Why Catholic Bibles Are Bigger (2 page)

Luke 24:44

These are My words which I spoke to you while I was
still with you, that all things which are written about Me in the Law of Moses
and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.

In their attempts to find evidence for a canon closed during
the inter-testamental period, some writers have appealed to these words of Our
Lord in the twenty-fourth chapter of Luke’s Gospel. The argument runs like
this: “While it is true that ancient Jews did not use the terms ‘Bible’ or ‘Old
Testament,’ they had developed a stock idiom which they regularly employed when
referring to the entire body of inspired Scripture; that idiom was (as we noted
above) ‘the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings.’  And we know for a fact
that the collection thus referred to
did not
include the Deuterocanon.
If, therefore, Our Lord is found using those same divisions (as He is in Lk
24:44) then we may reasonably infer that He rejected the Deuteros as
well.”  

While this argument sounds plausible enough on the surface,
both of its premises contain assumptions that go far beyond (and even against)
what we know of the period. First of all, it assumes that the stock idiom under
discussion had already come into use by the time of Christ; whereas, in fact,
the phrase in question cannot be located in any document dated earlier than the
mid-second century AD. The earliest example of anything similar is found in the
book of Sirach, as we saw above; yet Sirach never uses the all-important
“coined phrase” but only a vague, tentative approximation to it (“the Law, the
Prophets, and the other books”) from which nothing solid can be deduced.
Another early reference, found in 2 Maccabees (written around 150 BC), also
misses the mark; it speaks only of “the Law and the Prophets.”
[11]
Even Philo, writing
about the same time as the evangelist Luke, seems unaware of the three-fold
division upon which this argument depends. Philo wrote, “And in every house
there is a sacred shrine which is called the holy place, and the monastery in
which they retire by themselves and perform all the mysteries of a holy
life…studying in that place
the Law and the sacred oracles of God enunciated
by the holy prophets and the hymns, and psalms and all kinds of other things
by
reason of which knowledge and piety are increased and brought to perfection.”
[12]
  Neither is
Christ Himself using what became the standard phrase. His words are “the Law of
Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms”—not “the Law, the Prophets, and the
Writings.”  Perhaps, it may be argued, the two phrases mean the same.
Perhaps and perhaps not, but they certainly are not
actually
the same,
as any argument based on the received meaning of a later idiom would seem to
require. The first rule of exegesis is not to go beyond the plain meaning of a
text unless there is sufficient justification for it. The plain meaning of Luke
24:44 is “the Law, the Prophets and the [Book of] Psalms,” not “the Law, the
Prophets and [the Writings which are being called the] Psalms. Certainly, there
is no scrap of evidence that Christ’s hearers would have understood “Psalms” as
anything other than those of David; and any suggestion that they might have is
pure speculation.
[13]
 

What, then, is the connecting thread between “the Law, the
Prophets, and the Psalms” as referred to by Christ here in Luke 24:44? Verse
forty-six of the same chapter leads us to the best, simplest explanation: “Thus
it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the
dead…” All three sources cited by Christ in verse forty-four are notable for
their many prophecies of a suffering Savior; the inclusion, by name, of the
book of Psalms seems to underscore this conclusion.
[14]
Simply put, there is no indication that Our
Lord wished to delineate the parameters of the Old Testament canon in Luke
24:44. “Commonly,” as Protestant scholar Edward Reuss observes,

the attempt is made to prove the integrity of the
Hebrew canon for the apostolic age, by the terms which Luke uses (xxiv. 44);
but it is easy to see that in that passage he is simply enumerating the books
in which Messianic prophecies were found.
[15]

The second premise of this argument from Luke’s Gospel is
also fatally flawed. It assumes, as a matter of fact, that the later, idiomatic
phrase with its three-fold division, excluded the books of the Deuterocanon; in
reality, this common assertion is far from proved. For example, the Jewish work
Baba Kamma
92b (written well into the Christian era) explicitly includes
the book of Sirach among “the Writings”! Rabban b. Mari (320–350) told Raba
(320–350):

