contains the Old Testament. And so this bishop has to ask, when someone asks him, what are the books, if he's being asked, what are the books of the Christian Old Testament, which is how Protestants want to present this, that he has to go and ask somebody else which books constitute the Christian Old Testament. Now, let's imagine that's the absurd situation. Now, tell me, why would he not have asked the bishop or the elders in the church in Ephesus? He was only 77 miles away.
That church had been around for a long time. It was probably older than the church in Sardis. It also was one of the seven churches listed there in Revelation. More importantly, Paul had written a letter to the Ephesians. So that church was one of the apostolic churches where Paul or other apostles had taught in person. And it was a church that dated back at least to the year 60 and probably much earlier than that.
So are we to assume that when Melito has asked this question and he's so dumb, even though he's a bishop, he doesn't know what books constitute the Old Testament? No one in his church knows. Their Bible is apparently deficient. That he doesn't just send somebody over to Ephesus, 77 miles away, to ask them, hey, please give us a list of the Old Testament books that Christians accept as the Old Testament. I mean, why wouldn't he do that if that's what the question was?
What books do Christians accept as the Old Testament? That he doesn't go to the closest apostolic church there in Ephesus. But he doesn't go there. Why doesn't he go there? Well, let's go back to the question of what is it that Onesimus was seeking? He's answering the question that his friend Onesimus, who is a Christian, is asking him. And this is what is being asked. Sardis says this in response to Onesimus. I'm going to read this to you.
He says, since you have often asked in view of your great zeal for the word. So this is someone who has great zeal for the word of God. And we're to believe that he, Onesimus, doesn't know what the Old Testament is, what books constitute it. And so he's having to ask Melito. And it turns out Melito doesn't know. Okay. But now listen to what he's asking, though.
He says, you've often asked that I should make for you extracts from the law and the prophets concerning the Savior and the whole or entirety of our faith and have further desired to learn the truth about the ancient books, especially with regard to their number and the manner in which they are arranged. And I have been anxious to do such a thing. So Onesimus is wanting to be able to prove the Christian faith from the books of the Old Covenant, from the law and the prophets.
He wants to be able to prove that Jesus is the Messiah and all of the other things that are part of the Christian faith, the belief in the Trinity and the resurrection of the dead and the judgment day and all of these things that we as Christians believe. He's wanting to prove them not from the New Testament writings, but from the Old Testament, the books of the Old Covenant is the way that he puts it.
Now, a lot of translations of this letter will say the books of the Old Testament, but that term Old Testament, as we know it today, was not in use yet. When they say Old Testament, the word Testament is the Greek word for covenant. He's saying the books of the Old Covenant. Okay. So Onesimus wants to be able to prove the Christian faith from the books of the Old Covenant, from the Jewish scriptures. Why is that? It's so he can effectively witness to the Jews.
Therefore, he had to find out which books the Jews accepted and which ones they didn't. Because he knew that their canon differed from the Christian Old Testament canon. I mean, Origen went through this same process. And Origen discusses this. Origen says he went to the Jewish scribes and he found out which books they accepted and which ones they didn't.
So that when he was witnessing to them, he wouldn't end up using one of the books in the Christian Old Testament that Christians accepted as canonical, such as the wisdom of Solomon or the wisdom of Sirach, only to be told, well, that's not in the Bible. He wanted to know what was in their Bible, in their canon of scripture. Like I say, that's Origen I'm talking about. He describes going through that process. Justin Martyr brings this up.
If you've read the work Dialogue with Trypho, the Jew, he's talking to the Jews. And he says, you all have removed a lot of books from your Bible. But he said, you know, for the purpose of our discussion, I'm going to argue the truth of Christianity from the books that you accept as canonical since you have removed these other books. They were accepted as canonical by Jews. They're not Christian books. They're Jewish books.
But now the scribes and Pharisees had rejected them because the Christians were using them to such great effect. Okay. So Melito isn't describing the Christian Old Testament canon. I mean, if he had been, he would have simply rattled it off. I mean, he would have known that. If he didn't know it by memory, which he probably would have, he'd just pick up the Bible or pick up their list that they had in their church and, you know, rattled it off.
No, he said he had to travel to the east, referring to Palestine, which would have been mainly south, but a little bit east of Sardis. Now, why would he go down there to find the answer to this question? I mean, after all, there was a large Jewish synagogue right there in Sardis. I mean, I know personally because I've been there. I've been in Sardis and I've walked through the ruins of a very nice Jewish synagogue here. Let me show you some. Let me see. Let me do this where I'm showing you my screen. Share. Okay.
Window. Okay. So if you can see that, that is the Jewish synagogue in Sardis. The remains of it, as you can see, it's a pretty nice synagogue. Here's another view. So it was large. They had a big congregation there. This wasn't some, you know, just a little fly-by-night, you know, tiny synagogue that, oh, you wouldn't go there to ask them what their canon was because they wouldn't necessarily know that. No, this was a big synagogue. So let me go back, stop sharing, and I'll get back to myself. Okay.
So why didn't he just go across the street or, you know, whatever it was and ask them what the Jewish canon was? The problem is that this was Sardis, where Greek-speaking Jews lived. And very likely these Jews were still using the Septuagint. I mean, it had been less, you know, it had only been 80 years or less that the scribes and Pharisees had tried to eradicate the Septuagint from use by the Jews. But Jews had been using it all over the world for, you know, a couple hundred years.
So it would have taken a while for this to have gone through the Jewish synagogues. The scribes and Pharisees had to come up with a new Greek translation of the Old Testament to replace the Septuagint. It wasn't anywhere's the one done by Aquila or Aquila. It wasn't anywhere's near on the same quality as the Septuagint. And of course, the Septuagint had been their beloved translation for so long.
