Are the Jews the gatekeepers of the OT?

In one sense, they are, because it is their cultural and religious literature. In another sense, many of the earliest Christians were Jewish and had a Christological perspective on the same text. So the answer will always depend upon who you ask.

OkieAllDay said:

Protestants have the same OT as the Jews. The Jews are said to be entrusted with the oracles/words of God. People take this to mean that God gave the Jews the OT and so Orthodox and Catholics have "added" to the Word by bringing books in which the Jews have always rejected. Agree or disagree and why?

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Are you speaking of the Apocrypha?

No. The OT is our book. The Jews have their own canons related to their different divisions (not all Jews share the same canon of scripture, just like not all Christians share the same canon of scripture), and while they share some of the same books as are in the Christian OT, the Christian OT is larger, since it is traditionally based on the LXX codified in Alexandria by the translators there in the time before Christ's incarnation (c. 2nd-3rd century BC), which contains within it material that is specific to the Hellenized Jews of that area (the books that they specifically preserved, which were different than what was preserved elsewhere). Some Christian churches of antiquity, such as those of the Axumites (modern day Ethiopia and Eritrea) have even more than what is in the LXX, making them even more distinct from the Jews would accept of the OT writings.

It is better to consider the OT of the Jews of today to be a later development, particularly if you are looking at the Masoretic text (on which the OT in many Protestant bibles is based), as that was not fixed until the 7th-10th centuries AD, which is much later than the Christian OT or even the NT. We have complete Bibles (OT and NT) centuries older than that.

OkieAllDay said:

Protestants have the same OT as the Jews. The Jews are said to be entrusted with the oracles/words of God. People take this to mean that God gave the Jews the OT and so Orthodox and Catholics have "added" to the Word by bringing books in which the Jews have always rejected. Agree or disagree and why?

Click to expand...

When Paul spoke about Jews having the Torah and being entrusted with the oracles/words of God, he was referring to Jews having physical possession of Torah scrolls and being entrusted copying, maintaining, and teaching them. Moreover, Hebrew script did not originally have vowel points, so there needed to be an oral tradition of how to pronounce the words of Torah in order to correctly know which ones it uses, and Jews were also entrusted with passing down this tradition. For example, if we were to read "md", then we might not know whether it us the word "mad", "med", "mid, "mod", or "mud" without vowel markings or an oral tradition, which is why Jews claim that the Torah can't be correctly understood without that oral tradition. In other words, if a Gentile wanted to learn the Torah, then they had to go through a Jews to do that.

This also means that Gentiles should approach interpreting the Tanakh with some humility with giving respect to a people who have been entrusted with teaching it for thousands of years. This is a bit exaggerated, but Christians can sometimes come across as having the attitude towards Jews of "I just started reading the OT, I don't know Hebrew, but I just purchased this Hebrew dictionary, and I can't wait to tell you how you've been teaching the Tanakh all wrong for thousands of years, and even though the Tanakh speaks about grace and faith, let me tell you about these concepts that Paul invented." There is much that Gentiles can learn from how Jews have interpreted the Tanakh that provides context for how the authors of the NT interpreted it.

OkieAllDay said:

Protestants have the same OT as the Jews. The Jews are said to be entrusted with the oracles/words of God. People take this to mean that God gave the Jews the OT and so Orthodox and Catholics have "added" to the Word by bringing books in which the Jews have always rejected. Agree or disagree and why?

Click to expand...

Disagree. The Jewish Tanakh developed and formed in parallel, but distinctly, from the Christian Old Testament. It's not that we should ignore the Jewish community and why it did what it did and why; but it isn't the determinant of what is or isn't Scripture for the Christian Church.

There can be interesting conversations to be had, but that the Jewish rabbis in the centuries following the destruction of the Temple ended up with a final form of their Bible doesn't mean that the Christian community's own questions and ways of dealing with the matter of a Biblical Canon are thrown out the window just as soon as the Jewish community settled on their own Biblical Canon.

The Christian Old Testament and the Jewish Tanakh aren't the same thing. Each developed distinctly from one another, one from the Christian community and the other from the Jewish community. And so each community dealt with different questions, different methods, and the processes of canonical development were quite different. We shouldn't, therefore, expect necessarily the same answer (Canon) to arrive from these different sets of questions posed by each community.

-CryptoLutheran

OkieAllDay said:

Protestants have the same OT as the Jews. The Jews are said to be entrusted with the oracles/words of God. People take this to mean that God gave the Jews the OT and so Orthodox and Catholics have "added" to the Word by bringing books in which the Jews have always rejected. Agree or disagree and why?

Click to expand...

Disagree. If there's one overriding theme of the OT, it's that Jews can't be entrusted. Think about it - despite being written by Jews, the OT is the most anti-Jewish book you'll ever read apart from the Quran and Mein Kampf.

OkieAllDay said:

Protestants have the same OT as the Jews. The Jews are said to be entrusted with the oracles/words of God. People take this to mean that God gave the Jews the OT and so Orthodox and Catholics have "added" to the Word by bringing books in which the Jews have always rejected. Agree or disagree and why?

Click to expand...

I disagree, and I think that Paul's reference means something more along the lines of "official curators" rather than gatekeepers.

If Christianity is true, and taking something from, say, Isaiah 48:1-12 as even a token indication as to the extent that God has made the Jewish people on the whole those who are "entrusted with the oracles of God," then obviously---if Jesus really is the Messiah, the Son of God, The Alpha and The Omega----then the Lord God did not also make the Jewish people the official or the only interpreters of those same oracles.

Well if we obedient Gentiles and obedient to God Jews are all called the true seed of Abraham then how can it be said Gentiles can't consider it their book as well?