This matter is written in the Torah, repeated in the
Prophets, and repeated a third time in the Hagiographa, and was taught in the
Mishnah, and was taught in a Baraitha…and repeated a third time
in
the Hagiographa
, as it is written, ‘He will stay with you for a time, but if
you falter, he will not stand by you’ (Sir 12:15).
[16]

Some of the early Christian writers also witnessed the
inclusion of Deuterocanonical books within the three-fold division of Jewish
Scripture. Origen of Alexandria (AD 185–232), in listing the books of the
Hebrew canon in his day, enumerates all the familiar Protocanonical works, then
adds this phrase: “And besides these there are the Maccabees, which are
entitled Sarbeth Sabanaiel.”
[17]
Likewise, Hilary of Poitiers includes the Book of Baruch in his list of the
Hebrew canon (under the category of “the Prophets”) and indicates that Wisdom
and Sirach could be added to this list as well.
[18]
Quite a few other patristic documents shed
doubt on the crucial second premise as well. For instance, if we know for
certain that “the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings” did not include the
Deuteros, what are we to make of these facts, compiled by the Catholic scholar
A.E. Breen?

St. Epiphanius, Haer. VIII. No. 6, testifies that
Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus were in honor among the Jews, and distinguished from
the apocryphal works. Isidore says of Wisdom: ‘As a certain one of those who
know has recorded, the Hebrews received this work (Wisdom) among the Canonical
Scriptures. But after they had seized and killed the Christ, remembering the
most evident testimonies concerning Christ in that same book, in which it is
written: ‘The impious said among themselves, ‘let us seize the just,’ etc.,
taking counsel lest we might lay upon them such an evident sacrilege, they cut
it off from the prophetic volumes, and prohibited its reading to their people.’
The Apostolical Constitutions testify that Baruch was read in the Jewish
synagogues. St. Jerome testifies in this preface to the book of Judith that
among the Hebrews Judith is read ‘among the Hagiographa.’ ‘Its authority,’ he
continues, ‘is considered less apt to decide things about which there is
dispute. It is written in Chaldaic, and reckoned among the historical books.’
[19]

Any attempt then, to argue that the later rabbinical,
three-fold division of Scripture certainly did not include the Deuteros, goes
well beyond the realm of proven fact. Even if Luke 24:44 does affirm the
tripartite division of Scripture, it does not, by that very fact, rule out the
possibility that the disputed books were also included in that collection of
Scripture.

Both premises, then, have been disproved. If the argument
based on Luke 24:44 is, simply stated, this: “The recognized name for the
Hebrew bible, used by Christ, referred to a collection with no Deuteros” then
the Catholic answer can be stated simply as well: “This claim has not been
established; and even if it were, the recognized name cannot even be shown to
have existed at the time of Christ.”

Luke 11:49-51

Therefore also the Wisdom of God said, ‘I will send
them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and persecute,’ that
the blood of all the prophets, shed from the foundation of the world, may be
required of this generation, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah,
who perished between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, it shall be
required of this generation.

Another common argument against the Deuteros is based on
this quote, in which Our Lord pronounces a word of judgment upon faithless
Israel. The contention here is that the Lord has produced a sort of “A to Z”
listing (though the correspondence to our modern alphabet is an admitted
coincidence) of “all the prophets”, the first being Abel (Gn 4:8-10) and the
last Zechariah (2 Chr 24:20-22). And since 2 Chronicles (the book in which the
martyrdom of Zechariah appears) was the last book of the shorter Hebrew canon,
this passage supposedly shows Christ Himself placing a stamp of approval upon a
canon ending at 2 Chronicles. In truth, this argument, like that based on Luke
24:44, falls apart at its premises.

The premises are these: (1) the Zechariah mentioned in Luke
11:51 is the same person as the Zechariah mentioned in 2 Chronicles 24:20-22;
(2) the second book of Chronicles was the last book in the Hebrew bible of
Jesus’ day; (3) Jesus’ reference to these two martyrs purposefully corresponded
to the limits of the Old Testament canon; and (4) the only books found between
Genesis and Chronicles are those in the later Jewish and Protestant canons. Let
us examine each of these individually.

