Thread by @drjohnmeade

1/ Listening to a good apologetics podcast (link 👇) today from @DrTimothyPJones, I was especially interested in his answers to the questions on the formation of the canon of Scripture around 40:45. The answer to the NT (about 40:50-46:30) was fine.

The OT one though (46:30)...

2/ I think he captured the early church's view of the deuterocanonical books well when he said "they were some really great books." But the story for how they ended up in the Roman Catholic canon and not the Protestant one is not quite right, IMHO.

3/ It goes awry when the Septuagint was brought into the story. "The 70" translated the Law of Moses and nothing is said about them collecting all kinds of books translated into or written in Greek. Not until Justin Martyr (ca. 165 AD) are the 70 responsible for the whole OT.

4/ Thus Jesus and the NT authors probably didn't think in terms of a Septuagint canon vs. a Hebrew canon. There was only a mostly formed Jewish canon or corpus of recognized books as Qumran, Philo, the NT, and most 2nd century Christian authors attest (cf., e.g., Enoch in Jude).

5/ Even in the 4th century #canonlists of Cyril of Jerusalem and Epiphanius we can see Christians defining the work of the 70 by the books they translated from Hebrew into Greek, and then they list twenty-two books of OT according to the number of letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

6/ So what about the debate between Jerome and Augustine, which Jones mentions? Can we solve this debate by mere appeal to the canon of Jesus (cf. Luke 24:44) and the supposed order and structure of that canon vs. the order and structure of Septuagint one? I'm not so sure. Why?

7/ For one, no early Christian thought in terms about "the canon of Jesus." 4th cent. Christians did think in terms of tradition & hoped they received the accurate one from their bishops.

For the OT canon, can we decide between antiquity of traditions of wide & narrow canons?

8/ Yes, we can. There r two 2nd cent. canon lists (Bryennios & Melito). These two lists attest specifically the narrow canon, the one Jerome argued was the more traditional. That is, 4th cent. fathers who transmitted the narrower canon certainly have precedent in the 2nd century.

9/ But clearly Tertullian and, slightly later, Origen would have probably subscribed to a wider canon, anticipating Augustine's view, according to what books the churches were reading and using. But this opinion doesn't appear to be the mainline view, which equaled 22 book canon.

10/ All this to say, we can't describe the early picture in terms of Septuagint Canon vs. Hebrew Canon or Canon of Jesus vs. later Augustine/Roman Catholic Canon.

Better: in the 4th cent. lists, what canon appears to be more traditional and which one more innovative?

11/ IMHO, the narrower canon appears more traditional, though the innovation began far earlier than Augustine.

I have written a short piece, "Was There a Septuagint Canon?", on this here: academia.edu/36207537/Was_t…

12/ Again, I appreciate Jones' work and his engagement of these questions. I only wanted to point out that the answers are far more complicated than the podcast could have shown.
(podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/thr…).

13/ Our apologetic must be consonant with truth, which I know Jones would agree. This is one reason I helped found the @TextandCanon Institute so that apologetics can be grounded in sound scholarship. Scholars must listen 2 apologists and apologists 2 scholars. This is my hope.

@TextandCanon @threadreaderapp, please unroll.