gluadys said:
You seem to be assuming that I am supporting including oral tradition as authoritative. I am not. I am only looking at the fact that some denominations, rightly or wrongly, do. Also at what we can deduce of the role of oral tradition in regard the LXX prior to the completion of the canonization process of the Old and New Testaments.
I thought it seemed out of place for you and couldn't quite see where you were coming from. I think I saw somewhere (was it you?) said you had EO leanings, which might have explained some of it, or you could have just been trying to find out more about the subject.
There are two ways we can look at the question of the apocrypha, we can try to find understand the reasons some denominations accept them, or we can look at
why they are wrong!!! Coming from a Catholic background, after a long struggle to deprogram myself and leave, I lean rather heavily towards the second option, as you have seen
In short, I am not evaluating the correctness or reliability of oral tradition, but only attempting to establish what it was and how we can know it.
Unfortunately we only know what oral tradition was after the fact, when someone writes it down, or writes about it, or when we hear it for the first time. Usually an oral tradition will claim to be 'what the church has always believed'. Sometimes you can trace the development of a tradition or doctrine from references in earlier writings, but people who believe in the oral tradition is an authentic will read the later tradition
back into the early statements that the tradition grew out of.
Which is why I prefer to stick with the scriptures.
It does not mean that he didnt either. Or that such a tradition did not exist. I expect the key question here is whether the LXX was seen to be a collection of scripture prior to the existence of the codices. It is possible that it was not.
If that is the case, we are looking at whether each book in what has come to be seen as the LXX canon was perceived as scripture or simply as edifying reading.
Yes, it can be quite hard to tell the difference.
Canonization requires elimination as well as inclusion. If all the Fathers did was recognize which Christian writings were held authoritative by churches, the NT would contain hundreds of books and letters, not just 27. I recall a plaint by one 4th century bishop that over 400 gospels were in circulation in his diocese. Canonization whittled down that number to four. If that is not decision-making, I dont know what is.
Yes, the NT made the churches what they are, but only after the church made the NT.
Of the 400 'gospels' floating around his parish, how many were actually considered authoritative by the churches? If you look at the lists of of actual candidates for the canon, there weren't very many books being considered.
Of course they are not. Relative to the LXX, the question is how did pre-Jamnia Jews, including Jewish Christians such as the apostles, evaluate them? Did they see the LXX as a scriptural canon? Did they see any deuteron-canonical work as scripture.
I suggest we cannot know from the evidence what their position was. We know that there is no direct quotation from them in NT scripture. But what about extra-canonical Jewish and Christian writings? We know there are many allusions to them in the NT.
But neither citation nor allusion specifically identify the LXX deutero-canonical books as scripture. OTOH they do not exclude the possibility of this POV either.
The testimony of NT writers backs up the Jamina council. This is the most powerful testimony you can have, hostile witnesses. You would need very strong evidence to claim that the apocrypha were part of the first century canon, in spite of the testimony of Jamina that they were not and the strange failure of the NT writers to quote them.
Thats impossible. Most NT scripture was written prior to the rabbinical conference of Jamnia. No one can recognize a canon that has not been proposed yet. The only available "canon" they could recognize was the LXX.
You are assuming the LXX was a canon, in fact the LXX initially applied to only to the Pentateuch, If you are talking of all the Greek books bound together into a codex as the canon of the LXX then that belongs to 4th and 5th century Christianity not 1st century Judaism. On the other hand the council of Jemina did not 'propose a canon', they put in writing the books of scripture that were already recognised in the Synagogues. I think the only book to give them any trouble was Ezekiel, probably because of his weirder acting out prophecies naked that would have got him banned and undergoing counselling in any church I know of.
If you read the NT people knew what scripture was. There is a shared definition when Jesus spoke about 'the law and the prophets'. Jemina wrote it down for us, but people even understood the order of the books, otherwise Jesus comment about all the prophets from Abel (in the beginning of Genesis) to Zechariah (the end of Chronicles the last book in the Tanach), would have been meaningless.
Why not? Why would they be any different than the church fathers in this respect, many of whom argued passionately for the inclusion of Christian apocrypha such as The Shepherd of Hermas or the letters of Clement?
