What Kind of a Book is the Bible? . . .

THE MAKING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

This would better be entitled The Making of the Old Testament Scriptures, or better still . . . the Old Covenant Scriptures, for that literature extending from Genesis to Malachi is not the Old Testament or Old Covenant, but rather the scriptures produced by a covenant people. Jer. 31:32 plainly says that the covenant with Israel was made “when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant which they broke.” Israel was a covenant people before any of the Old Covenant scriptures were produced. Dt. 5:2-3 is equally clear: “The Lord our God made a covenant with us in Horeb. Not with our fathers did the Lord make this covenant, but with us, who are all of us here alive this day.”

The same is true of the New Covenant (It was of course the new that made the first old), which was ratified on the day of Pentecost in Acts 2. Jesus was its mediator (Heb. 9:15), and it became a reality when men accepted him as the Christ and obeyed him in baptism. Neither the Old or the New Covenants depended on literature for their existence, except that the Old was burned into tables of stone by the finger of God, the New being written upon tablets of human hearts (2 Cor. 3:3). Such books as Romans and Galatians are not, therefore, parts of the New Covenant, for the second Covenant had long been in existence before those letters were ever written. This helps to explain why some of us are saying that fellowship with Christ is a matter of covenantal relationship, based upon faith and baptism, and not a matter of conformity of interpretation of the New Covenant scriptures. The early Christians were one together, sharing in the fellowship of the Spirit, long before there were any New Covenant scriptures. Those scriptures enhance and strengthen the fellowship of the Spirit, but they do not create it except as they reveal the nature of the covenant that Christ mediates.

So Israel was a covenant people all along, from the time that God called them out of Egypt and made a covenant with them on Mt. Sinai. If the Messiah had come then, there would never have been any Old Testament scriptures, but the Old Covenant would have been just as real. So with the New Covenant. If Jesus had returned within 15 or 20 years of his advent, there would never have been any New Testament, as we call it, but the New Covenant would have nonetheless existed. God wrote that on human hearts, beginning at Pentecost. If you are part of that covenant, it is because God has written it upon your heart for Jesus’ sake, and not because you have memorized something from some book. That one Book may have revealed to you the covenant, but that Book, whether in the form of the Old or New Covenant scriptures, or both, is not the covenant.

It is to be expected that in the long history that followed the making of the first covenant that a body of literature would emerge. Surely it was according to God’s plan that such would be the case, for in that history God was molding a nation as well as a religion, both serving crucial roles in presenting the Messiah to the world. In creating a nation He also created scriptures designed to educate people in reference to the Messiah. Prophets not only spoke but they also wrote, offering both consolation and judgment, preparing Israel for her ultimate mission.

The scriptures that grew out of the first covenant were the Bible of the primitive church. John 2:22 for example. “When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word which Jesus had spoken.” Jesus taught his disciples that they were to “believe all that the prophets have spoken” about him (Lk. 24:26), and in verse 27 we have: “And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.” And in verse 44 the Lord divides those scriptures in the way we still find them: “Everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled.” These were the scriptures of the early church.

Thus Paul refers to the “holy scriptures” in Ro. 1:2 and to the “sacred writings” in 2 Tim. 3:15. In 1 Cor. 15 he argues that the death and resurrection of Jesus is “according to the scriptures,” and in Gal. 4:30 he asks, “What does the scripture say?” All this is, of course, the scriptures of the Jewish church. Jesus made the same use of them, as he did in the synagogue at Nazareth: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Lk. 4:21), and more generally in Mk. 12:24: “Is not this why you are wrong, that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God?”

All this means that the Church of Christ received its first scriptures, what we call the Old Testament, from the Jewish church, and that these were the “Bible” of the church for the first generation.

The question as to how these Jewish scriptures emerged and were finally gathered into a canon, some writings being included and others excluded, is another problem. This was no problem to the early church, for they were Jews, and they simply carried their “Bible” with them into the new experience, which they believed to be the fulfillment of those very scriptures. Jesus had done the same, for he too was a Jew, and he too had his “Bible” to start with. And surely he believed that he was fulfilling those scriptures.

The threefold division that Jesus spoke of, “the law of Moses, and the prophets, and the psalms” (writings), goes back at least to the early second century B. C., for in Ecclesiasticus (about 180 B. C.), written by one Jeshua ben Sira, there are several references to “the law and the prophets and other books,” albeit that particular reference comes in the preface, written by Sira’s grandson some 60 years later. But Sira, in his survey of divine history, not only reveals a detailed knowledge of the Old Covenant scriptures, but follows an order that indicates a division between the Torah (law) and the prophets. For example, he speaks of “the twelve prophets,” which in those days were viewed all as one book, and in his survey he passes from the law to the prophetic era.

The Persians allowed the Jews to bring the “law of your God” from their Babylonian exile (Ez. 7:14), which may be a reference to the law (first five books) as distinguished from the prophets. But we really don’t know what “the law” was that Ezra read to the people (Neh. 8). It may have been only part of the Pentateuch. But from that time until the days of Christ the Old Covenant scriptures have always been substantially the same as they are now, though differently arranged and were counted as 24 (Josephus counts 22) instead of our 39. But that comes from reducing “the twelve prophets” to but one book, and by Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, and Ezra-Nehemiah counting as one book each. And they were arranged for size, so as to fit scrolls, rather than chronological or logical order.

