Audio only:
Joe Heschmeyer explores what constituted Sacred Scripture in the time of Jesus.
Transcription:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. What did the Bible look like at the time of Jesus? That’s the question I want to explore today. Did it look more or less like the Bibles that we have carrying around our bone, personal KJV or RSV or ESV or NAB or whatever, or did it look radically different than that? And I think we’re going to find out the answer is it looks radically different and in some ways that are really important for how we make sense of the Bible itself. I want to start by just looking at a particular verse. This is from Luke chapter four in context here. Jesus is in Nazareth, his hometown on the Sabbath on Saturday, and he goes into the local synagogue as was his custom, and at the end of verse 16, it says that he stood up to read. So he’s reading in a kind of liturgical context, right?
He’s reading in the synagogue, he’s not just reading privately, and there was given to him the book of the prophet Isaiah. He opened the book and found the place where it was written. The spirit of the Lord is upon me. That’s what it says in the translation that I’m using the R-S-V-C-E as we’re going to see there’s a little more going on than you’re going to get in that English translation, but let’s just start there and notice a couple of things. Number one, Jesus isn’t carrying around his own Bible. Now, maybe that’s something you’ve thought about before. Maybe it isn’t, but every individual Christian having their own Bible is really only a possibility after the printing press in the 14 hundreds. Before that, if you were going to hear the words of the Bible, you were going to hear it in a liturgical communal context, in the synagogue, in the temple, or in church.
If you’re a Christian, that’s important for how we make sense of the Bible and how we listen to it and interpret it because in those contexts, one of the important things that happens is there’s someone there explaining what the text is about, and Jesus is going to serve that role here in Luke four, but there’s more to it than that. When he’s handed isn’t the entire Old Testament, what he’s handed is just Isaiah, why doesn’t he get handed the entire Old Testament? Well, it’s hidden here in the Greek. So when it says that he’s handed the book Bion, that’s a conjugation of the word biblios, which is where we get words like Bible. And it’s also where a lot of other languages get words like Bibliotech or biblioteca. So Portuguese, French, Spanish and Romanian and Italian all have the word for library bibliotech or biblioteca comes from this Greek word biblios, which comes to mean book, but it doesn’t originally mean book.
It originally means a scrap of papyrus or papyrus bark. From there, it comes to mean scroll, and then over time it comes to mean book. So what he’s handed isn’t a book in the sense that we’re thinking of What he’s handed is a scroll, and this is clearer in the Greek when you go on where in the translation I’ve been using it says he found the place, he opened the book and found the place. That’s not what it actually says, it actually says, and having unrolled the scroll, that’s what the Greek says. So have in mind not a physical book like you’re used to using, but a liturgical scroll of the kind used both then and now in Jewish synagogues.
There’s a whole story there. There’s a whole history there that’s maybe worth unpacking because as Lev Grossman points out back in 2011 for the New York Times, Christians are actually a really pivotal part of how books come to be standard. This move from the scroll to the Codex, which is the forerunner of the book, is something that Christians were really quick to jump on as a way of compiling all of the books together in the Bible. Because here’s the thing, here’s why this matters. If you have a bunch of scrolls, you don’t have your Bible all in one place, and you see this in a lot of ways. So for instance, maybe you’ve noticed first and second Kings are pretty clearly one continuous story broken up into two books. Why is that? Well, because the story is so long, it didn’t fit on one scroll. On the flip side, sometimes a prophet’s writings would be so short that they’d actually put a bunch of different books together on a single scroll.
For instance, in the Jewish Bible you have the 12 minor prophets, not minor like their messages and unimportant but minor like their messages short. And so you can put 12 of them together on a single scroll and still find your place. But there’s a size limitation to scrolls before they’re just unwieldy. The Codex revolutionizes that because you can turn the pages and so you can get a much larger amount of text in an accessible, easy to read kind of format. But there’s another reason this is important as well, because once you do that, when you’re putting all of the books of the Bible together in a single volume for the first time, and this is Christians doing it, you have to ask a question, which books go in and which books don’t? But notice you don’t really have to ask that question in the same way until you have books, until you have codices the plural of codex.
Until then you have scrolls and some of the scrolls are inspired by God and some aren’t. But an ordinary person may never stop to think exactly which scrolls are in which category because the limitation of having a book with a front and back isn’t forcing that question upon them. So with that said, which books were in the Bibles of Jesus’ Day? And as we’re going to see there are basically two answers to that question. On the one hand, you have a widespread scholarly answer, which is Judaism is really fractured at the time. You’ve got the Pharisees Sadducees of scenes, you’ve got all these different groups. They believe different things and they have different books that they consider inspired scripture. On the other hand, you have a lot of outspoken, popular level Protestant apologists and speakers who claim the opposite and say, no, actually this is all really well settled at the time of Jesus. So I want to point to a couple of people in that second group, look at maybe why they’re saying that and then show how modern scholarship shows that they’re wrong, that they’re telling things that are not true, and we can say that definitively, but let’s start by giving a fair hearing to the position. I’m going to begin with Dr. Brian Edwards who is explaining why he believes in a 66 book Protestant Bible.
Video:
So what is the evidence for our collection of 66 books? How certain can we be that they are the correct books to make up our Bible? No more and no less? Well, let’s start with the canon of the Old Testament. Now, the Jews had a clearly defined body of scripture. This was fixed early in the life of Israel, and there was no doubt as to which books belonged and which didn’t. They didn’t order them in the same way as our Old Testament, but the same books were there
Joe:
As we’re going to see most of what he just said. There is completely indefensible. Historically, we can find evidence even after the time of Christ of major debates, even among the rabbis about which books do and don’t belong in the scriptures. But there’s one thing that he says it’s true. I think maybe only one thing he says is true, and that’s this, that the Jewish books are divided these days into a structure called the ak, the Torah ne ve. The TNK is an acronym for Torah law ne prophets. Vem writings also sometimes called the hagiography or sacred writings. So you’ve got those sections in other words, whereas Catholic and Protestant and Orthodox Bibles tend to be more or less chronological. So we got the same first five books. But then after that, we tell basically a chronological story, not perfectly, but more or less the Jewish ordering of the books is more or less thematic.