First of all, it is not at all certain that the Zechariah
indicated in Luke 11:51 is the same Zechariah mentioned in 2 Chronicles
24:20-22. Indeed, the parallel passage in Matthew’s Gospel (Mt 23:34-36)
specifically identifies the Zechariah to whom Christ refers as “the son of
Barachiah”—in other words, the eleventh of the Twelve Prophets, author of the
Protocanonical book of the same name
[20]
—whereas the Zechariah of 2 Chronicles is identified as “the
son of Jehoiada.” Some writers have guessed that the phrase “of Barachiah” is
an error or later corruption of the Matthean text; given, however, the total
absence of evidence for such a mistake, the theory remains just that—guesswork.
[21]

The second premise of this argument assumes that the book of
2 Chronicles was certainly the last book of the Hebrew bible in Jesus’ day.
This is impossible to prove, for several reasons. To begin with, this idea
takes for granted, once again, that a rabbinical canon dating from many years
later must have been authoritative in New Testament times as well; and we have
already discussed the many fallacies contained in that anachronistic notion.
Also, determining the actual book order even of these later, rabbinical
editions is highly problematical. No surviving codices have survived from the
early centuries. In fact, the earliest existing copy of the Hebrew bible (in
the sense of a book or codex, as opposed to a loose collection of scrolls) is
the famed Leningrad Codex, composed around the end of the first millennium; and
both the Leningrad Codex and the standard Aleppensis Codex place the Books of
Chronicles, not last, but first among the Writings!
[22]
And although these Codices are relatively
recent in history (ca. AD 1000), they do, nevertheless, open the possibility
that the Chronicles may not always have been the last books of the Hebrew
bible. Further evidence can be found in the texts of Chronicles and Ezra
themselves. Protestant exegete David Noel Freedman argues that the last
paragraph of Second Chronicles is a repetition of the first paragraph of Ezra.
He suggests that 1 and 2 Chronicles must have been separated spatially within
the collection of the Writings because if the books had been connected, there
would have been no need for the repetition.”
[23]
If Freedman is correct, then the order found
in the Leningrad and Aleppo Codices reflects a more ancient ordering which
differs from that used today. At the very least, we may regard as wholly
unsubstantiated any dogmatic insistence that the book order followed by modern
Jews and Protestants would have been known and insisted upon by Christ.

The third premise states that Jesus wished to make these two
martyrs (Abel and Zechariah) into a set of bookends, so to speak, corresponding
to the limits of the Old Testament canon. If, after all, He had considered the
books of the Maccabees to be prophetic or inspired Scripture, would he not have
said, rather, “from the blood of Abel to the blood of the Maccabees”? The
mistake here is that of forgetting the context; Christ is, in this passage,
judging the faithless Jews for spilling the blood of prophets—and the Maccabees
were slain by Greek, and not by faithless Jews. The context restricts Jesus’
remarks to the first and the last prophet slain by their compatriots and not
necessarily the first and last books of the Bible. In brief, there is simply
nothing in the surrounding context of this passage to indicate that Our Lord
intended to make any comment whatsoever about the limits of Old Testament
canonicity. Any attempt to find such a comment is pure imagination.

Finally, the argument based on Luke 11:49-51 assumes that
the only books found between Genesis and Chronicles are those of the Protocanon.
This, as we have already demonstrated, is also a matter of conjecture. There
are simply no Jewish bibles, no lists or canons of Scripture from Jesus’ day or
earlier, by which one might establish this point, however badly one might wish
it were otherwise.
[24]
In fact, we do not even know the status of several
Protocanonical
works
during that period. Many of the books present in later Jewish Old Testaments
(such as Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Esther, and others) were still being
hotly debated in Judaism well after the time of Christ. So even if we were to
uncover some widely accepted Jewish canon from apostolic times or earlier, it
might very well be missing these important books now present in all Christian
canons!