Hermas was left out because it was written later, but ultimately, because most churches didn't recognise them as scripture. What you are suggesting is that the Jews in Jamina left out books that had been generally recognised and loved as the word of God, simply because the Christians like them? The Christians loved Deuteronomy, Isaiah and the Psalms and they were always quoting them at the Jews as evidence of Jesus being the Messiah. Why didn't Jamina cut those books if they dropped the Apocrypha when the Christians quoted them?
Well, the codices did not appear out of thin air. Someone decided what to include in them. And what was included already existed and was no doubt used in Jewish and Christian communities. So there must have been copying and circulation of the manuscripts going back possibly as far as the original translation of the Hebrew works into Greek. So we are looking here at nearly 6 centuries of use prior to the creation of the codices. And for the first two centuries, we are looking at solely Jewish use unaffected by the still non-existent church.
I dont think there can be any question that the early churches imitated the synagogues of the Greek-speaking diaspora in terms of what writings were deemed authoritative.
I also expect that the production of LXX codices reflected the use of the early church. What would be really helpful here would be to find an earlier codex with Jewish roots, or failing that, a pre-Jamnia or extra-Jamnia listing of recommended writings from a Jewish perspective. Lacking such evidence we can only speculate.
How, for example, could one ever say that 1st century Jews regarded Sirach as part of a canon if no canon yet existed? Only the first two sections of the Tanakh (Torah and Prophets) had fixed boundaries in the first century. Canonicity did not apply yet to any other text, including Chronicles, Job, Proverbs or any of the texts we do now refer to as canonical.
Yes copies of Greek manuscripts of Jewish books were passed down to the church who bound them together in a codex. Some were translations of the Hebrew scriptures. Others were Jewish religious books mostly written in Greek. The Christians who bound these collections together into a handy book format centuries later did not know the difference.
It does not mean any Hellenistic Jew ever considered the apocrypha scripture. But we do have a rich source of what first century Jews considered scripture, we have the testimony of Jamina and we have the testimony of the writers of the NT. Astonishingly, inspite of the animosity between Jews and Christians they agree. What more testimony do we need?
But that is the basis on which you are arguing that the NT writers did not regard the deutero-canonical LXX books as inspired scripture. When the NT writers composed their epistles and gospels, Proverbs was no more part of the Jewish canon than Wisdom or Baruch were. There was no canon to hold authoritative in respect to the Ketubim. Unless it was that of the LXX.
The LXX wasn't a canon. But Jemina tells us what rabbis in the first century had been taught were the books of the bible and it matches very closely the books quoted by the NT writers and even the order of the canon assumed in Jesus teaching.
If lack of a NT reference is sufficient to exclude Judith or Maccabees, it is also sufficient to exclude Proverbs.
Apart from the fact that Proverbs was quoted in the NT, it was part of the group of wisdom literature including Job and Psalms that were long accepted as scripture and were quoted in the NT. No book of the second canon was ever accepted as scripture by the Jews.
The same could be said for any OT book that is not part of the Torah or the Prophets, and not cited in the NT e.g. Proverbs.
The law and the prophets was a phrase used to describe the Jewish scriptures, just because it only says 'law' and 'prophets' it does not mean it excludes historical books like Chronicles, or wisdom literature like the Psalms. The idiom 'the law and the prophets' covered the whole Tanach including Psalms and Proverbs. But it never meant religious books like Sirach or Judith.
gluadys in If evolution is not valid science said:
It might be helpful if we knew what you considered signs of something being "quoted as though they were the Authoritative word of God." How does one distinguish such a citation from one that is quoted without implication that it is the Authoritative word of God?
It could be as strong a reference as
James 4:5&6 where the writer is talking about what scripture says, 5 Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, "He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us"? 6 But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, "God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble." Which is a direct quote from Prov 3:34 in the LXX
The Lord resists the proud, but He gives grace to the humble.
But "
quoting as though they were the Authoritative word of God." can mean just quoting the verse, simply thinking the passage was worth quoting. The New Testament writers clearly recognised a body of work they called Scripture or 'the law and the prophets'. 99.5% of the times when a passage is quoted in the NT it is a passage from the body of books the Jamina Rabbis called the Tanach.
Now I wouldn't have any trouble accepting a book if it belonged in the same body of work, even if it didn't get quoted in the NT, I would have serious difficulties with a claim that a book was scripture if it belonged to a different corpus, a 'second canon' that was neither quoted by the NT or accepted by the first century Jews as scripture.