After you have the books of the law, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, numbers, Deuteronomy, you then have all the prophetic writings, and then you have all the writings that don’t neatly fit into law or prophecy. Things like the Psalms, for instance. The order of the books is going to be very foreign if you go from a Christian Bible to a Jewish one or vice versa, more than just old and New Testament. The ordering of the old and New Testament, the ordering of the Old Testament is very different. Significantly though, saying someone holds to the what’s called the tripartite structure, TNK doesn’t tell us which books are in their Bible. It tells us which order those books are in. So there’s some scholarly debate about whether anybody had the TNK structure at the time of Jesus. There’s no clear evidence that they did. We see lots of references to the first two categories, the law and the prophets.
You find that description all over the New Testament, for instance, but the closest you get to a threefold structure is at one point in the gospel of Luke, there’s a reference to the law, the prophets and the Psalms, but that still doesn’t tell us about whether there’s a full fledge third section called the VE for that it’s going to be after the time of Christ. So I mentioned this at the outset. So Josephus who was writing at the end of the first century is the first to clearly have that tripartite structure. There’s other people who might have it earlier, but whether they have it or not, that doesn’t tell us which books are in there. That point will become more important as we go on and see people who try to claim, oh, they had the exact same Bible that modern Jews and modern Protestant Old Testaments have that we just don’t actually have that evidence.
So that’s the first Dr. Brian Edwards. I want to turn now to Dr. Michael Krueger because he’s written a lot on the canon. He focuses more on the canon of the New Testament, but he’s got plenty to say about where the Old Testament canon allegedly came from and when the books were all compiled into one. And so just as Brian Edwards is really clear that one reason that he wants to believe that the books were settled early was to defend the 66 book, Protestant Bible Krueger is just as clear that one of the reasons he wants to believe the books were settled early is to get rid of the need for anything like the church.
Video:
Do you have any thoughts on the canonization of the Old Testament books? Well, one thing that’s a big subject, as you might imagine, one thing that I think is worth noting is it seems to be well established and agreed upon in Jesus’s own day. If you think about it, the Jesus and the Pharisees and Jesus and the Jewish leaders disagreed about virtually everything, every theological thing you could come up with. They were on different sides of it, always arguing the debating, but you never hear one time in the debate Jesus quote from a scriptural book and a Pharisee say, well, that’s not in our Bible, or, well, that’s in your Bible, not in our Bible. What you realize is that Israel, as God’s people had rallied around and had received and recognized these books for quite a while before Jesus showed up on the scene. So it was an established core thing that seemed to be well in place by Jesus’s day. And here’s the thing I want you to realize. It was in place in Jesus’s day without a vote, without a church council and without some sort of decision-making body, the Council of Jamia that was mentioned a moment ago used to be thought of as a thing that did some of that in the first century ad, but it’s been shown now that it really doesn’t play that role, and scholars have changed their direction on that.
Joe:
So here again, almost everything that Dr. Krueger says is contradicted by the best scholarship, and I’ll show why. But there’s one thing he says here again, that’s really important. If you’ve ever heard people claim, oh, the Council of Jamia settled which books did and didn’t belong in the Bible, that is a real oversimplification of the evidence itself, and scholars no longer lean in that direction first because council makes it sound like something like the First Council of Nsea like an official church body, and Judaism doesn’t have that kind of structure. But second, the role of the Jamia Rabbis, which we’re going to look into in a little bit here, is maybe less and more complicated than we originally realized. So anyone saying Council of Jamia, that is outdated scholarship. Nobody in the early church, nobody in early Judaism claims there was a council at Jamia that settled these kind of questions.
Okay, so that’s Kruger and Edwards, another person who’s really big on this is James White. If you’re familiar with James White, he regularly argues against Roman Catholicism, and one of the points that he likes to make over and over and over and over again for decades is that allegedly people in Jesus’ Day just knew which books were in the Bible and which weren’t, and they didn’t need the church. So here he is at the G three conference back in 2018, recounting an event from decades ago in which he had a debate point that he thought went really well. Well,
Video:
When we talk about the Old Testament cannon, and I’ll try to be brief on this. Back in, I think it was 1993, I did a debate at Boston College with a fellow that you’ve probably heard of by the name of Jerry Mattick.
Joe:
So he goes on for about two more minutes to setting up the story before he gets to the kicker of the question. But
Video:
Here was the question that I asked Jerry that resulted in something called dead air, which means everything just goes silent to the point where the lady who was running the program was like, so let’s take a commercial break now, and then we came back and it was still pretty much silent. Here was the question that I asked Jerry. I said, in your perspective, how did the believing Jewish person know that Isaiah and second Chronicles were scripture 50 years before Christ?
Joe:
Now, there’s a really easy answer to that question, which is a lot of believing Jewish people did not know that Isaiah in two Chronicles were inspired scripture 50 years before the time of Christ, and we’ve got abundant evidence to show that nevertheless, white thinks this is a really good argument, and he’s been repeating it for more than 30 years now and is now calling it the White question. So here he is three years ago on his own talk show representing the same story, telling the same thing. Again, I’m going to give a truncated version for your sake and mine.
Video:
Out of the blue, I came up with the question for Gerry Mattix, which eventually has become known as the white question.
Joe:
I don’t know who else calls it the white question, but here’s the question again,
Video:
Just out of the blue, I had not researched this. I was just probing for a way to be able to illustrate what the real issue is. I said, Jerry, I said, Jerry, how did the man, how did a believing Jewish man living 50 years before Christ know that Isaiah and second Chronicles were scripture
Joe:
And White says something really important in that clip? I don’t know if you caught it, he says, his question came up just out of the blue. He had not been researching it. That shows because the question presupposes the same thing that Krueger’s claiming that Edwards are claiming that the Bible is really clearly settled at the time of Jesus, which we’ve known for decades is not true. But nevertheless, he keeps telling the story over and over and over again. At this point, I’m honestly reminded a little bit of Uncle Rico
Video:
Back in 82. I used to be able to throw a pig skin a quarter mile. Are you serious? I’m dead
Joe:
Serious. But all kidding aside, how do we answer the white question? How do we answer people who claim, oh yeah, this was all settled really early in the life of Israel. The first thing you need to know is that there are a bunch of factions within Judaism. So let’s talk for a second about those Jewish factions. Jimmy Aiken does a great job of introducing us to those in his book, the Bible is a Catholic book In there, he explains that by the end of the Old Testament era, there are several different movements that had developed in the Jewish community. Now, movements is maybe even too gentle of a word because we often find them squabbling with each other, but other times we find them getting along. So movements is fine. I’m going to look at just a few of the ones that he mentions and they’re even more than the ones that he mentions.
