The Literature of the Old Testament

by George Foot Moore

Controversies in the second century made the Christian apologists aware that the Jews did not acknowledge the authority of some of the books from which their opponents adduced proof-texts, and this practical concern, rather than purely learned interest, led to the drawing up of lists of books which were accepted by the Jews as Sacred Scripture. The oldest of these lists which has come down to us was made by Melito, Bishop of Sardes, about A.D. 170; it contains the books of the Jewish canon enumerated above (p. 8), with the noteworthy exception of Esther, about which, as we have seen, Jewish opinion was divided. Christian catalogues of the Jewish Old Testament long show an uncertainty about the right of this book to a place in the canon.

Meanwhile the church had, in its worship and in religious instruction, established a use and tradition of its own. The Wisdom of Jesus, son of Sirach, was appropriated for the moral instruction of youth and of converts, as is shown by the title it bears in the Greek Bible, Ecclesiasticus, that is, "The Church Book," and other writings not included in the Jewish canon were highly esteemed in the church. About A.D. 240, Julius Africanus, Bishop of Emmaus in Palestine, addressed a critical letter to Origen on the story of Susanna and the Elders in the Book of Daniel. This story, he said, was not found in the Hebrew Daniel, and was not acknowledged by the Jews. He proved by internal evidence that it was not translated from the Hebrew, the language in which the Scriptures of the Old Testament were inspired, but originally composed in Greek, and he raised various historical objections to the tale: it ought not, therefore, to be quoted as Sacred Scripture. In his answer, Origen, the greatest Biblical scholar of his age, argued that if the story of Susanna was to be set aside on the ground that it was not accepted by the Jews, other books, such as Judith and Tobit, would have to be rejected also. He appeals to the prescriptive usage of the church itself, which had always used these books and read them with edification. This immemorial tradition was authority enough for Christians; there was no reason why the church should prune its Bible to please the Jews or adapt itself to their opinions about what was and what was not inspired Scripture; he reminds his correspondent of the law, "Thou shalt not remove the ancient landmarks which those before thee have set."

This way of looking at the matter, as might be expected, prevailed in the church. Lists of the books of the Jewish Bible were handed down, and scholars were well aware that the Christian Old Testament contained several books not received by the Jews. By the more critical of the Greek Fathers these books are not cited with the same authority for the establishment of doctrine as the books of the Hebrew Bible. Thus, Athanasius, at the end of a list of the canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments (A.D. 365), adds: "There are, besides these, other books, not, indeed, included in the canon, but prescribed by the Fathers to be read by those who come to the church and wish to be taught the doctrine of religion, namely, the Wisdom of Solomon, and the Wisdom of Sirach, Esther, Judith, Tobit, and the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles." But this learned reserve had no effect on the liturgical or practical use of the church. The question of the inspiration and authority of the supernumerary books of the Old Testament was not decided by any council speaking in the name of the catholic church; nor was it ever thus determined exactly what these supernumerary books were, though several local synods made lists of them.

The Latin Church received its Bible from the Greeks, and the Latin translations of the Old Testament made from the Greek included, as a matter of course, the books which the church accepted and the synagogue rejected. About the beginning of the fifth century, Jerome undertook a new Latin translation direct from the Hebrew. He lived for many years at Bethlehem, and had learned Hebrew from Jewish teachers, whose assistance he employed also in the work of translation. In some of the prefaces to this translation (which was published in parts), and in other places in his writings, Jerome gives a catalogue of the books of the Hebrew Bible, corresponding to the contents of our English Old Testament, and expressly excludes all others from the class of canonical Scriptures: "Whatever is not included in this list is to be classed as apocrypha. Therefore Wisdom (commonly entitled 'of Solomon'), and the Book of Jesus son of Sirach, and Judith and Tobit ... are not in the canon." The word "apocrypha," literally "secret, or esoteric, writings," had been used generally for the books of heretical sects, or suspected of being such, and, more broadly, of writings which the church repudiated as not only uninspired but harmful, the reading of which it often forbade. It was, therefore, a very radical word that Jerome uttered when he applied this name to books which the church had always regarded as godly and edifying.