It took a while, probably a number of centuries before all of the Jews who lived out among the Gentiles had quit using the Septuagint. So the Jewish canon being used there in Sardis was probably the canon of the Septuagint, or at least similar to it. It very likely would not have corresponded with the quote official canon that was being promoted by the center of rabbinical Judaism, which was down in Palestine. I'm not sure in 180 if it was still Jamnia. It had been at the beginning of the second century.
It may still have been. I'm not a Jewish historian, but somewhere in Palestine would have been the center. So that's why he travels all the way down there to find out officially, okay, what is the Jewish canon as recognized by this descendants of the scribes and Pharisees there in Palestine? And that's the list that Melito sends back to his friend Onesimus. And we know that this is the list of the Pharisees because we have other sources like Josephus that have a very similar one.
But his list shows that it's still in the state of flux. The book of Esther is still not accepted, apparently, by most Jews. And the wisdom of Solomon is still included in the canon, Old Testament canon by many Jews, even down there in Palestine. Okay. So in short, does the list furnished by Melito disprove the canon of the Septuagint, which included the seven books that the Protestants have removed from the scriptures, the seven books that the Protestants called the Apocrypha? No, not at all.
Melito isn't giving us a list of the Old Testament canon that was recognized by Christians. He has gone down to Palestine to find out what is the canon of scripture that the Jews officially recognize. And he had to go down there to find out. So his list is of interest if we're researching what Jews accepted as the canon back in the year 180. It doesn't tell us anything as to what Christians accepted as the Old Testament canon. It illustrates the problem of people who've never read the early Christian writings.
And yet they'll quote excerpts from them and think they know what they're talking about. They pretend that they have all of this knowledge because they read a quote. And I'm sorry, it doesn't work that way with early Christianity. You have to read, well, ideally all of their writings, you know, up to the time of Constantine, or at least read, you know, the equivalent of one or two volumes of the Ante-Nicene Fathers.
You know, after a while, yeah, you do see the same things over and over and over again, which is what you want to see. I mean, that's great. It shows there's a consistency. But you can't just read an excerpt and quote it and think that you know what they believed back then. If you want to know what the Old Testament canon was that the early Christians used, well, you go and read their writings. Read all 10 volumes of them. By the end of that, you know what their Old Testament canon was.
You'll see beyond any doubt that they quoted from and accepted as inspired scripture the seven books that Protestants refer to as the Apocrypha now. Generally speaking, they didn't have official lists of either the Old or the New Testaments. You'll see a list here or there, but they're nothing official. They're written by one person. And often you don't even know what exactly it is because you just have an excerpt.
Like in this case, you've got to do a little detective work here, but he does thankfully provide enough of the context of what he was doing was preparing a list of scriptures from the Old Testament that could be quoted to the Jews to prove that Jesus is the Messiah, perhaps to prove his divinity and to prove some of the other doctrines of Christianity from the Old Testament.
But if he was going to put together this compilation of scriptures, he wanted to make sure he was going to be making the compilation from the books that the Jews officially recognized as scripture. So you can compile a list of the Old Testament canon accepted by the pre-Nicene Christians by going and reading, like I say, their writings from the pre-Nicene period and making a list of which books do they cite as scripture, which books do they quote from or make reference to as being inspired scripture.
And you can come up with the canon that we have in the pretty much the canon that Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox and other ancient churches accept today. In fact, it's the canon that's in the King James Bible, also in the Geneva Bible, I assume also in the, I'm sure in the Tyndale Bible, and it's in the Wycliffe Bible. So you can go back to any of those English Bibles until it wasn't until the 1800s that these books were taken out of even the Christian Old Testament.
So you don't have to, I mean, you want to go back to the early Christians to see what they looked at, but like I say, you don't have to. I mean, you can just go back to the year 1800 or so and find these books in the Bibles used by nearly all Christians. Nevertheless, if it is important to you, when the institutional church did provide an official list of the Old Testament canon, and they didn't do this until the year 419 AD. Okay. So this is like almost a hundred years after the Council of Nicaea.
Like I say, the early Christians weren't into making lists of canon. I mean, you'll see one or two here, but they're not official. Okay. And they serve different purposes. But now you finally get an official one in the year 419, at least official as far as the Western Church. And anyone can look this up. This is, it's the Council of Carthage. Let me see if I have it here in my notes. It's the Council of Carthage in the year 419. There were a number of councils of Carthage.
That's why I'm hesitating here, because if you just look up Council of Carthage, you're going to see there were several. So you want the one from the year 419, and anyone can look this up on the internet or, you know, in history books. And there you will be given an official list of the Old Testament. It's the first one made in the West by the church in general instead of just by some individual.
And you find that it includes all seven of the books that Protestants called the Apocrypha and that were actually just books that were part of the canon of the Septuagint that the scribes and Pharisees rejected and later the Protestants rejected. And you'll see that the Council of Carthage did not regard the list of Melito as an authoritative list of the Christian Old Testament. It's a list of the Jewish Old Testament of his day as accepted down there in Palestine. So I hope this has answered your question.
Thank you for sending the question in. And I look forward to visiting with all of you in a week where we will look at another question submitted by a reader. And thank you. Keep sending the questions in. I can't answer every question every week, but I am trying to work through and answer all of the questions, but it may take me a while I'm, you know, running a little bit behind on them because a number of them have come in, which I appreciate. I'd rather have more questions than I can answer than too few of them.
So thank you for your interest in the scripture and in early Christianity. God bless you.
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