The first of these is the Sadducees. They’re relatively small group, but they’re politically influential. They’re favored by the rich and powerful. They have access to the temple significantly. They don’t believe in the afterlife or in angels. We’re going to get into why that is. The second group is the Pharisees. Now, they’re relatively newcomers on the scene. They only seem to emerge around one 20 bc. You’re going to look in vain for a lot of references to the Pharisees anywhere in the Old Testament itself, but they have risen to prominence and according to Josephus, who is kind of aligned with the Pharisees, there are about 6,000 of them by the birth of Jesus. I mean, he doesn’t say by the birth of Jesus by around two BC or so. Third group you need to know about are the Enes, and these ones we actually know less about.
They’re not mentioned in the New Testament. They seem to have been a separatist group. They refuse to engage in temple worship and they expected the temple to be destroyed and replaced. According to Josephus, there’s about 4,000 of them and they’re significant for an important reason. They are probably not certainly, but most scholars think they’re the community that leave behind the Dead Sea Scrolls. So when you’re looking at or hearing about the Dead Sea Scrolls, you’re not hearing about the kind of Judaism practice by the Pharisees or the Sadducees in Jerusalem. You’re hearing the people out in the sticks, out in the boonies, out in the hinterlands who are a little bit conspiratorial, a little bit apocalyptic, a little bit ready for the world to end. And I don’t mean that in a pejorative way because they’re right. The Messiah does come and the temple does get destroyed.
So a lot of the stuff, they’re like they’re prepping out there in the desert. They’re right to do so. But the point I want to make here is simply they are these three groups and more. And so if we want to understand the Bible being used, we need to look at these groups close up, and I want to add a fourth group to this as well, the Samaritans, and I’ll explain why I’m adding the Samaritans. The Samaritans are like then your neighbors of the Jews. They’ve diverged from Judaism at some point in the past, but they can still tell us a lot about the Jewish scriptures. So we’ll get into them. But first I want to look at the Dead Sea Bibles and even saying the Dead Sea Bibles is a little bit of a misnomer because we unfortunately don’t have any list among the Dead Sea Scrolls saying which books are and which books aren’t inspired scripture. Remember the point I made earlier, how when you have a bunch of scrolls not bound together in a book, it’s hard to know which ones are and aren’t supposed to be biblical. So Dr. John Bergman does a good job of capturing the basic evidence that we know among the Dead Sea Scroll finds. We’ve found every copy of what’s called the Proto canonical books. These are the books of the modern Jewish and Protestant Old Testament. All but one of them, Esther, we haven’t found, and I think also he says We haven’t found Nehemiah,
Sorry, I butchered that
Dr. John Bergsma does a good job of laying out the basic story that when we’re looking through the scrolls of all the different caves and all the Dead Sea scroll findings, we have all but one of the books that are found in a modern Jewish or Protestant Hebrew Bible. That’s going to be everything except Esther and Nehemiah. But we also have a number of other books that are not in Protestant Bibles and in many cases are not in any Bible of a mainstream Christian. Books like First Enoch and Jubilees are actually better represented than most of the biblical books, which suggests that they were viewed as scripture by the community, but doesn’t prove it. You can always say Maybe they just liked this book and they had a lot of copies of it, but usually one of the things we’re looking for is do you have a lot of copies here?
Because that probably tells us this is a really important book to your religious community. Additionally, there are six copies of Tobit, which is in Catholic Bibles and in Orthodox Bibles and not in Protestant or Jewish Bibles, and Tobit is actually found as frequently as Jeremiah Ezekiel or Job. Now, does this prove beyond a shadow of a doubt anything? No, it’s highly suggestive, but it doesn’t prove anything. Nevertheless, Bergman says, for this reason, most scholars believe that the sene cannon was significantly different than that of the Pharisees in modern rabbinic Judaism, right? You can’t prove it without a list saying, these are the books we find inspired or thus says the Lord sort of thing. But it’s highly suggestive kind of evidence. And so here I would actually turn to Jay Philip Hyatt who at the time was the president of the Society of Biblical Literature next to Jesus, and this is in 1956, so just a few years after the Dead Sea Scrolls had been discovered, and he says the whole question of canonicity and the date of the fixing of the cannon will have to be restudied.
This upends everything we thought we knew about when the Bible was formed. He goes on to say that the Dead Sea discoveries have helped to reveal the fluidity, variety and great vitality of Judaism in the period of the first two centuries BC and the first century of the Christian era, that we see a great insight into the life of Judaism at the time of Christ that we otherwise don’t have a ton of written evidence about. So what does it mean to kind of upend what we know about the Bible and when the Bible was formed? Well, Eugene Ulrich talks about this a little bit. He says that prior to 1947, the critical consensus in Canon’s study as Jack P. Lewis sums up postulated a collection of law closed by 400 bc. That’s the Torah. So the standard view prior to the Dead Sea Scrolls was that the Torah had been settled by 400 bc.
The profits had been settled by 200 BC and the writings were closed at the Council of Jamia about 90 ad. Now, we’ve already heard from Krueger that the Jamia thing is no longer kind of gospel, so to speak. It’s no longer widely accepted in scholarly circles, but or Richard’s point is that, but there’s actually no such thing as a Canon or Bible as such during this period, this period called the late second Temple period. So the period up until 70 ad when the second temple is destroyed, so during the lifetime of Jesus Ulrich’s argument is there is no such thing as the Bible in the sense that we think of it today. There’s not just one collection of books that everybody accepts. Instead, he says there’s a wide selection of books accepted as authoritative in varying degrees, but there’s no clear group of texts beyond the Torah, the Pentateuch and a non-specified group of the prophets, which typically included the Psalms that all would agree were those books which merited the highest rank of scriptural as opposed to those which may have been important, but were not scripture.
