The Hebrew Bible wasn't canonized until after the fall of the Temple.
Canonized by whom?
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The Very Long Process of Canonization of the Hebrew Bible : History of Information
"Evidence suggests that the process of
canonization of the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible
(Old Testament) occurred over several centuries, probably between 200 BCE and 200 CE.
"Rabbinic Judaism recognizes the twenty-four books of the
Masoretic Text,
commonly called the Tanakh or
Hebrew Bible
. Evidence suggests that the process of canonization occurred between 200 BC and AD 200. A popular position is that the Torah was canonized circa 400 BC, the Prophets circa 200 BC, and the Writings circa AD 100 perhaps at a hypothetical
Council of Jamnia
—this position, however, is increasingly criticised by modern scholars."
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NT Writers thought it was already canonized:
Luke 24
25 And He said to them, "O foolish men and slow of heart to believe
in all that the prophets have spoken!
26 "Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and to enter into His glory?"
27 Then beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself
in all the Scriptures.
Again Paul say "
ALL scripture is given by inspiration from God and is to be used for doctrine AND correction" 2Tim 3:16.
And in Acts 17:11 "they
studied the scriptures daily to see IF those things (spoken to them by the Apostle Paul) were SO"
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Jerome –
Jerome is an authority for this division, he (Luther) cited
St. Jerome, who in the early 5th century
distinguished the
Hebrew and
Greek Old Testaments,
[4] stating that books not found in the Hebrew were not received as canonical. Although his statement was controversial in his day,
[5] Jerome was later titled a
Doctor of the Church and his authority was also cited in the
Anglican statement in 1571 of the
Thirty-Nine Articles.
[6]
Jerome completed his version of the Bible, the
Latin Vulgate, in 405. In the Middle Ages the Vulgate became the de facto standard version of the Bible in the
West. These Bibles were divided into
Old and
New Testaments only; there was no separate Apocrypha section. Nevertheless,
the Vulgate manuscripts included prologues[11] that
clearly identified certain books of the Vulgate Old Testament as apocryphal or non-canonical. In the prologue to the
books of Samuel and
Kings, which is often called the
Prologus Galeatus, Jerome described those books not translated from the Hebrew as apocrypha; he specifically mentions that
Wisdom, the
book of Jesus son of Sirach,
Judith,
Tobias, and the
Shepherd "are not in the canon". In the prologue to
Esdras he mentions
3 and
4 Esdras as being apocrypha. In his prologue to the books of Solomon, he mentioned "the book of Jesus son of Sirach and another
pseudepigraphos, which is titled the
Wisdom of Solomon". He says of them and Judith, Tobias, and the
Books of the Maccabees, that the Church "has not received them among the canonical scriptures".
He mentions the
book of Baruch in his prologue to the
Jeremias and does not explicitly refer to it as apocryphal, but he does mention that "it is neither read nor held among the Hebrews". In his prologue to the
Judith he mentions that "among the Hebrews, the authority [of Judith] came into contention", but that it was "counted in the number of Sacred Scriptures" by the
First Council of Nicaea.
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The invented idea of: council of Jamnia for the purpose of canonization
Jamnia – Speculation about Torah is baseless
In 1871
Heinrich Graetz, drawing on Mishnaic and Talmudic sources, concluded
that there must have been a late 1st century Council of Jamnia which had decided the Jewish canon. This became the prevailing scholarly consensus for much of the 20th century,
but from the 1960s onwards it came increasingly into question. In particular, later scholars noted that
none of Graetz's sources actually mentioned books that had been withdrawn from a canon, and questioned the whole premise that the discussions of the rabbis were about canonicity at all.
Answer: The Council of Jamnia did not canonize the Tanakh (the OT text) since as Josephus admits the books of the Tanakh had not changed from the days of Ezra.
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Josephus, a Jewish historian of the first century: “
From Artaxerxes [Malachi ' s time] until our time everything has been recorded but has not been deemed worthy of like credit with what has -preceded,
because the exact succession of prophets ceased.
But what faith we have placed in our own writings is evident by our conduct; for though so long a time has now passed, no one has dared to add anything to them, or alter anything in them” (Contra Apion. Whiston's Josephus, p. 609, emphasis added
This is interesting because Josephus has no "horse in this race" so to speak, when contrasting the Catholic Apocrypha with fact that the Protestant OT is in agreement with the Hebrew Bible.
