Obviously, the Bible does not refer to the Bible, and any “biblical doctrine” (whatever exactly one of those is) of scripture is at best an inferential extrapolation. Those whose only authority is the Bible, however, are obliged not only to make the move, but to make it as strong a case as possible. The real problem comes, however, not in the extrapolation or the inferential nature of the argument, but in the attempt to apply the use of the term “scripture” in scripture to the 66 books of the Protestant Bible – the whole 66 and nothing but the 66.
The use of the term for Torah, prophets and psalms seems reasonably clear. Its use with regard to the rest of the books that came to be classified as “the writings” is less clear. It is also unclear whether it might be used to refer to other books. In this latter regard there are two uses of the term worth noting.
Now there came to Ephesus a Jew named Apollos, a native of Alexandria. He was an eloquent man, well-versed in the scriptures. … He powerfully refuted the Jews in public, showing by the scriptures that the Messiah is Jesus. (Acts 18:24,28)
But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work. (2 Timothy 3:14-17)
It seems reasonable to assume (absent other evidence) that the first use means the Greek scriptures as known in Alexandria. Further if we are to interpret 2 Timothy in the light of Acts 16:3 then Timothy is more likely to have known the scriptures in Greek – whatever Timothy’s Jewish faith, it is hardly rigorous or Torah observant, and Greek would be the language of his education.
It remains uncertain what books were classed as scripture by what period. The use of “scripture” to refer to collections of Greek writings (or Greek collections of writings) does at least raise the question whether, even in the NT, books other than those of the (later) Hebrew canon might have been referred to as “scripture” by scripture.
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Doug,
At the risk of being pedantic, John 10:22–39 mentions Chanukkah, which is itself Maccabean. Furthermore, it presents the Messiah *celebrating* Chanukkah, which might seem to imply some kind of authoritative nature of Maccabees. For that matter—as I’m sure you know—Jude alludes to The Assumption of Moses and quotes Enoch.
-JAK
I would say that there are enough allusions to Wisdom and Sirach to merit a second look at those books.
Hi Doug,
Very interesting historical question. I would point out that the whole idea of an Alexandrian canon is incredibly easy to debunk. For example, should not an Alexandrian canon show up in some way in Philo of Alexandria? But it doesn’t. Instead, Philo quotes almost exclusively from the Torah, and when he doesn’t, he quotes from a wide range of other books, but always from those found in the Tanakh. How about other Hellenistic Jewish authors from Egypt? What kind of canon-consciousness do they exhibit? Perhaps I’m forgetting something, but so far as I remember off hand, we find the same non-interest in books outside of what we now call the Hebrew Bible, from Ben Sira’s grandson onwards [to be sure, the tradition of Ben Sira suggests variation, at least later on, if one looks carefully at the text-critical data).
But of course, you are not limiting your discussion to Alexandrian Judaism, but intend all of Judaism in the Hellenistic Diaspora. Then you will want to read Steve Mason on Josephus: Josephus's Bible equals Athanasius's "Old Testament" (A's term); i.e., the Hebrew Bible padded here and shorter there, but with the same "books" as understood at the time by convention (for example, shorter in Jer 1-52, but inclusive of Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah, if I remember correctly).
The best evidence we have for a woolly-edged canon among sect(or)s of Judaism comes from Qumran, in Hebrew and Aramaic. There is a correlation here: Qumranic Judaism is a bit of an outlier; their functional canon is a bit of an outlier. For example, Jubilees is quoted for all the world like any other scripture that is profitable etc according to the criterion expressed in 2 Timothy. Next, from the New Testament, the Petrine corpus and Jude. This corpus has a set of traditional and scriptural coordinates that is a clear outlier with respect to what else we find in the NT as far as a functional canon is concerned.
To make a long story short, it's very probable that whole groups of Jewish Christians, i.e., that subset of the devout Jews from every nation of which Luke speaks who became the original nuclei of national/linguistic Christianities, had a more inclusive notion of 2 Timothy criteria-meeting scripture than others. This then shows up in odd isolated places like Ethiopia and Armenia. [With the NT, of course, it works the other way, with Syriac-speaking Christianity having a shorter canon than the 27). Furthermore, other texts among still other Jews and then Jewish-Christians, like Ben Sira according to some rabbis, were valued and appreciated and read but not put in the same basket.