In other words, the evidence we have today suggests that different Jews held different books to be scripture. There is a core set, the Torah, some of the prophets that there was broad agreement that yeah, this is scripture, but then there’s a lot of murkiness around what are the edges, which prophets are in, which are out. Those kind of questions were not settled at the time of Jesus. Instead, Ulrich says, the cannon of the ak, remember the TNK for Judaism as that of the Old Testament for Christians were both established at unclear dates after the Jewish war and the destruction of the temple. Now the Jewish war is the Jewish uprising against the Romans between the year 66 and 74 ad the destruction of the temple is there in 70. And so prior to that, you don’t have anything like one Bible. Now, this is a pretty important moment in Jewish history.
It’s when the Jews are dispersed. You have what’s called the diaspora where you have the Jews kind of kicked out of Jerusalem, kicked out of Israel and sent to the four winds. But you also have an important thing as well, which is that the Sadducees and the Senes and many of these other groups are basically just wiped out. And so the Pharisees are the last man standing, and so they play a really outsized role in the period after the destruction of the temple in 70, and they’re massively influential on later rabbis, but we know that during the lifetime of Jesus, they didn’t have that role. Their authority was much more disputed. The Sadducees didn’t agree with the Pharisees, the Enes didn’t agree with the Pharisees and so on. So that becomes really important because a lot of what we think of as the Jewish Bible is from a group within the Pharisees who went out not by force of argument, but because the Romans kill everybody else.
So that’s going to be really important. Now, Ulrich is going to give us a little bit of the history of Look, how do you even know which books are and aren’t in the Bible unless somebody’s just giving you a list? How do you know which books, different groups considered inspired? And he’s going to tell you there’s several things that you’re going to be looking for some of these clues, and he’s careful to call them clues. We don’t have definitive authoritative kind of lists. Well, first mention of a list of books is sacred. There it is. That’s kind of the gold standard. If someone says, these are the books that we consider scripture and these only that’s super helpful, most of the time you don’t have that. So instead you have things like the designation of a book as God’s word when they mention it and say as it says in the word of God, something like that.
Or as scripture says, that tells us that book is scripture. Third, you have quotations from a book doesn’t automatically prove it, but it can be suggestive. Fourth, you’ve got a large number of manuscript copies. In fifth, you have commentaries on the book. So as we’re going through these different groups and what Bible or bibles they used, that’s the kind of evidence that we’re looking for. So we already saw that with the Dead Sea Scrolls. We can’t say for sure, but the evidence is suggestive of the fact they have a pretty different Bible than the one used by modern Jews and by modern Protestants, and for that matter by modern Catholics, they have a pretty different Old Testament, pretty different Hebrew Bible. Let’s turn them to the Samaritans. Now, the good news is the Samaritan Bible is way easier. The bad news for those claiming that the Old Testament was settled at the time of Jesus is it’s not the Jewish Old Testament.
They only have five books and their Bible called the Samaritan Pentateuch. Now, fortunately, Robert Anderson and Terry Gilles are really clear in their book Fittingly called the Samaritan Pentateuch on what this is and why it matters. So as they say, the Samaritan Pentateuch is the sacred text of the Samaritan community. And then they mention most of us know the Samaritans through the New Testament with stories like the Good Samaritan and the Woman of the Well in John four, but that they’re a group of ancient origin who are still here today. Now, where the Samaritans come from is actually a little bit debated, but we know they’re kind of an offshoot of Judaism. They’re kind of schism from Judaism if you want to think about them that way. And we also know that throughout their whole history, and again, they’re still around today, so we’re not guessing here, they’ve only recognized five books, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, numbers, Deuteronomy, the Torah or the Penta, but they have a version of those five books that’s significantly different than the Virgin you’re going to find in a Jewish or a Christian Bible.
Now, why is it different? Well, the Samaritan Pentateuch has several different points where it has these insertions we would say about the importance of worshiping at Mount Gar, which is where it’s Samaritans worshiped and worship rather than Mount Zion. So hopefully that’s clear that we have a group very clearly at the time of Jesus who have the wrong books in their Bible, and I want to point something else out. We never see Jesus correct them on that. Even when he is talking to the Samaritan woman, he never says, by the way, you have the wrong Bible. He doesn’t do that. Now, if you remember earlier, Michael Krueger’s argument is the way we can know everybody must have had the same Bible is Jesus doesn’t correct them for having the wrong one, but here’s a group we know had the wrong Bible and Jesus doesn’t correct them.
So that argument isn’t very good. We’ll get into a deeper reason that argument’s not very good. Next when we look at the Sadducees Bible. So someone could say, well, the Samaritans aren’t really Jews anyway, even though they have a version of the Torah, but the Sadducees definitely are Jews, and here we’re on a little bit shakier territory because we don’t have the clear evidence we have with the Samaritans as Lee Martin McDonald writes in his book, the Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon. Unfortunately, we do not have any surviving Sady documents that would clarify which books they consider scripture. That’s just, that’s where the evidence is. Blame the Romans for some time. Scholars have argued that Ecclesiastes was a Sady book and maybe, but there’s no other surviving material from that that might suggest what their view of the biblical canon was. Instead, he says, we can look to basically three places, Josephus, the first century Jewish author who’s decidedly not a sady.
Jesus’s comments in Matthew 22 and the passage in Acts 23 where there’s a very brief description of some of the differences between the Pharisees and Sadducees. That’s not a ton of evidence. Slightly later we have some really interesting evidence. Lee Martin McDonald says Origin and against Celsius and Jerome, his commentary on Matthew agreed that the Sadducees accepted only the law of Moses as scripture. In other words, what we seem to have here, although we can’t prove it, is a group that like the Samaritans only accept the first five books as inspired scripture. Everything else may be helpful, but it doesn’t have the same authority that the law of Moses does.
