Audio only:
Joe addresses some of the misconceptions spread about the cannon of Scripture by people like Wes Huff and Dr. John Meade. With Wes’s rise to popularity from his debate with Billy Carson and appearance on Joe Rogan, we thought it’d be good to correct some of his errors.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe, Heschmeyer, and I want to belatedly talk about some of the arguments that were made by Wes Huff, both because I think he’s worth responding to in his own right and because I think the errors that he’s spreading are the kind of errors about the Bible that many Christians believe. Now, if you’re not familiar with who Wes Huff is, he got extremely famous in the world of Christian apologetics a couple months ago when in short succession he first debated Billy Carson on Christianity. That debate has millions of views and every single person I’ve seen review it said that Wes absolutely trounced Billy Carson’s crazy claims about the Bible. But then if that wasn’t big enough, shortly thereafter, Joe Rogan invites Wess on and they had what was honestly an amazing interview. Now, I rarely listen to the super long form stuff.
I’ve got three small kids and I rarely have three hours I’m looking to kill, but I think I listen to every word of that three hour and 15 minute long episode. Now, Wes was so clearly better informed on the history of biblical manuscripts and the like than most of the people commenting on YouTube doing apologetics or going on Joe Rogan. So naturally there were moments where he makes a few mistakes and I know people caught some of those, but he also quickly owned them. So I came away and press both with his intelligence and his humility. The mistakes frankly weren’t even the surprising part of that. Everybody is going to get details wrong in what’s essentially a 200 minute long episode in which they’re responding to random questions on everything from the Bible to ancient Egyptian history. What was surprising was how effectively he could remember even arcane information. Now, all of that is a long way of saying that I think we Huff is a good faith smart Protestant thinker who’s worth taking seriously. But when he talks about Catholicism, he often makes these just rudimentary errors, things that I’m genuinely surprised someone of his intelligence and goodwill, the caliber of arguments are just much worse than I would expect. So for instance, here he is arguing for why Catholic Bibles are bigger. I’m just going to take a 45 second clip and highlight three major things that he manages to get wrong.
CLIP:
Protestants continued to call them the apocrypha derived from the Greek word meaning hidden marking. The historically held distinction between books that were canon in scripture and ones that were not. Nonetheless, traditions that the papacy held to as doctrine like that of purgatory, worship of the saints and prayer for the dead could be proof. Texted out of many of the Deutero canonical books and this was defended as scripture vigorously by Catholic apologists following Trent on a lot of these grounds, Luther, Calvin and many other Protestant reformers noted that none of these doctrines could be found within the canon of scripture and therefore Rome must include them to justify their own traditions.
Joe:
So it manages to get a lot wrong in a very short time here first and most obviously there is no Catholic doctrine that says we are to worship the saints. Quite the contrary, the Catholic Church condemns that as idolatry. Now I know many Protestants argue that asking the saints to pray for you is really the same as worshiping them, but I think that argument is both a untrue and b unserious for a scholar to make to say there’s a doctrine teaching X when the church you’re accusing of having that doctrine says X is evil and don’t do X. Is it factual error in the falsehood? Now, you might put it like this, I think many Protestants prefer their personal interpretation of scripture over the 2000 year interpretive tradition of Christianity. But if I said there is a doctrine in Protestantism teaching people to do that, that would be false and unfair.
Just because I think you might naturally lead to this place you don’t mean to go, doesn’t mean that you have a doctrine telling you to go to that place. Second, and we’re going to get into this in much greater depth, he speaks as if the Catholic church is adding books in the 16th century to respond to Protestantism. Now as we’re going to see this is entirely false. You have in the 15th century before Martin Luther is even conceived the Ecumenical Council of Florence, which is declaring that the books of the Bible have 73 books and this is agreed to by the Catholic Church, by the Orthodox Church, by the Coptic Church, and none of this is in response to Protestantism because Protestantism does not exist and much before that, as again we’re going to see the early Christians often held to this Bible as well.
But the third factual error is that he’s wrong about John Calvin’s Bible, which is something many Protestants don’t realize that even though John Calvin rejected six of the disputed books, as we’re going to see, there are seven books that are in Catholic Bibles that are not in Protestant bibles and John Calvin rejected six of those seven, but he accepted the seven, the book of Baruch, and in fact, he refers to it as scripture multiple times in his own writings. For instance, in one of the first theological treatises that he writes, it’s an argument against soul sleep. He quotes the prophet and it’s Baruch. So he’s quoting from the book and speaking of it as a prophetic book. Likewise, in his commentary on one Corinthians 10, he speaks of the prophet Baruch and again, quotes in that time from Baruch four. So it’s clear from actually repeated references that he thought of Baruch as an inspired book.
So citing to him as if he’s agreeing with the Protestant position is in fact incorrect. So that’s three basic factual errors in 45 seconds, whether you agree with the Catholic side or the Protestant side, either way we should recognize those as errors. And unlike in the Joe Rogan interview, this wasn’t off the cuff, this was a short planned episode on his own channel. So it’s not that he was just caught off guard, he wasn’t expecting someone to ask him about those things. He voluntarily brings all of that up himself and it’s not just Wes himself. So in addition to the video that I’m going to be critiquing, he also uploaded a longer version of what’s essentially the same argument being made by Dr. John Mead of Phoenix Seminary who has a lot of interesting work in this area. Now, I want to stress here it’s not just that West linked to the talk, he actually uploaded it.
It’s on his personal website even though it’s not him speaking and it’s someone that he presumably invited to speak because he was speaking at the 2024 Apologetics Canada Conference, which is the group that West Huff is associated with. And because the two of them are making very similar arguments and because Mead’s about three times more depth in terms of just length, I’m going to be addressing both the claims that Wes makes as he often kind of points in the direction of an argument. And then in many cases Mead makes a more thorough version. So I want to try to intermix both of those. I don’t want to ever put someone in the position of having to defend somebody else if it’s not something they believe in, but in this particular case, given that he’s uploaded it, this seems to be a fuller presentation of his own argument.