Jewish tradition has it that it was Ezra and the men of the Great Synagogue that collected those writings that were considered inspired of God and formed them into what might be called a canon. In the rabbinic tradition that built up through the centuries each book of the scriptures was inspired because it was the work of a prophet. To do this they had to assign Job to Moses, Ruth to Samuel, and, strangely enough, Esther to Mordecai, whom they made into a prophet. But they ended up with the same books the Jewish church accepted in Jesus’ time and which we accept now. It is interesting, however, that those old Jews drove a hard bargain when it came to “being inspired of the Holy Spirit,” a gift they assigned only to a prophet. This led one rabbi to write: “When Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi died, the Holy Spirit left Israel.”

An illustration of this is the place given to Ecclesiasticus, a book highly prized by the rabbis, but not accepted for public reading in the synagogue (though suitable for private study, if not too seriously!) because it came after that period of Spirit-inspired prophets. A few books (Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon and Esther) have been questioned as truly canonical, but they have in the long run been accepted. Still others, not in our canon, have been highly esteemed by both the Jewish and Christian churches, and have been given sort of “secondary” canonicity. These are Tobit, Judith, Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, and the prophet Baruch. One will find these in “Catholic” Bibles, such as the splendid Jerusalem Bible, and in reading them one may well suppose that he is in still more of the riches of the Old Covenant scriptures. But the Jews have never given these books prime rating as inspired scripture, though they are included in the Septuagint, which is the Greek version of the Old Covenant scriptures, rendered about 200 B.C.

The Septuagint was completely Jewish, designed to fill the needs of Greek-speaking Jews that were scattered over the Mediterranean world, but it finally came into disrepute with the Jewish seat of authority in Palestine. This was due mainly to the Septuagint becoming the Christian’s Bible. Almost certainly it was the scriptures of Jesus and the apostles, and it is believed that most of the quotations in the New Covenant scriptures from the Old are from the Greek Septuagint. So it was the point of reference in debates between the Christians and the unbelieving Jews. The Septuagint, for example, has parthenos (virgin) in Isa. 7:14, and the Christians would waylay the Jews with that fact, showing that their own authorities, two centuries since, recognized that Isaiah was pointing to the Messiah as being born of a virgin, which of course was Jesus.

The Septuagint also has all these extra books that the “Catholic” Bible has, which the Palestinian Jews never gave first class passage, so that gave them another reason for cooling on it. They proceeded to make still another Greek version of the Old Testament, rejecting the Septuagint, which they had by the second century A.D. pretty well surrendered to the Christian church. It shows the remarkable way in which God works. The production of the Septuagint was supposed to be a great blessing to the Jews of the Dispersion, and of course it was since it was their Bible for more than two centuries. But it turned out to be the Bible for the Christians, the one they used in converting so many Jews!

In accepting that as a fact we must also accept as a fact that the early church used a Greek Old Testament that contained the Apocrypha (the disputed books we’ve referred to). If Paul used a Bible containing Maccabees and Tobit, we can’t be too hard on the Roman Catholics when they choose to. Even the Roman Catholics, however, give these extra books “deutero-canonical” status, which is only a secondary acceptance.

What happened here is that the Protestant churches followed the Jewish tradition of scripture, accepting whatever they accepted and rejecting whatever they rejected. The Jews first accepted the Apocrypha in the Septuagint because that was as early as 200 B.C. The canon was in process of being formed, so as time went on the Jews rejected books that they earlier only held in doubt. The Jews finally “closed” the canon at a gathering in Jamnia near the close of the first century A.D. Their scriptures were then the same as our present Old Testament, except for a different order. But these were the scriptures that they had accepted all along, with the disputed books fading in and out of acceptance, depending on circumstances and geography. But Jamnia finally nailed down forever what had long been assumed —that those books that “render the hands unclean,” their strange way of identifying the books inspired by the Spirit, are those that presently make up our Old Testament.

The term canon may need some explanation. It is a Greek word meaning “straight rod” or “balance beam,” and from that it took on the meaning of normative. So, canonical scriptures refers to those accepted as normative, and “the canon” is that collection determined as final.

It is evident, then, that the early church did not receive from Judaism a closed or fixed canon of scripture. Indeed, it used a Bible that had books that were finally rejected by the Jews, and through them by the Protestant churches. We can be sure that “the law and the prophets” were determined, but “the other writings” were more open. This is why we should not be surprised to find a reference to some of these doubtful books in the New Covenant scriptures, such as Jude’s quotation from Enoch and his allusion to the Assumption of Moses.

But this is marginal. The Old Covenant scriptures that we have are those honored by God’s people all back through the centuries. And they were initially so honored because they had upon them the mark of prophetic inspiration. The man had first to be accepted as a prophet of God, and then his writings. So it was God’s gift of prophecy to His people that gave us the Old Covenant scriptures. As for all the sticky problems about the canon, which is more man’s notion than it is God’s anyway, we who make up His church can believe that we have in the Old Covenant scriptures what He wants us to have. This is because in creating and preserving a People for His great purposes, He also created and preserved a body of literature for their edification. He saw it through.

It is true that He also preserved the Apocrypha and these other books, and I for one will read them with great profit, which God surely intended. But they remain secondary to those writings produced in that era in which the Spirit of God was inspiring the prophets of Israel.

In our next we will study the making of the New Testament. —the Editor