This is going to be hotly debated. So work with me here first. Here’s the line from origin. Origin says, but although the Samaritans and Sadducees who receive the books of Moses alone would say that there were contained in them predictions regarding Christ, it’s certainly not in Jerusalem, which is not even mentioned in the times of Moses, was the prophecy uttered. So you’ll notice he just throws out there the Samaritans and Sadducees only accept the Torah. He puts them in the same kind of category. He’s not alone in this. Another early third century document that may be by St. Haus called refutation of all heresies talks about the Sadducees, and it says that they had their stronghold, especially in the region around Samaria, which would explain perhaps why they followed the Samaritan practice of only having five books. We don’t know that. But in any case, the author perhaps Bolus says they do not however devote attention to prophets, but neither do they to any other sage except to the law of Moses only.
And in regard of which however, they frame no interpretations. So he’s explicit here. They have only the five books. They don’t accept the prophetic writings as inspired scripture, and they don’t follow what’s called the Oral Torah. So if you remember the traditions of men that Jesus talks about when confronting the Pharisees, the Pharisees believed in the binding authority of their own teaching on par with the scriptures, and this was called the oral law or the Oral Torah. And so that is clearly refuted by the Sadducees. Everybody agrees the Sadducees don’t accept the authority of that Oral Torah hypothesis and origin are also really clear that they only accept the first five books of the Bible. This as we’re going to see is a point that some people contest, but there’s a third source also called against all heresies. It was not hard to name books in the early days.
You could just be like against heresies re reputation of all heresies against all heresies. But in any case, this book is actually like an appendix appended to a writing of Tertullian. So Tertullian has a writing, and then this document which most scholars say is not written by Tertullian but is seemingly from somewhere in the two hundreds talks about which heresies we’re dealing with. So Tertullian was dealing with different Christian heresies and it says, for Judaism’s heretics, I am silent. Meaning just as Christianity has had to deal with heresies, so is Judaism, and it mentions first diocese, the Samaritan who believed in only the five books he repudiated, the prophets on the ground that they had not spoken under inspiration of the Holy Spirit of the Sadducees I’m silent, who springing from the root of this error had the hardy hood to adjoin to this heresy, the denial likewise of the resurrection of the flesh.
So in other words, this author, whoever it’s in the 200 seemingly has said, the Samaritans only accept the first five books, reject the inspiration of the prophets, and the Sadducees do likewise, and the Sadducees also deny resurrection of the body. That’s interesting. Evidence doesn’t prove everything because you’re going to have people who say maybe those Christian authors are all wrong, they’re all writing after these Sadducees are all gone. But it still is pretty instructive and I think there’s more reasons we can believe the Sadducees only have the first five books, and I’ll get to that in a second, but I want to be really clear here. There are people who say, no, this is a misread of the evidence and according to this theory, those early Christian authors have all misread Josephus in the same way because Josephus says that the Sadducees do not regard the observation of anything besides what the law meaning seemingly here, the Torah enjoins them.
Now Josephus might mean simply that they don’t follow the oral Torah, or he might mean that they don’t follow anything besides the Torah period. They don’t follow the prophets or the writings or the oral Torah. You can read that either way, but you’re going to find people who say maybe the Sadducees had more books and all of the Christian authors have just misread Josephus. Now there are reasons I think that’s a bad argument. I’m going to briefly give one of them. The Jewish scholar, Albert Baumgartner points out that in his essay Joseph and S on the Pharisees, that while there’s obvious indebtedness or S is clearly read Josephus, there’s also a lot of information in ISTs that he’s not getting from Josephus. So Baumgartner points to five different areas where a politics gives us information about the Sadducees that he’s not getting from Josephus and more, there’s not a lot of verbal agreement with Josephus, meaning the ideas and the sequence of ideas are the same showing that he’s obviously read him, but he diverges a lot in the language and he makes a point quoting Morton Smith that when a politicians quotes people, he tends to quote them almost verbatim.
And so it’s very strange if the idea here is hypo politics is just regurgitating Josephus and misreading him, we don’t see that. We see that he’s clearly read him, but he doesn’t seem to be just relying on Josephus. So for that reason, I would suggest the Christians in the early two hundreds may know more about the Sadducees than we do today because they had documents and information we don’t have anymore. And so there’s maybe a reason they’re able to name names that aren’t found in Josephus because they just know more about the information because it’s closer to their own day. Now, much more could be said about that, but I want to actually give another way of showing that the Sadducees only had the first five books of the Bible, and that’s from scripture itself. In Matthew 22, the Sadducees who we’re told here, deny the resurrection, come up to Jesus and they pose a question and the question is about a man who dies leaving a widow behind and then the brother has to marry her.
This is called a lava marriage. It’s outlined in Deuteronomy 25. And so other question is, okay, well let’s say there’s seven brothers. They each marry a woman, none of them have children with her, and so none of them have fulfilled this duty and then they all die in the resurrection. Whose wife will she be? And they’re pretty clearly mocking the resurrection here and Jesus responds to them in a pretty profound way. He says, you are wrong because neither the scriptures nor the power of God. Now you think he’s going to say you’ve got too short of a Bible and instead he’s going to do something else really fascinating. First, he’s going to just tell them the right answer in the resurrection that either marry nor given in marriage but are like angels in heaven. Now, that is a clever line because one of the other things, the Sadducees is deny and acts tells us this explicitly is angels and they don’t believe in angels because they take all of those references to angels in the Torah metaphorically.
And so Jesus is poking them about their denial of angels and then telling them, as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read was said to you by God? And then he quotes Exodus three verse six, I’m the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. He is not the God of the dead but of the living. Now, what do you notice about this? What you might notice is Jesus chose a really weird passage to prove the resurrection. Saint Jerome notices this in his commentary on Matthew. He says, this passage seems ambiguous and not sufficiently to the point about the truth of the resurrection. He’s not criticizing Jesus, he’s just saying weird choice. Right on its surface. This is not what you would go to if you were trying to prove the resurrection. And Jerome says, as much he could have used other far clearer examples to prove the truth of the resurrection.
Jerome actually points to two Isaiah 26 verse which says, the dead shall live, their bodies shall rise O dwellers in the dust awake and sing for joy. That’s pretty clearly about bodily resurrection or Daniel 12 which talks about how many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake summed everlasting life and some to shame in everlasting contempt, right? So quite clearly there you have these prophecies not found in the Torah, but found in the prophets that lay out the resurrection, and if the Sadducees had accepted those, we would expect Jesus to point to those passages, but he doesn’t seemingly for the simple reason that the Sadducees wouldn’t accept the authority of those passages. In fact, let me demonstrate that. I want to do a quick illustration here. Open Bible info has just Bible verses on every topic and you’ll find websites like this, and so I pulled up open Bible’s list of a hundred Bible verses about the resurrection, and the question I wanted to know is how many of them are from the Torah, from Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, numbers, and Deuteronomy?