So I’m hoping that I’m treating him fairly here of saying, okay, you said this, but you seem to have meant this argument that you didn’t maybe make in its full depth. So hopefully I’m treating him fairly and please, if you’re watching this Wess, if I’ve done anything short of treating your argument fairly, please let me know that as I see it, there are really two major arguments, maybe two and a half, and I’ll explain what I mean by two and a half when we get there. And the arguments for the Protestant Bible. So we should have seven fewer books than Catholics do. We should only have the 66 books that Protestants have. There are basically two arguments that I see Wes and Dr. Mead making. The first is that we should follow the Protestant Old Testament because it matches the ancient Jewish Bible and particularly this idea that it matches the Bible that was in use at the time of Christ.
Second, we should follow the Protestant Old Testament because this is the Old Testament used by most of the earliest Christians. So those are the two arguments. Before I get to what those arguments get wrong, which is going to be most of this video, I want to acknowledge at least a few moments what do they get right? And the first thing that I see them getting right is just West does a good job of laying out the basic terms of the debate. It’s very easy in videos like this to assume Catholics and Protestants are aware of what the differences are in our Bibles, and I know intellectually that’s obviously not the case. So here’s I think a good explanation. Very simply, Wes gives on Catholic Bibles, Protestant Bibles, Jewish Bibles.
CLIP:
So just off the bat, let me outline that. If you open up a Protestant Bible, you are going to find 39 books in your Old Testament. If you open up a Catholic Bible, you’re going to see 46 Roman Catholics then have seven more books as well as some additions to books like Daniel and Esther. It also might be useful to mention that the Hebrew Bible, that is the Bible that modern Jews read today has the same books as the Protestant Bible, but they group them in a different order.
Joe:
So I mean, I just think that’s an important thing to get straight in the beginning, and Wes is exactly right, the Jewish Old Testament, even though the numbering is different and the order is different agrees with the Protestant Old Testament, I think this is important to remember when we’re talking about the nature of the debate because we can sometimes exaggerate our differences and Catholics and Protestants agree on a lot here. All 66 books that are in the Protestant Bible are also in the Bibles that Catholics and Eastern Orthodox have. We just have more books. Now we have two books that are in both Bibles, but we have a longer version that’s Daniel and Esther, but then there are seven entire books that are in Catholic Bibles and in Orthodox Bibles that you won’t find in a Protestant Bible. That’s going to be Judith Tobet first and second Maccabees, Baruch Wisdom in ak.
So I mentioned this for a few reasons. One, because we don’t want to exaggerate the differences, and two, if you are someone arguing, we should hold to the Protestant Testament because this is what the early Christians used. It should be important that you actually make sure they use exactly your canon, your list of books, because after all, when the entire debate’s really only about seven books and two partial books saying, well, they agreed with me on five of them isn’t really the same as them agreeing with you. If I tried to prove that the four gospels are Matthew, mark, Luke, and John, and I found a guy who said, it’s Matthew, mark, Luke, and Sam, yeah, the one that we’re disagreeing on matters because I can’t really rely on them for support me saying that is going to make sense when we get into this.
When you see Wes Huff and Dr. John Mead citing to people who allegedly support the Protestant Bible, and then when you go and read them, it turns out they don’t. It’s much more of a Matthew, mark, Luke, and Sam where it’s, well, sure they agree on a few things, but they disagree on a few things too. So those are the terms of the debate. Another area that is helpful that I want to give credit to Wes Huff for laying out is acknowledging that even when there were disputes over the juro cannon, these seven disputed books, and there were disputes, make no mistake, there were Christians who didn’t think all of these books should be in the Bible. All seven of these have this kind of status of being spoken against book. That’s just what that means, like a spoken against book, a disputed book. And so it’s completely fair for Protestants to point that out.
We don’t want to say, oh no, these were undisputed. They weren’t. They were disputed. They were Christians on both sides of the question. For every one of these books, what does a good job of pointing out, and I wish more Protestants pointed out was that even when that’s the case, the people who argued against the books didn’t make the modern Protestant argument that they should be out of the Bible entirely. They still treated them as important in having this role that was edifying, that they were church books, that they were useful in building you up in the faith, et cetera. So they didn’t just reject them entirely as many modern Protestants do. So if you were to open up a modern Protestant Bible, you won’t find those books at all. If you were to open up, say, an original King James Bible from the 17th century, you would find those books in there just in a separate section. That’s an important shift that I think many Protestants aren’t aware of. Their Bible is extremely new in the grand scheme of Christianity.
CLIP:
It’s clear that there have been Christians since its earliest inception who did consider a lot of what would eventually be labeled the Deutero canonical books as scripture.
Joe:
That’s going to be another important point that Wes makes that we’re going to want to come back to. If it’s really true, as West is going to claim that the Old Testament was totally set in the time of Jesus and everybody just knew which books were and weren’t in the Bible, it’s going to be hard to square that with the fact that as he just said, the early Christians didn’t have a clear consensus, and from the very beginning we find Christians believing that these deutero canonical books, these disputed books belong in the Bible. Not every Christian to be sure, but that position is certainly out there and I think I’m going to make a pretty strong case for it being the majority view. That’s going to be hard to spare with the idea that while everybody just knew what the books were of the Old Testament during Jesus’s time, the last point I want to highlight here is that Wes is absolutely right with one of the broader points that he’s making, which is that both Protestants and Catholics tend to have a sort of oversimplified narrative that in many ways the whole process of how we got the Bible, whether you’re a Catholic or a Protestant, whether you’re Orthodox, whatever, whether you’re Jewish for that matter, the story of how you get the Bible with exactly the books that you have is more complicated than we usually tell, and even in this video, I will probably have to oversimplify at times just because the amount of nuance and complication can be really in depth at times.
So on all of that, I want to say, yeah, I agree with a lot of that framework, but I should also address some areas that we disagree and that includes areas where I know Wes is trying to be even handed, like right here.
CLIP:
The idea that Protestants somehow removed, agreed upon books out of the Bible during the Reformation is completely inaccurate. In a similar vein though, the idea that Roman Catholics wholesale just added these books as a response to the reformers is also a little bit too simplistic.
Joe:
Again, I appreciate that Wes is trying to be even-handed with this and saying, oh, both sides make some mistake, but what he’s highlighting as the strongman, he’s getting both of these things wrong. So first of all, there really were Bibles, right? If you were to take a time machine back before the Reformation, or if you were to go to a library that has ancient books, you’ll find old bibles from before the Protestant reformation. You’ll also find a lot of ancient church documents and ancient Christian writings talking about the books of the Bible. We can say, as a matter of fact, that the Latin Vulgate had 73 books in it. Seven of those are removed to create the 66 book Protestant Bible. That’s not totally inaccurate, that is accurate, and he says, well, it’s not as if there were 73 agreed upon books. Well, there were in fact, at the Ecumenical Council of Florence, the 73 book Canon is described as the inspired books.