Later on, the memory of the distinction of the two baskets faded in many centers of Christianity - but not in others, think Melito, Athanasius, and Gregory of Nazianzus). The putting of a book like Enoch in the second basket by Jews was considered by Tertullian as grounded in an unwillingness to accept Jesus as the Messiah - clearly prefigured of course most especially in Enoch. But of course T had his historical facts wrong.
On another note, I wonder why you refer to the 66 book collection containing the Old and New Testaments as if it were a Protestant invention. Does that make people as various as Athanasius of Alexandria, Gregory of Naziansu, Cyril of Jerusalem, Rufinus of Aquileia, and Jerome of Bethlehem Protestants? And what about Melito of Sardis, whose canon omitted Ezra and Nehemiah but included Wisdom of Solomon? Not quite a Protestant, but not nearly "a whole-church" Christian either.
Surely Origen had it right when he said (as is reported by Eusebius) that the "Hebrew tradition" had 22 books [generally speaking]. Cyprian of Carthage understood the distinction also. That’s why, in the anti-Jewish part of his catechism, he cites only from the Jewish canon as he knew it. When he goes on to ethics and such, then and only then does he quote from a larger set of scriptures.
Now, having said all that, I still agree with your main point: it is not respectful of the whole church to offer a translation of the Bible that does not include everything Christians in the various branches of Christianity currently hold to be scripture in the 2 Timothy sense of the term. That is, Athanasius’s Old and New Testaments plus whatever else is read in the churches or at least included in their traditional Bibles.
The Bible that come closest to doing this is another Protestant Bible: the NRSV. Catholic Bibles leave out books found in Orthodox churches. Orthodox Bibles leave out 4 Esdras found in the Vulgate. No one has seen fit to include Jubilees and 1 Enoch in a Bible of the whole church. I guess the Ethiopian Orthodox, who have these books in their Bible, are not part of the whole church.
The funny thing is this. A “whole church” Bible of the kind I envision here would, if marketed with gusto, sell like hotcakes.
Thanks for the erudite essay, John. I would point out, however, that I am nowhere claiming a “canon” exists as such at the time.
@ Justin and Joel – agreed, but outside the narrow limits of this post, which is whether the word “scripture” might have been used to refer to one of these books.
John, I remember having a very similar discussion with you a year or two ago, in which you took the opposite position. I’m glad to see that I have more or less convinced you of the antiquity and superiority of the 66 book “Protestant” canon!
Doug, let me clarify. I do believe that it is possible to see ‘Scripture’ as being applied more easily to these works than to say, Esther or Ruth, at least for a certain amount of time. We have to see that the idea of Scripture was a rather fluid one for the early Christian communities.
Agreed.
Doug,
A typical way of disposing of the problem is to limit the use of the term “canon” to a late period in which formal bodies existed which made formal decisions at least on a local or regional level. Then a further assumption is made, that before that time, whatever various authors say, canons only existed in the heads of individuals like Melito, Athanasius, and Gregory of N, and that Origen and Jerome talked about the Jews having something that walks like a canon and quacks like a canon but isn’t a canon because they just couldn’t have a canon because, even though there is plenty of evidence that a functional canon was accepted, the fact that there was some controversy nonetheless about Qohelet, Esther, and Song of Songs means things were not settled after all. Of course, the controversy proves the opposite, that there was no such thing as the absence of a canon in Greco-Roman Judaism, or its various offshoot Christianities. In short, if you are claiming that was no such thing as a canon “at the time,” I would just say you risk not being able to describe the situation on the ground accurately, in which not just Josephus and the author of 4 Ezra had very strong and neatly etched and not identical ideas about a set of scriptures with authority of a kind reserved for them alone, but each and every sector of Judaism and Christianity throughout the relevant period.
Peter,
It seems as if you miss the point entirely. What I pointed out before, and point out again this time, is that within the NT already you have more than sense of canon reflected, and the situation is even more complex in early Christianity. Protestants and Catholics and Orthodox who claim that they are producing a Bible for the Church Universal but do not include books other branches of the church include in their Bibles are making a false claim. Furthermore, Protestants need these books in their Bible, even if they are only books to be read rather than books on which to build doctrine.
John, you appear to be trying to have your cake (yes there was a canon) and eat it (every canon was different).