You know what the answer is zero. Most of them unsurprisingly are from the New Testament, which has a lot to say about the resurrection, but you have several Old Testament passages as well. For instance, the Psalms are on here, but you don’t have Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, numbers, Deuteronomy significantly. You don’t have the passage that Jesus himself points to in Exodus. It is not here. So why does he do that? I think the answer is actually right there in the scripture itself in Matthew 22, when Jesus says to the Sadducees, have you not read what was said to you? Then when he accuses them of not knowing the scriptures, he’s not criticizing them for not holding to the scriptures they don’t accept. He’s criticizing them for not even understanding the scriptures that they claim to accept the Torah. Now, there’s a Jesuit scholar by the name of John Jay kil Galen, who makes this point very eloquently in an old essay from 1986, which he says, the more one reflects on the source of the Sadducees opposition to the resurrection, their interpretation that the mosaic law about Levi vibrate marriage and Deuteronomy argues against resurrection from the dead, the more one realizes the impact of Jesus’ citing Moses himself as proof that indeed there is a life after death.
So catch that If Jesus had just cited to the prophets, they could say, well, we think the prophets contradict Moses here and Moses is a higher authority, and so Jesus instead cites to Moses like, no, you’re misunderstanding what Moses is saying. The rules and Deuteronomy about a brother having children with his wife do not disprove the resurrection of the dead. You’re just misunderstanding the status of married life and love and the resurrection Kilian goes on says, apart from his own nice turn to the argument it’s clever. The reference to Moses indicates that Jesus is carefully adapting himself at all points possible to the framework out of which the Sadducees fashion their problem. He lets them determine the limits within which he’ll respond to them. This is a cardinal principle by which Jesus’s words are to be understood. So I want to say two things here. In other words, Klan’s point is Jesus only ever quotes the Torah to the Sadducees, and if you go back and look, you’re going to see that which is highly suggestive evidence that there’s a reason for that. Even when a clearer passage could be found in the prophets, he goes with the Torah alone because they accept the Torah alone.
Two things, as I say, number one, Jesus lays his principle out pretty explicitly in John chapter five, some of his listeners who don’t accept him but say they accept Moses, he tells him, do not think that I shall accuse you to the Father. It is Moses who accuses you on whom you set your hope. If you believed Moses, you would believe me for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words? Then? In other words, the people who don’t believe in Jesus won’t be condemned for the revelation they don’t know about or don’t accept. They’ll be condemned for not accepting the revelation that they claim to accept because the Torah teaches Jesus. That’s his argument. Likewise, the Torah teaches resurrection of the dead. So what he’s criticizing is not, why don’t you believe in Daniel? What he’s criticizing is why don’t you believe in Exodus when you say you believe in Exodus?
I hope that’s clear. There’s a similar case today as a Catholic, if I’m trying to show a particular doctrine to be true to a Protestant, I will typically confine myself to scripture alone. Even though I don’t believe in scripture alone, I realize that saying, well, tradition says this, or the church says that is not going to be a very convincing argument. And so Krueger’s point that Jesus would’ve corrected them on their Bible if they disagreed on the Bible just isn’t empirically true. Plenty of conversations happen between groups where they disagree on the cannon and they focus on the doctrinal disagreements rather than the books on which they disagree. Okay, so much for the Samaritans and Sadducees, both of whom seem to have the Torah alone, although different versions of the Torah, let’s turn to Josephus because Josephus is a major figure. I mentioned him already.
He is one of the best people if you’re a Protestant, trying to argue that this is the proper Old Testament to have because in sometime after the year 94, so the late first century, maybe even slightly into the second century, he talks about how the Jews are superior to the Greeks because where the Greeks don’t have a common set of books that they recognize as scripture, he says, well, we don’t have an innumerable multitude of contradictory books. We have only 22 which contain the records of all the past times which are justly believed to be divine. So this is great evidence because he’s saying there are 22 books in the Old Testament that he regards as authoritative. Five of them belong to Moses. Okay, clear enough which ones those are. Then he talks about up to the time of art of surrogacy, there are the books of the prophets and he says there are 13 of them, and then he says, there are four books containing hymns to God and precepts for the conduct of human life.
So typically this has been seen as a slam dunk argument that look, Josephus is canon agrees with later rabbis and agrees with later Protestants, right? But there are a couple problems. First, I don’t know if you notice this, but he doesn’t actually tell us what those books are. That’s going to be just a starting problem and Sid Lyman mentions this in his Josephus in the canon of the Bible, other than the five books of Moses, which is the least controversial things everybody agrees on the Torah, Josephus does not identify the titles of the 22 biblical books by name. So scholars are forced to speculate what 17 of the 22 are. To make matters worse, modern Jews say they have 24 books, not 22. Now, Lyman suggests possibly this is just a difference in numbering that remember how scrolls were an important factor that judges and Ruth were sometimes on one scroll and Jeremiah and Lamentations were sometimes on one scroll.
So maybe based on the scrolls that Josephus is using that he has 22, whereas later Jews will have 24, if that’s right. Maybe he has the exact same books. That’s just one of the major theories on this. There are several others which are that maybe he’s actually missing books. So for instance, some scholars say maybe he doesn’t have the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes others say maybe he doesn’t have Esther and Ecclesiastes still others say maybe he doesn’t have Chronicles, Ezra and Esther. So we know that he claims to have 22 books. We don’t know if those are the same as the 24 books of the modern Jewish Bible or if he’s missing some to make it even more confusing the TNK structure to knock, we got to go back to that one more time. Josephus has 22 books include the five books of the Torah, 13 Prophetic books and four other books in the writing section that is not very similar to the 24 books of the Modern to Knock other than the five books of the Torah where Josephus has 13 prophetic books, modern Jews have eight, where Josephus has four books in the writing section, modern Jews have 11.