We’ll get into that in a little more depth later on in this episode, and this is agreed to by the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, and the Coptic Church. This is well before the reformation, before Martin Luther is born. So it is not inaccurate to say there was a consensus. Now granted, we should caveat that by saying there were dissenters from that consensus. There were people who argued that consensus was wrong, but at the level of churches, there clearly was a consensus on a 73 book Canon, and even in ones where maybe it’s a little more amorphous in the East, it was still clearly much larger than the Protestant canon. If anything, it was more than 73 books. The reformers absolutely reduced the number of books recognized as part of the Bible. That is objectively true. Whether you think that’s good or bad to deny that that happened is just denying a historical fact.
On the flip side, when he says, well, we can’t just say Catholics just added them wholesale in response to the reformation, they’d be a little too simplistic. Now, it wouldn’t be a little too simplistic. They’d be flatly untrue. We can see these books in Catholic Bibles now, unless your argument is that Catholics in the 16th century perfected time travel and they went back and they fixed all the Bibles in the Middle ages to match the Council of Trent, well then you have to just acknowledge no, even though he’s trying to be even handed here, neither of the things Wes has said here are actually true. Another area where he tries to find some common ground, and I admire this, but he does it in a way that isn’t true, is when he claims that the 66 books of the Protestant Bible were undisputed from very early on.
CLIP:
Let me pause, because there was very little doubt extremely early on concerning the 66 books agreed upon by modern Protestants and Catholics. Those were always considered scripture. The discussion then is about the other books,
Joe:
Look, I don’t want to nitpick, but this just is not true. I mean, many of the very same people that Wes Huff and Dr. John me are going to be citing to if you actually read which books they have in their Bible. While it’s true, they don’t always have the 73 book Catholic Bible, they also don’t have the 66 book Protestant Bible. They’ll have books that Protestants don’t have, but they’ll also reject books that Protestants do have books like Esther. So I’m going to give you just a helpful tool if you’re doing any research in this and you start reading early Christian lists on which books are in the Bible, there’s a few to be looking for. You should look to see what a particular author has to say about Esther, about Lamentations and about Baruch. Remember, Protestants today accept Esther and Lamentations and reject Baruch, but they’ll support this by citing to people who reject Esther and accept Baruch, and you say, well, that doesn’t matter even if you have the same number, you’ve got different books.
This is Matthew, mark, Luke, and Sam instead of Matthew, mark, Luke, and John. It doesn’t work. Now in talking about that, I’ve only looked at the disputed books in the Old Testament. There were also disputed books in the New Testament. This was not nearly as common. It’s true, but pretty famously, Martin Luther in his original version of the German New Testament highlights four books that he rejects. So you can’t just point to consensus to prove the canon of the old or the New Testament if you’re arguing from a Protestant consensus, it’s more complicated than that. Anyway, I just wanted to get a few of those kind of details out of the way, and now I want to dive into the heart of the argument. The first argument he makes is these books were not in the Bible in Jesus’ day. So there are really two arguments that go into this One, this idea, we should accept the Protestant Testament because it’s the Jewish one. Within that argument are two sub arguments if you want to call it that. Number one, that the Jewish people had a closed Bible. They had a clear list of which books were and were not considered scripture at the time of Jesus, and that this matched the Protestant Old Testament. Now West says very clearly that this is true of the ancient Jews. In the video I’m critiquing
CLIP:
The Jews in this ancient period likewise consider these writings as valuable, but they did not consider them as scriptural,
Joe:
So that’s his argument that these seven books were clearly rejected among the ancient Jews. Now, he doesn’t say how ancient he’s talking about, but in an interview he claims that this was true in Jesus’s own day, and that’s going to be pretty important if you just say Jews, after the time of Jesus rejected some of these books. Well, Jews after the time of Jesus rejected Jesus. So it doesn’t have a lot of rhetorical weight. You’re having to point back to the Old Testament messianic awaiting Jewish people, and so that’s what he claims.
CLIP:
I think we can say definitively that the Jews in Jesus’ day had the same canon of scripture that we have as our Old Testament.
Joe:
Then there’s a related argument to this, which is that okay, not only did the Jews have a very clear Old Testament, but that the early Christians, many in fact we’re going to see even most according to Wes Huff and Dr. John Mead use this as their Old Testament as, and Wes is going to say that it’s really good that they did this because in Romans three verse two it says, the Jews are entrusted the Oracles of God. So that’s the argument. This was the ancient Jewish Bible. They’re the ones given the biblical authority to figure out what is and isn’t in scripture, and the early Christians followed their lead. Now, all of that is false, and we can see all of that is false even from other Protestant sources. So Aaron Clay Denlinger is a professor of church history and historical theology at Reformation Bible College.
He is by no means a Catholic, and he thinks that the Catholic Bible is wrong, but nevertheless, he acknowledges that John Calvin is wrong in the way that he talks about the Bible, that in fact the ambiguity that we find in the early Christians about which books do and don’t belong in the Old Testament reflects an even earlier ambiguity amongst the Jewish people that amongst Jews, you had different Bibles, he says, and basically reflecting the Catholic Protestant distinction, the books in question were denied canonical status. These are the seven disputed books were denied canonical status in the Hebrew Bible by Palestinian Jews, but afforded canonical status by Hellenistic or Greek speaking Jews who lived outside of Palestine, and so they were included in the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures completed in Alexandria called the ent. Now that is admittedly even slightly an oversimplification in both directions, but it is directionally correct.
You will find more short Jewish Bibles in Palestine and longer Jewish Bibles outside of Palestine, and Dinger goes on to say that it’s only in the second century following Christ’s birth so well after the time of Christ that the Jews finally reached consensus among themselves in favor of the narrower canon rejecting the seven disputed books. Now, even this, as I’m saying, is a bit of an oversimplification. It actually is even later than that and it’s more complicated than that. I’m going to give some of that nuance as we go, but let’s just take this as a starting point that you have this tut canon that the Greek speaking version that has these longer set of books that are accepted as part of the Bible that you won’t find in the Hebrew canon. Well, as Timothy Michael law points out, and when God spoke Greek Timothy Michael Law is a lecturer in divinity at the University of St.