Jerome himself did not consistently maintain the position which would make the Jewish Bible the canon of the Christian church. At the request of certain bishops he translated Judith and Tobit, noting in the prefaces that the Jews exclude these books from the canon and put them among the apocrypha, but significantly adding in the one case that he thinks it better to oppose the judgment of the Pharisees and obey the commands of the bishops, in the other pleading not only the demand of a bishop but the fact that the Nicene Council had included Judith among the Sacred Books.[1] In another preface he describes Ecclesiasticus and the Wisdom of Solomon as books which the church reads "for the edification of the people, not for proving the doctrines of the church"—a definition which accords with the attitude of many of the Greek Fathers. Jerome thus halts between two opinions: in relegating to the apocrypha everything that is not in the Hebrew Bible he speaks as a critic; in recognizing the books found in the Christian Old Testament, but not in the Hebrew, as useful and edifying, though of inferior authority for doctrinal purposes, he, like Origen, takes the ground of the practical churchman. The mediating position is more clearly defined by Rufinus, who, after giving a catalogue of the books of the Hebrew Bible, adds: "There are other books, which older authors called not 'canonical' but 'ecclesiastical,' such as the Wisdom of Solomon, and the so-called Wisdom of the Son of Sirach, named by the Latins Ecclesiasticus; to the same class belong Tobit, Judith and the Books of the Maccabees."

The great influence of Augustine was thrown wholly on the side of ecclesiastical tradition; he even remonstrated with Jerome for translating the Old Testament from the Hebrew and thus disturbing the minds of the faithful, instead of revising the Old Latin version after the Greek. In his treatise on Christian Doctrine (ii. 8; written in A.D. 397) he includes among the canonical books of the Old Testament, Judith, Tobit, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Ecclesiasticus, and the Wisdom of Solomon; African provincial synods at Hippo (A.D. 393) and Carthage (A.D. 397) pronounced themselves in the same sense.

The Syriac-speaking churches, whose Old Testament was translated from the Hebrew, originally recognized those books only which were found in the Jewish Bible; it appears, indeed, that the earliest Syriac version did not extend to Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah, but did include Sirach. Under the influence of the Greek Church, those branches of the Syrian Church which remained in communion with it gradually added to their Bible translations of the other books from the Greek; but the Nestorians, in whose schools Biblical criticism moved more freely than in the Catholic Church, continued to reject them, or to accord them, together with several of the books commonly reckoned canonical (Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Job, Ecclesiasticus, Wisdom), only qualified authority.

Throughout the Middle Ages learned authors repeated the conflicting utterances of the Fathers concerning the canon, without being disturbed by their inconsistency; in practice, the Old Testament comprised all the books that were usually found in copies of the Greek or Latin Bible, without regard to the fine distinctions of "canonical" and "ecclesiastical." The immemorial usage of the church had more weight than the opinions of scholars. With this concurred the fact that from the fourth century on the Bible was copied in collective codices, on folded sheets of parchment or vellum like our books, not in separate rolls, and thus the canon of the Old Testament became, not a mere list of Sacred Books, but a physical unity, in which the books of the Jewish Bible were intermingled with those which the Jews did not accept.

The question assumed a new significance at the Reformation. In rejecting the authority of ecclesiastical tradition and the prescriptive usage of the church and making the Scriptures the only rule of faith and practice, the Reformers were under the necessity of deciding what books were inspired Scripture, containing the Word of God revealed to men, clothed with divine authority, demanding unqualified faith, and a means of grace to believers. Obviously they could not logically acknowledge books whose place in the Bible had no other warrant than that the church had accepted them from very early times; nothing short of the authority of the New Testament itself would suffice, and they found in the New Testament no quotations from these books. To the Jews, St. Paul said, were committed the oracles of God; it was the Jewish Scriptures to which Jesus and the Apostles appealed.

Naturally, therefore, Luther reverted to the position of Jerome: the books found in the Hebrew Bible, and those only, were the Scriptures of the Old Testament; whatever was more than these was to be reckoned among the apocrypha. In the first complete printed edition of his translation (1534), these books (Judith, Wisdom, Tobit, Sirach, Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, the Greek additions to Esther and Daniel, the Prayer of Manasseh) stand between the Old Testament and the New, with the title (after Jerome) "Apocrypha; that is, books that are not equally esteemed with the Holy Scripture, but nevertheless are profitable and good to read." The other Protestant versions, on the Continent and in England, followed this example.