So we have to just guess whether they actually agree or not. All that’s to say if you are a Jewish or Protestant apologist who tries to say this is the historic Bible before the time of Christ on the basis that Josephus writing after the time of Christ says something that may or may not match up even the numbers don’t work out and the sections don’t work out. I just want to suggest that’s weak evidence. That’s again, the best evidence for the Protestant position and it’s paper thin because you have to guess the very things you’re trying to prove. Well, maybe his Bible matches up with modern Bibles, but that’s the thing you were allegedly showing by pointing to Josephus. Okay, so how do we get to the modern Jewish Bible? Fortunately, the Jewish Talmud collects a lot of rabbinical debates over the centuries that really lay out how we get to the rabbinical Talmudic Bible that becomes the norm for Judaism and ends up becoming the norm for Old Testament Protestantism or the Old Testament of Protestantism, and there’s an important point to be made here in the Mishna, which is from around the year 200 ad.
So well after the time of Christ, we find a debate about which books do and don’t belong in scripture. Remember the wild claims symbol like Michael Krueger and Brian Edwards were making and that James White’s assuming about how all of this is settled well before the time of Christ. We see that this is false from the Jewish evidence itself in the ish, which again from somewhere between about one 90 and two 30, they lay out the principle that all the holy scriptures defile the hands, meaning if you touch scripture, it makes you richly impure, not morally evil but richly impure. It’s complicated. I’ll just say it very quickly. You don’t want to combine holy things with profane like earthly things. So if you are a Catholic, you may be familiar with the fact that aftermath you have the purification of the vessels. Now the vessels were holding the body and blood of Jesus.
So the word purification there sounds wrong. How could it be impure pure here just means undivided, just like you could say something is pure evil and you don’t mean pure in a positive sense of pure. So all the holy scriptures defile the hands, meaning that you have to have a ritual purification before you can go back and do worldly things after you touch scripture. So that’s the principle. So I realize this is counterintuitive, but to say that a book defiles the hands is good, it means it’s inspired scripture to say it does not defile. The hands suggests it’s not scripture, it’s worldly. You can read that book and then go do something else and you don’t need to purify yourself. Okay? Makes sense. That’s important because Mish goes on to say the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes Koha defile the Hands. So Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes are scripture.
That’s what it says, but then it reveals that there’s a debate on this point. It quotes Rabbi by Judah of saying Song of Songs defiles the hands. So it’s scripture, but there’s a dispute about Kallet, about Ecclesiastes. So maybe Ecclesiastes is, maybe it isn’t. Rabbi Jose then says, Kallet does not defile the hands. Ecclesiastes is not scripture and there is a dispute about Song of Songs. Okay, this is getting complicated. Rabbi Shamon then says, the ruling about Khali is one of the leniencies of Be Shamai and one of the stringencies of bet Halel. What that means, in other words, is at the time of Jesus, the two major rabbinical schools were shammai and halel, and ironically, usually it was the other way around. Usually Shamai was stricter and Halel was more liberal, was looser with things, but here they’re the other way around. But significantly, all you need to know is at the time of Christ, the two major rabbinical schools don’t agree on whether or not Ecclesiastes is inspired scripture according to rabbis from after the time of Christ,
Rabbi Joshua, the son of the Father-in-law of Rabbi Akiva said in accordance with the words of Ben Ozzy. So they disputed and so they reached a decision. Okay, I’m skipping a little bit of the rabbinical debate, but I want to just put that to you to suggest this is one of the reasons people believed in a consulate Jamia or some kind of body, that there clearly is a role where the rabbis, well after the time of Christ are debating about which books do and don’t belong in scripture and they come to a conclusion. But significantly, they didn’t start from saying, we all know which books are in scripture. The way Protestants tend to claim that the Jews operate, that simply is the opposite of the evidence. They arrived at that conclusion well after the time of Christ, and that’s only on this handful of books.
We have other evidence as well. It’s quite interesting. Magilla seven A talks about how the disagreed, whether or not the book of Esther had the same force and sanctity instead of the canonized books of the Bible. And then it quotes Ravi Huda who says that Schmuel who Schmuel is from 1 65 to 2 54. So again, well after the time of Christ who said that the book of Esther does not render the hands richly impure. So he says Schmuel here, although the sages issued a decree that sacred scrolls render hands richly impure, the book of Esther was not accorded the sanctity of sacred scrolls.
What’s my point in saying this, that there is not unanimity at the time of Christ? Clearly on books like Esther Sung of songs, Ecclesiastes, there are debates that are lively and are going on. Rabbi Barari and Baa 92 B does something really fascinating because so far I’ve only been looking at the books that were debated about whether to exclude and that were eventually included, but this happens in the other direction as well. So Rabbi Barari is from the early three hundreds ad, so this well after the time of Christ and he’s trying to defend a particular point and he’s using this Jewish practice where you point to something from the Torah, from the prophets, from the writings to prove your point, and then from the mission, the Bara from the Talmud. So you’re making a five kind of source argument in the same way that maybe you would defend something by looking to the Old Testament and the New Testament to prove a doctrine, that kind of thing.
But this is a format of argument all you need to know, and when he’s proving this, the part of the Torah he goes to is Genesis the ne. He goes to judges in the Keve, he goes to ak, which is in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles not in Protestant, in modern Jewish Bibles, and he’s explicit that he considers it part of the writings. He says in Baba 92 B verse 13, that it is Triplicated in the writings, and then he quotes Sirach 1317. So quite explicitly you have rabbis quoted in the Talmud denying books that are in modern Jewish and Protestant Bibles and affirming books that are not in modern Jewish and Protestant Bibles. You cannot conclude from this. It seems to me that they always had the same books that were in the modern Jewish and Protestant Bible. It just doesn’t follow if you actually read any of the evidence.
Okay. What about the early Christian Bibles then? Because this is obviously an important issue if you’re a Christian. That is a broad enough question. I’m going to largely leave it aside, but I’m going to say just a handful of things. Number one, St. Justin Martyr in his dialogue with Tri Pho is Jewish in about 1 55 ad. So while this rabbinical debate is still underway and hasn’t been resolved, one divergence has already been observed that the Christians tend to use the Sept and the Jews don’t anymore. There’s a whole story here. After the destruction of the temple, there’s a kind of purging of anything that felt too Greco-Roman, or too Christian within Judaism, and so late first century onwards, you have a push against things like the sep, but if you read the New Testament, you realize most of the time the SIG agent gets quoted, excuse me.