Andrews, and he’s also the co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of the Sub Agent. He is an expert in this field. He points out that while the Old Testament translation almost all of us have in our modern English version of the Bible is based on the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament authors in the early church when they would quote from the Bible and when they would read the Bible, it was usually the Sept that is this Greek bible that has the longer Old Testament canon. He goes on to say the New Testament authors almost always use the ENT to access the Jewish scriptures that they so often quote examples from the gospels from the Apostle Paul and from the writer of Hebrews, demonstrate that the Greek SubT had a profound impact on the development of New Testament thought. Now, it’s too far afield to go way in the weeds on this, but I would say there are several points where there are prophecies that are either not found in the Hebrew text that are found in the Greek and are quoted as prophecies in the New Testament, or at least are a great deal clearer in the Tugen than they are in the original Hebrew.
Also, even thinking of it as the original Hebrew as Timothy Michael law points out, is somewhat inaccurate. We have this idea that the Hebrew text never changes in the Greek text does, but in many cases the Greek text appears to be more faithful to the most ancient documents when we find them than the Hebrew one. Just because it’s in the same language doesn’t mean you couldn’t have scribble errors and people modifying the text and the like. So if you’ve ever found yourself in a situation where you’re saying, okay, I see that the New Testament author is quoting the Old Testament, but then when I go and read the verse that my footnote said it was, that verse doesn’t seem to match. The reason is you have a different Old Testament, most likely then the New Testament authors, and that might be a problem with your Old Testament, not with the New Testament authors that they’re using this Greek version of the scriptures which include more books than you’re going to find in a Protestant Bible today and not also just like different translations, different versions of the books. So it’s a pretty important kind of point. I think the argument being made, and Dr. John Mead makes this in greater depth is that the Jewish cannon is closed, it crystallizes, it’s formed where we can say, okay, this is the Jewish Bible or the Hebrew Bible that we now call the Old Testament. He claims that maybe happened around 100.
CLIP:
I’m skipping way ahead here a lot, but some summary here from the period, the earliest evidence we’ve got from say the Dead Sea Scrolls down to Josephus, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Jewish theologian, Philo, and the New Testament show a core canon of Pentateuch. So the first five books of Moses, the prophets, Psalms and Proverbs with some disputed books like Esther at the Fuzzy Edges. That is, we’re not sure, I don’t have a certain answer for you on the status of Esther right during the time of Jesus even.
Joe:
So I appreciate that Dr. Me is giving some of the nuance to this and showing that it’s not nearly as clear cut as many Protestants believe that it’s just not true, that the biblical canon is closed at the time of Jesus. This is kind of a striking thing for West Huff to put up on his channel when he is claiming that it was closed at the time of Jesus. You’ll notice that Mead is saying that, well, the only evidence we have suggests that it happened maybe around the year 100, and even then it’s not that close. There are fuzzy edges because we don’t know about books like Esther. Now, it’s going to get a little more complicated than that because obviously that answer doesn’t work for a Protestant audience. You can’t say, well, you have to hold to what the Jews in the year 100 ad were doing because of course not we’re Christians by this point, and so there’s this attempt including by mead to try to push the evidence back further than it will really go.
Now, this is important because the difference between Judaism in the year one and Judaism in the year 101 is actually pretty massive. You have the Sadducees, you have the Pharisees, you have the Enes, you have all these different groups in the year one, you have the temple standing, you have no Messiah yet or an infant one. All of that looks really different when you have a destroyed temple. You have the Jews in diaspora, you have the destruction of many of the different factions in Judaism and you have the establishment and creation of Christianity. So we can’t just assume that Judaism looks basically the same in the year one as in the year 101 because we know for a fact it doesn’t. Nevertheless, Protestants like Mead and Huff will try to pull the historical evidence a hundred years back, and I think you’ll see that happening in this clip
CLIP:
Josephus and for Ezra, another Jewish document around the same time show that a Hebrew canon crystallized right kind of came to its final form by around a hundred ad. It may have been earlier. I want to say that I’m just giving you what the dates of the evidence are, like 95 ad a hundred ad. I think the canon was around long before those statements. Those statements did not create the canon, but those are when the statements were made. So sometime I would say in the first century before the time of Jesus, the Old Testament canon crystallized,
Joe:
If you listen to that, you’ll notice he’s almost like an auctioneer outbidding himself as to how early he’s going to go. He starts with, okay, what the evidence actually says, the earliest thing we can find is in about 95, but maybe it’s earlier than that. Maybe it’s sometime in the first century, maybe it’s before the time of Jesus. So let’s go with that and as we’re going to see that is just actually not true. In fact, we can’t even go with 95 or 100. So you’ll notice that the only evidence that he cites is well twofold. It’s Josephus and forth. Ezra. Now, if you’ve ever talked to a Protestant about the Old Testament canon, like why are these books in the Bible? Josephus almost always gets mentioned and there’s a problem with the way that Josephus gets used. So I’m going to here’s Dr. Mead’s presentation for what we can make from Josephus, and I want to point out a couple of things as we go.
CLIP:
So let’s just give a summary point here about the situation of the Hebrew canon or the Jewish canon before Christianity. So around 95 ad,
Joe:
First thing to notice, he said it’s before Jesus was born, and then it says around 95 Ad Ask yourself, this is the year 95 ad before Jesus was born
CLIP:
Around 95 ad the Jewish historian Josephus says that the Jews have only and always ever had 22 books.
Joe:
Josephus doesn’t actually say that though. He says they have 22 books which contain the record of all the past times, which are justly believed to be divine, but he doesn’t say they’ve always had 22 books. That would be ridiculous. It’s not like they had 22 books in the time of Moses. So no, he doesn’t say that Mead is saying that in putting that in Josephus mouth to make him work for a closed cannon to say, oh, well, if Josephus said they’ve always had that, it must go back a long way, but he’s adding that it’s not there. Josephus doesn’t say that. What is true is that Josephus says that there are 22 books and Protestants will often cite to this and even claim that, oh, it’s the same 22 books that make up the modern 24 books of the Jewish Old Testament, but it’s a little more complicated than that. If you actually listen to the books that Josephus includes
CLIP:
22 books, five from Moses, 13 of prophets and four of others.