Ok, John, but why do “Protestants need these books in their Bible” and not (to quote one of my own comments elsewhere) “the works of Augustine/Luther/Cranmer/Calvin/Wesley/Todd Bentley(!) (delete as preferred)”? After all, aren’t those latter works, or many of them, also “books to be read”? What makes them less worthy of a place in the Bible than the works of Sirach, Tobit, the Maccabees etc? Hardly the profoundness of their theology.
Doug,
I probably need to work harder on presenting the historical facts as I understand them. It is my understanding that in the Greco-Roman period, various subsets of Judaism and Christianity included and excluded, for the purposes of exposition in worship and establishing doctrine, some books and not others. It isn’t that difficult to identify the common denominator of these various functional canons. For the OT, you have the Tanakh minus a few books like Song of Songs, Qohelet, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Esther. For the New Testament, it’s even more complex, given that the Gospels in Syriac-speaking Christianity were read and commented on in the form of the Diatessaron for a long stretch of time. Aside from that, the common denominator is clear enough from the discussions in Eusebius. So yes, there was a canon, in fact, people had different functional canons, long before local synods formalized them. And yes, it pleases me no end to have my cake and eat it, too.
Peter,
The question is how wedded Protestants are to a sectarian approach. It is well-known that Luther and others originally recommended the Apocrypha to the Church and had them printed in their Bibles, though they did not build systematic theology upon them.
You, on the other hand, have a tendency to belittle the literature in question. Since I have often noticed how this tendency correlates with a tendency to belittle things in the Old and New Testament as well (surreptitiously or overtly), I am dead set against it.
Your question about the works of Augustine and Bentley is not helpful. No one has ever suggested that their works belong in a Bible. True, some Christians have elevated such works to scriptural status. Ellen White’s works are an example. Note, however, that, at least de facto, they have been demoted again.
OK, John. BUT (you knew there’d be a but!) I think this equates to:
a) Most groups had a concept of a list of books they regarded as scripture. These lists substantially but not entirely overlapped.
b) Some groups with one version of the list still recognised others with a slightly different version of the list as the same community – whether because of a common core or a rule of faith. Whether you can call this “canon” is a matter of definition as much as history.
c) it is highly questionable whether any use of the word “scripture” in ‘scripture” refers to any list that is now taken to be canonical by an existing body. The use of the term “scripture” may refer to either a subset or even possibly a superset of the present Hebrew canon.
The last of these points is, of course, close to the heart of what I was suggesting in this post.
John, I strongly resent your ad hominem argument implying that I and others who “belittle” the Apocrypha also have “a tendency to belittle things in the Old and New Testament as well”. To start with, this is completely untrue and opposite to the truth – the staunchest fundamentalists who hang on every detail of the 66 books mostly ignore the Apocrypha, whereas those in mainline denominations who value the Apocrypha are more likely to have liberal opinions about the authority of the Bible. More importantly, this is also an entirely unworthy line of argument. If you can answer my point only by making a completely unjustified slur on my attitude to the 66 books which I recognise as the Bible, then I regret entering this exchange with you and going back on the decision I made some time ago not to interact with you because of your unscholarly and ad hominem way of arguing. Over and out!
Peter, is the attachment to the apocrypha the reason for the ubiquitous liberalism of the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Armenian, Coptic, Syrian, etc. churches over the last 1000 years?
Do you really think the staunch fundamentalist ignores the apocrypha because of their view of biblical authority? What did protestants redefine first, doctrine or canon? Not that correlation proves causation, but it deserves consideration.
Before accusing John of ad hominem argumentation, you might consider that he is simply stating his personal experience and why he thinks the way he does. If the books in question truly are scripture (in whatever secondary sense), maybe, just maybe, rejecting them tarnishes your view of scripture as a whole.
Nathan, I did not intend to include “the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Armenian, Coptic, Syrian, etc. churches” among “mainline denominations”. My comparison may have been incomplete in that it referred only to Protestants. But I think it is true as a general comparison of the two main wings of Protestantism.
I have made it abundantly clear that I do NOT hold that “the books in question truly are scripture”, so your “if” is out of place. I do not accept that my attitude to these non-scriptural books in any way tarnishes my view of the books I accept as scripture. I assumed that these latter were what John was referring to when he mentioned “the Old and New Testament” in contrast to “the literature in question”. It is on this basis that I complain about John associating me with “a tendency to belittle things in the Old and New Testament”, in an explicitly ad hominem paragraph which started with “You”.
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