Most of the time the Old Testament gets quoted. It’s the Sept that gets quoted, and this matters because the SIG agent has a longer list of books that it treats as inspired. This is where the disputed books between Catholics and Protestants come from, they’re in the SubT and they’re not in a lot of the versions of the Hebrew scriptures. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s part of the issue here. So we see that there is a difference of Christians use the sub agent and Jews don’t after the time of Christ. But we also know that Jews at the time of Christ did use the subagent because it’s used throughout the New Testament. So the Jewish side is the one that changes here, not the Christian side. That’s a significant piece of evidence that you can’t look to Judaism in the 200 304 hundreds and assume that that’s going to be the same as Judaism while the temple is still standing.
They look radically different. Remember you’ve got the Sadducees, the scenes Pharisees, they look one way before 70 and then it’s the Pharisees in their descendants. The rabbis after the destruction of the temple looks radically different. Second origin writing in the early two hundreds, maybe around the two thirties, we don’t know exactly when rises to Africanists and it’s really striking what the dispute is about. So Origin had quoted from the longer version of Daniel. This is again in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles and is not in modern Protestant or Jewish Bibles, and Africanists complains about this. So Origen responds to him in a letter and he says, your letter from which I learn what you think of the Susanna in the book of Daniel, which is used in the churches, although apparently somewhat short presents in its few words, many problems. That’s not saying the book presents many problems.
He’s in African’s letter prisons, many problems even though it’s a short letter. But notice there that he’s saying that the Christian Church uses the longer version of Daniel. He goes on in the next paragraph. To sum up what African’s objection was, he says that Origin must not have known that this part of the book is spurious. And origin responds and says, well, in answer to this, I have to tell you what it behooves us to do in the case, not only in the history of Susanna, which is found in every Church of Christ in that Greek copy, which is the Greeks use but is not in the Hebrew. So remember that difference between the Sept, which is the Greek translation and the Hebrew version. They’re aware that there are differences in which books are in and which ones are out between the Greek and the Hebrew.
Now, this isn’t totally settled on either side, but you’re going to find if you’re using the Sept, you’re going to find a longer version of Daniel than if you’re using the Hebrew version of Daniel. And every church of Christ, his origin uses the longer version. And then he mentions another portion called Bel and the Dragon also part of the longer version of Daniel. But he says, but there’s also thousands of other places where there’s a divergence between the Jewish and Greek version or the Hebrew and Greek version of the scriptures. And origin had just finished translating. So he was deeply aware of these both the small and the large discrepancies. And so he gives out a basic principle. He says, well, when we notice these things, he thinks it’s foolish to reject a spurious, the copies used by the churches and enjoying the Christian brotherhood to put away the sacred books and instead to ask the Jews to give them untempered with books like to assume the Jewish version is accurate.
And the Christian version is inaccurate, is a faulty presupposition. And so origin says, are we too suppose that that providence, which in the sacred scriptures has ministered to the edification of all the churches of Christ, had no thought for those, but with a Christ for whom Christ died, whom although his son, God, who is love spared not, but gave him up for all that with him, he might freely give us all things. In other words, it is wild to take the position that God gave us, the scriptures, gave us his own son, but then allowed the scriptures to be so screwed up. We didn’t know what they taught. So origin says, look, if the church uses a book that’s good enough. And he’s really clearly talking about entire books here because he says later on in the same letter, he mentions that Africanists, even though Africanists rejects the longer version of Daniel because it’s not in the Hebrew copies, in his own letter, Africanist quotes. And so Origen says, well, don’t you know that Toit and Judith, the Jews don’t use, they’re not even part of the Hebrew apocrypha. He says, I learned this from the Jews themselves. But he says, the church has used Toit so great, he’s ready to accept. Toit is evidence on this same principle that the church uses it. So I want to close by appealing to James White of all people because even though he gets the history of where the Bible comes from wrong, he makes a really insightful point about that we should trust the process.
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Todd is active in this world. He has a purpose. He’s accomplishing a purpose. There is a goal in mind for creation and it’s his own self-glorification, the final analysis. And it was his intention for Christ to come when Christ came and to do what Christ did as the early church confessed in Acts 4 27 to 28. And if it is his purpose that the scriptures function as a rule of faith, the soul infallible rule of faith for the church, if it’s his purpose that the scriptures function and it’s his purpose to build the church, then God would exert, exert and utilize all the power necessary to make sure that the church has the scriptures and knows what is and what is not scripture.
Joe:
I think this is a brilliant point. Now, I disagree with James White on one point there. I don’t believe the scriptures of the soul, infallible rule of faith, but I believe the scriptures are an infallible rule of faith for the church and that God means to reveal himself through scripture. In part, he reveals himself in Jesus Christ. But this is attested to in scripture. Well, if that’s true, then white is right, that we should expect that even though this process is messy, even though there are various competing Bibles at the time of Jesus, even though the early Christians don’t immediately have an agreed upon new and Old Testament, that we can trust that God is guiding the church in this. So these are the places where we’re left. Either you have God not guiding the process and you have just chaos. The Pharisees Sadducees, the scenes Samaritans, everybody’s got different Bibles.
And within the Pharisees, within the rabbis, you’ve got different Bibles or you can say the Holy Spirit is working through this. God is bringing this to ever greater clarity. But if you say that, notice what you’re left with. You’re not left with the 66 book Protestant Bible because that’s not what the early church settled on. The early church settled on the Catholic Bible. And this is attested to in many places like the third Council of Carthage, like the Latin Vulgate, which was the standard version of the scriptures in the Western half of Christendom for over a thousand years. And so white’s argument doesn’t prove Protestantism. White’s argument proves Catholicism, and the alternative is total doctrinal and biblical chaos. So I hope that’s helpful. I hope that’s clear that you are left with one of two positions. Either just say, God is not in control of this because people weren’t agreed about it and therefore we can’t know what is and isn’t the Bible or God is in control of this. And that’s why we have the Catholic Bible for Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.