Joe:
So I don’t know if you caught that. There’s the five books of the law, the Torah, and then in Josephus is 22 books. There are 13 books of prophets and then four books that you’re just others. This is what someone’s called the Writing Section and the Vem and the hafa. In the modern Jewish Bible, there are five books of Torah that’s true, but instead of 13 prophets, there are eight books of prophets and instead of four books in the writing section, there are 11 books, and the thing is, Josephus doesn’t tell us which books he considers to be part of his 22 book Canon. So we can try to guess. We can look at other places he cites to things and try to piece a canon together, but the truth is we don’t know whether he had the same number of books as a modern Jewish Bible or as a Protestant Bible and he’s just numbering them differently and also ordering them differently or if he actually has different books.
If your argument is this structure, the so-called AK structure, TNK, that you have the Torah, then the prophets, and then the writings that that’s all set in the time of Jesus, and then you cite to a guy who has totally different numbers for the prophetic books and the writings, that doesn’t make it all look totally subtle, does it makes it look like there’s still some ambiguity so much for Josephus then, but if you remember Mead cites to both Josephus and forth Ezra. Now it’s totally understandable if you’re not familiar with that because it’s not a real book of the Bible and it is one that was sometimes considered part of the Bible very confusingly. So this is both a book that Protestants will cite too as telling us how many books are in the Bible and a book that is sometimes itself included in the Bible that Protestants and Catholics don’t accept.
So there’s the Protestant theologian, Martin Hle. In this book, the SubT as Christian scripture talks a little bit about this history and he points out that fourth Ezra speaks of there being 24 books. Remember that’s how many there are in a modern Jewish Bible and that this is the case beginning with Forth Ezra moving forward with the exception of Josephus. The rabbinic sources mentioned the number 24 only from the beginning of the third century. So there’s an early Jewish controversy over which books are and aren’t in the Bible, and we’re going to get into all of that in a little more depth. And so one of the things we don’t know is we’re comparing Josephus who says there are 22 books and Fort Ezra who says there are 24 and the modern Jewish Bible, which says there are 24. We don’t know if this is a difference in numbering or if there are actual substantive differences, and Ingle acknowledges that this could be a difference in number because they actually don’t have the same books, which would make this very bad evidence to point to if you are a Protestant trying to prove that you’ve got the same Bible as Josephus and Fort Ezra when they may not have had the same Bible.
Let’s talk about for Ezra. The line in question is for Ezra, which again, I don’t consider it inspired scripture, but it is helpful historical data, and it’s not really by Ezra, but it says When the 40 days were ended, the most high spoke to me saying, make public the 24 books that you wrote first and let the worthy and the unworthy read them, but keep the 70 that were written last in order to give them to the wise among your people. So in this view, it’s not saying there are 24 books that are divinely inspired. There are 24 public books, but the real books for the wise and initiated are the 70. Now, that could be a reference to the Sept, which literally means the 70 but is more likely just a coincidence. My former professor, father Juan Carlos Osan widow has an entire book on this called The Origins of the Canon of the Hebrew Bible, and in it he points out that Fort Ezra seems to be an argument against a move to restrict scripture to 24 books in favor of the truly wise having more books than that and that it should be read in that light not as an endorsement of a longstanding tradition of their being 24 and only 24 books.
So it’s not clear that Josephus and fourth Ezra agree with each other. It’s not clear at all that fourth Ezra wants there to be 24 books, so none of that I would suggest points to there actually being a clearly crystallized Bible in the year 100, much less a hundred years earlier, far past the evidence allows you to go, but it’s not just that. So to quote another solid Protestant scholar on this issue, Dr. Lee Martin McDonald, he’s professor of New Testament studies and believe he was president of Acadia Divinity College. He has pointed out that no, this was not crystallized, this was not closed. This was rather fluid in the time of Jesus and continued to be for some time after that,
CLIP:
The Talmudic literature was still debating certain books. Ezra, Ecclesiastes, Ezekiel, and even Roc itself was called scripture a number of times in the Talmudic literature, and so there was debates, it was fluid, the canon was fluid.
Joe:
You might understandably be lost at this point because you’ve got one scholar saying it’s crystallized and basically formed maybe with some fuzzy edges and one saying it’s fluid. How do we know who’s right? I would suggest you can resolve this in part by looking to the Jewish sources. You can look to the Jewish Talmud, the Mishna, the Rah, and if you read that, you’ll find the mishna. Ya says that all the holy scriptures make you richly impure. If you touch it, you can’t go and touch something else. It doesn’t matter why. So defiling the hands is a good thing for purposes of what we’re about to read it because it means it’s scripture and it says the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes defile the hand but then acknowledges that there’s a rabbinical controversy on this point and it goes through Rabbi Judah says Song of Songs is scripture, but there’s a dispute about Ecclesiastes Rabbi Yo says Ecclesiastes is not scripture and there’s a dispute about Song of Songs.
Rabbi Shimon says, this is one of those areas where the two major rabbinical schools of the first century bet shamai and be Hillel differed. So they aren’t claiming, oh, this was all settled before the first century. No, they’re saying no. This is now after the first century by we’re like 200 years into this now and we still don’t agree on books like Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs. Then Rabbi Shimon Aziz claimed that he had received a tradition that both of them were inspired or considered canonical, and Rabbi Akiba agrees on Song of Songs and said, if there’s a dispute, it’s only about Ecclesiastes. So that suggests that these were disputed books, right? Then you go to McGill seven A and it talks about how there was a dispute as well over the book of Esther and whether or not it was considered canonical, inspired and would make you richly impure if you touch it, and then it was a question of whether reading and reciting it or actually the text itself was divinely inspired.
Then you jump forward and you find in several other places that the book of RAC, which is not in Protestant bibles, is quoted in the Jewish Talmud as scripture with the invocation. It is written and then cites explicitly in ak. This happens at least three times in Baba. It’s explicitly cited to as being part of the writing section of scripture. So remember that question. Does the writing section in the time of Josephus match up the writing section today? Well, here’s some good evidence that the answer to that is no, it does not. That we know the book of Serac was accepted by later Jewish sources because they tell us it was so when Protestants say, Nope, there’s no controversy. You can see for yourself that there was, it is just not true if I said we weren’t fighting and the person I was allegedly fighting with says, yes, we were, and they show you the text messages and you see the text messages are fighting who’s not telling you the truth.
So the same thing is true here. You can see the fight in the Jewish Talmud because they preserved it and they even said, who’s on which side and on what issues, and that’s just scratching the surface. Timothy Michael law and when God spoke Greek points out, the history of Judaism isn’t so simple because not everybody is a rabbi or following these rabbinical schools in the late first century. Remember there’s this large group of Greek speaking Jews who were already using different Bibles with more books and the evidence suggests that they seem to have continued to have done so for a long time, even centuries, even in the medieval period. It doesn’t appear that the Jewish canon has universal support amongst the Jewish people. So this idea that it’s all settled by the time of Christ is just not true. So on those arguments, the Jewish people had a closed canon at the time of Jesus which matched the Protestant Old Testament.
We know that that is not true. What about that next argument that, well, the early Christians followed this because they believed in Romans three, which says that the Jews are entrusted with the Oracles of God. Well, it is true. They believed in Romans three, which says that the Jews are entrusted with the Oracles of God. As far as I can tell. It is not true that any of them ever took it in the modern Protestant kind of dispensationalist way that the Jewish people therefore have permanent decision-making authority over what does and doesn’t get to go in the Bible. So let’s address Wes’ Oracles of God argument here because I don’t know a lot of scholars making this argument and it is flagrantly wrong.
CLIP:
Arguments were made by those like milito of Sardis, origin, Athanasius, and many others. That Paul’s statement in Romans chapter three, verse two that the Jews were entrusted with the Oracles of God was reason to omit almost all of the deutero canonical books as divinely inspired scripture.
Joe:
Okay? The first red flag there is the fact that he says almost all, and he doesn’t really explain what he means, which books were and weren’t to be accepted if they didn’t agree with the Jewish canon. He does not say. Instead, he claims that this is the argument made by milito of Sardis, by origin, by Athanasius and others. He doesn’t really say what the others are, and it just as far as I can tell isn’t true, and this I see these early Christian sources being misused pretty frequently, and I think it’s an innocent mistake because Alito and origin are telling you which books are in the Jewish Bible and therefore Protestants are saying, well, this agrees with us, but they’re not saying that’s in the Christian Bible. They’re saying that’s in the Jewish Bible, which yeah, the Jewish Bible agrees with yours, and as it turns out, it doesn’t actually in the time of Alito and origin for the reasons we just talked about because the Jewish Bible hadn’t been completely settled yet, but let’s address him each in turn.
First Alito, this is pretty famous. He’s sometimes accredited with having the oldest list of books that are in the Christian Bible. The problem is if you read what he actually wrote, he’s speaking as one bishop to a brother Bishop saying, I know that you wanted to have extracts made from the law and the prophets concerning the savior and concerning our entire faith. So what’s he looking for here? Well, remember the context here. There’s still a lively conversation between Jewish and Christian believers. There’s a lot of, you have, for instance, in the one hundreds St. Justin Martyr’s dialogue with Tfoa Jew, and so this is still a time when there’s a very Jewish strain to Christianity and a lot of back and forth. It’s becoming an increasingly gentile religion, but one of the things that you find many of the apologists in this era trying to do intentionally is evangelize the Jewish people.
And so one of the things that you need to do to do that well is figure out which books they do and don’t accept as scripture. So the reason that onus has asked Milito for the canon list is to have a better sense of where in the law prophets we can find testimonies for the savior and aspects of the Christian faith. It is not explicit right there that he’s doing this for apologetic purposes, but it is pretty close to explicit and he’s intentionally wanting to know the number and order. Now, he’s not wanting to know the number and order of books that a Christian would have. These are two bishops. They know which books they have. They’re wanting to know which books and in which order they’re going to appear in the Jewish cannon, and this becomes abundantly clear, I think in that Milito explains that he went to the East very obviously meaning to Palestine to the holy land and reach the place where these things were preached and done.
He says, I learned accurately the books of the Old Testament and I send them to you as written below. Now, that line, the books of the Old Testament has confused a lot of later readers, but bear in mind, old Testament and New Testament are not yet terms used to describe the collections of books. Literally what he says here is the old covenant. He seems to be talking about the Jewish people there, the books of the Jewish people, the old covenant people, but because we think of Old Testament and New Testament, not as covenants but as sets of books, we can read that and say, oh, he’s describing a Christian Old Testament. He’s not. He’s describing a Jewish canon. This becomes clear. Martin Hle points this out. He says that the ongoing dialogue with Jewish opponents and their reference to the as had to be acknowledged more original Hebrew cannon kept this uncertainty alive, and he says that the original text is very apparent in Alitos list that this is what’s going on.
This is a debate about how do we evangelize the Jewish people and additionally, the list that he comes back with from Israel from Palestine is not the modern Jewish slash Protestant Old Testament, which is a bit of a problem. This is pointed out in the book the biblical cannon lists from early Christianity by Edmund Gallagher and John Mead, and you might be saying the same John Mead one. In the same, he knows that this is not actually good evidence for the Protestant position because he mentions there or they mention there that Alitos list includes the Jewish cannon minus Esther. Additionally, he includes a single book of Ezra, while many other ancient sources have two books of Ezra or Ezra also means Ezra. That might mean Ezra Nehemiah together as one book, or it might be referring to a different book called Ezra B. Unfortunately, and there’s not that I can do for this.
Different ancient sources referred to the same books by different names, and it’s extremely confusing. So we don’t know why he has one book of Ezra here and not two after Proverbs. He then mentions the book of wisdom, which either refers to the Book of Wisdom in Catholic Bibles or is another name for the book of Proverbs, which is what you see. BS argues. Mili also doesn’t tell us what’s in the book of Jeremiah. Why does that matter? Because he doesn’t mention Lamentations or Baruch in the Greek version of Jeremiah, Lamentations, Baruch and Jeremiah are all together as one book, and so if that’s what he means by Jeremiah, then he’s got one or two books that are not in the Protestant Bible. If he just means the Jewish version of Jeremiah that doesn’t have Lamentations or Baruch, then he’s missing Lamentations. He’s also clearly missing Esther.
He might be missing Nehemiah. It’s not clear he might have a different Ezra B. In other words, this is not a clear Protestant canon and is very clearly not a Protestant canon, and more importantly, this is not a Christian canon at all. This is a Jewish canon and shows that the Jewish canon in this era is still being hammered out, which is the opposite of what people like West Hoff are claiming. Okay, so let’s turn from Alito to origin. Origin is quoted in Zeus’s church history, and he’s very clear that he’s giving a Jewish cannon. He says it should be stated that the canonical books as the Hebrews have handed them down are 22. Now, remember, 22 is the older number later Jewish sources are going to say 24, but he’s explicitly giving a Jewish cannon and not a Christian Cannon. This’s going to become even more obvious for origin than it was for Alito.
He then gives both the Greek name that the Christians would know and the Hebrew name sometimes even seemingly an Aramaic name, although there’s a dispute about that for the different books of the Old Testament that are accepted by the Jews. As Martin Hle points out, we know for a fact that he’s not giving a Christian canon because he knows the Christian tradition and he knows the differences between the books and the Christian Old Testament and the Jewish one because he’s written about that. So we know for a fact that he’s given us a Jewish cannon here. Additionally, Gallagher and John Mead point out, well, one book for which Origen knew that his own text diverged from the Jewish text was that of Daniel, that we have an entire letter called the letter to Africanists, in which he argues against the position Wes Huff claims that he holds.
Remember Wes’ claim is that origin said, well, Romans three, two says the Jews have the Oracles of God. We’ve got to go with the Jewish cannon or doesn’t say that or says the opposite. Origen acknowledges that the Jewish cannon differs from the Christian Old Testament and says we should go with the Christian one. He says this at great length, and it’s not just on one book as you might get from the Gallagher and Mead quotation, while the context of that letter is about differences in the ENT book of Daniel Origen himself says that, yeah, while this is true of this passage, the history of Susanna, which is found in every church of Christ in that Greek copy, which the Greeks use, but not in the Hebrew. So let’s pause there. Origen is telling you every Christian Church uses the longer form of Daniel, and we know that is not the version used among the Jews, and yet this same guy telling us that we are to believe said, we got to just go with whatever the Jewish canon is.
He says, and it’s not just this, he says, there are thousands of other passages where there are these divergences. He might be exaggerating there, but there really are a lot of divergent translations and passages and the like, and it wasn’t just like individual passages. He explicitly says, Tobin and Judith are accepted by the churches, but not by the Jews. He says, they’re not even found in the Hebrew apocrypha as I learned from the Jews themselves. Nevertheless, he still treats them authoritatively because he says that churches use Tobias Tobit so clearly these are not people saying, we need to just follow whatever the Jewish canon is. They’re saying the exact opposite of that. Okay, flash forward to Athanasius, and Athanasius is a little more of a complicated case. Martin Ingle actually points this out because there’s a weird thing that happens on the way to Athanasius.
Origen has written this clearly Jewish canon. He’s not arguing for it. He’s describing it for what makes sense in the second century and third century kind of apologetic purposes. But Eusebius, when he records this, puts together origin’s description of the Jewish Old Testament with his descriptions of the Christian New Testament, and the result looks like Origin is giving his own view of what he thinks the Old Testament should be, and so many people reading Eusebius get confused by this, and that seems to be the case even for other early Christians like Athanasius and Ingle makes this argument explicitly that Athanasius’s Al letter seems to be following what he thinks his origins lead, that we have to put all the scriptures in this special 22 book list. And so he tries to make that work. Now, even in his attempt to make that work, he doesn’t end up with the Protestant Old Testament.
He has a shorter Bible of course, than you’re going to find among Catholics, but he includes the book Baruch explicitly. He says explicitly Baruch Lamentations in the Epistle one book. So he’s numbering in his one book with Jeremiah. He goes on to say in his Al letter that there are other books that are not treated as apocryphal, but are also not treated as canonical. And he mentions the Book of Wisdom book of Rac, Esther, Judith and Tobit, the Diday and Shepherd of Hermes. Now, that’s pretty striking because it’s not like he forgot about Esther. You’ll regularly find Protestants when they find these old cosmic pastors say, oh, maybe they accidentally skipped over Esther. It’s like, no, no, Esther was disputed. So if you’re following the Jewish canon, that doesn’t give you the Book of Esther. So that matters, right? Because if you’re saying, we got to go with Athanasius, well, Athanasius doesn’t have your Old Testament if you’re a Protestant, doesn’t have the Catholic one either, but my point is you can’t look to him as someone would support your view. He distinguishes these, as I said a second ago, explicitly, he does not think of them as apocrypha. So he has a place for books like Esther Wisdom, Sirach the Diday, but he doesn’t view them as fully scriptural or just throw ’em out completely. Okay? Bonus round. Now, this one West did not mention, but Dr. John Mead does St. Gregory Nazi Anus, who he’s going to claim never quotes from the Juda o cannon because he had this same short view allegedly.
CLIP:
This is an icon of Gregory, of Nazi anus. He is like Mr. Trinity, okay? Major fourth century theologian. Very, very instrumental in giving us the doctrine of the Trinity that we have today. So you just don’t expect much of the synagogue, so to speak, to influence him, but in fact, it does. And Gregory of Nazi Anzo, I can’t find a single place in all of his writings where he quotes a so-called apocryphal book as scripture. Even
Joe:
I can find several just to give a few. In St. Gregory Ian’s oration 45, he quotes as scripture, the line, the seed of the Chaldeans, which is Judith five verse six. In oration 37, several times, he’s addressing the sexism of laws of his day, talking about how they treat promiscuous women very badly and promiscuous men. They kind of nod and wink at it, and he responds by saying, this goes against the law of God. And so he quotes several places from scripture where the law of God says, you need to treat your wife well, and you need to treat your parents well. And one of the places he quotes is Sirach three, verse 11, which says, A man’s glory comes from honoring his father, and it is a disgrace for children not to respect their mother. So he’s quoted Judith as scripture. He’s quoted sir as scripture in Oration 28, also called the Second Theological Oration.
He says, and how shall we preserve the truth that God pervades all things and fills all as it is written? And then after saying as it is written, he quotes Jeremiah 23 and the book of Wisdom verse chapter one, verse seven. So no, repeatedly he quotes the Deutero canon as scripture. I don’t know why he’s claiming that he doesn’t, because it took very little time to find numerous passages, not only where he references it, and he references it a lot. He has an entire sermon just on the Maccabean. He quotes it as scripture and says he’s doing so it’s just not true. Alright, so that leaves one final argument. Did most early Christians use the Protestant Bible? Now by this point, you should be extremely skeptical saying, okay, well none of the historical evidence they’ve cited to yet has really stood up scrutiny. When you take a close look at it here, I want to give a little bit of ground and say there really were early Christians who said we should follow the Jewish practice. This happens actually much later, and it seems to be as Martin Ingle points out based on misunderstanding, origin and others. But you’ll find this kind of view. You’ll also find the view that origin laid out, the real origin that says we should look not to what the Jews are doing, but what the Christians are doing and follow the practice of the church. So Wes Huff in talking about this lays out these kind of two criteria
CLIP:
In the Latin West. Many were less concerned whether a book was part of the Jewish cannon and more concerned with whether early Christians were reading and receiving a book as authoritative. Both Augustine and Innocent, the first took this particular stance. Jerome and Ru Fineas stood on the other side of Augustine and innocent though promoting the narrower Jewish canon and placing the Deutero canonical books in a secondary list of books that were useful but not on the grounds of standing for faith doctrine and practice of the church.
Joe:
So as you heard, St. Augustine is one of the people who argues for what’s sometimes called the church criterion that if you want to know which books are in the Bible, look to the church and you can figure that out. Dr. John Mead gives a very helpful quote from Augustine directly that explains his view in his own words.
CLIP:
But what about the church criterion? Here’s Augustine. He says The most expert investigator of the divine scriptures will apply this principle to the canonical scriptures to prefer those books accepted by all Catholic churches to those which some do not accept. As for those not universally accepted, he should prefer those accepted by a majority of churches and by the more authoritative ones to those supported by fewer churches or by churches of lesser authority.
Joe:
So at least by the fourth century, the three hundreds, you have people like Augustine saying we should go with what the church says. And you have people like Jerome saying we should follow the Jewish consensus. And so an important question is, which one was the predominant strand of Christianity? And both Wes and Dr. John Mead are going to claim it’s the follow the Jewish canon model. So here’s Wes’ argument.
CLIP:
When we actually evaluate the history of the discussion throughout church history, it’s clearly not a case of Protestants removing books. The Protestant tradition as it pertains and agreed with the Hebrew canon is the stance that had more ancient precedents.
Joe:
And this argument is made even more strongly, forcefully and clearly by Dr. Mead who calls this a criteria crunch that these two criteria, what does the church say? What do the Jewish people say? They collide at some point and we realize, oh, it’s going to give us different bibles.
CLIP:
So what about the criteria crunch here then? This is what I like to say. These two here are going to wind up as some conflict, aren’t they? Number one, the Hebrew criterion caused churches mainly to adhere to the Hebrew cannon, okay? And I think the majority of Christians actually were there. But the second point is that the church acceptance criterion caused them some Christians to accept more books than were in the Hebrew canon.
Joe:
So that’s the argument. And if you think about that carefully, you should realize there is no way that could be right. Here’s what I mean by that. Both West and Dr. Mead are making the argument that the majority of Christians say that we should follow the Old Testament used by the Jews and the minority of Christians says we should follow the Bible used by the majority of Christians. If that’s true, they would all agree. If I said there’s two groups of people, one wants to go get burgers and the other wants to do whatever the majority wants to do, the majority wants burgers. The minority wants to do whatever the majority wants you say, it doesn’t sound like there’s a conflict at all. It sounds like the minority is willing to go along with the majority. So even within the terms of their argument, it does not make any sense.
If there really was at any point in history, a majority of people saying we should just follow the Jewish Old Testament. And the other group said, what Augustine says go with the majority, they would all follow the Jewish Old Testament. So the fact that they don’t is rebuttable proof that what Dr. Me is saying there cannot possibly be true because the actual evidence is they don’t all have the same Bible that Augustine and Jerome actually do disagree about which books do and don’t belong. So the reality is, number one, the view that we should follow the Old Testament used by the Jewish people has only ever been a minority view and usually a pretty fringe one and two, this explains why those following the Bible used by the majority of Christians would end up with a different Bible than those following the Jewish canon. That you can go all the way back to people like Origen and see that Christians were all using a different Bible than the Jews were.
Orgen acknowledges this and he’s fully aware of what both those canons are. So it’s just not true that Protestantism is resurrecting the oldest or the majority view or anything like that. No. The arguments for the Protestant view were number one, this was always a fringe view. And number two, many of the people, most of the people being cited to as adherence to this fringe view actually didn’t have the same Bible that modern Protestants do in the first place. And the more you get into the depth of actually reading their testimony instead of just reading what other people claim about them, the more you can see that for yourself. Final thoughts missing from a lot of this discussion are two important moments. I mentioned them before, but I need to just make sure we close on this as the IVP introduction to the Bible points out the standard Bible in the Western Church for more than a thousand years is the Latin Vulgate.
And as Richard Marsden points out, that includes the Deutero canonical books. Ironically, Jerome, even though he had private misgiving, personal misgivings about it, I should say, and even wrote against it, nevertheless consented to what the church told them to do, translates to books and they’re passed on often in ways he wouldn’t approve of. They’re not grouped together, they’re put in a totally different, they’re interspersed with the rest of scripture. They’re treated just as other parts of the Old Testament. The second thing I want to make sure that we close with keeping in view is what I said before, the Ecumenical Council of Florence and what’s called the Bull of Union with the cops in February 4th, 1442, tells us that God is the author of the Old and the New Testament, and that they’re both inspired by the same Holy Spirit and then lists the 73 books of divinely inspired scripture.
This is sometimes treated as some optional thing or just a theological opinion, but it clearly is more than that. It’s an ecumenical council describing what the church believes on an important issue. And so to call that the minority view seems so obviously false that it beggars belief. So I know this is a long one. I know I’m talking about a topic that other people have already done kind of hot takes on, and I am grateful for you sticking around to the very end. I just give this to say, as much as I like West Huff, as much as I like some of the work that Dr. John Meat has done as well on this issue, they’re just blatantly wrong. And I’ve seen we take correction very well, and I hope that videos like this one will help him to realize that the claims he’s making about the history of the Bible are not just disputed, they’re factually incorrect. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.