Re: Responses


Subject: Re: Responses
From: Jim Rovira (jrovira@drew.edu)
Date: Wed Jul 17 2002 - 19:45:08 EDT


Robbie --

I think one issue we can fruitfully discuss is the idea of "fixity" as
necessary for "canonicity," both in the sense of fixity of books chosen
for inclusion and fixity of the texts themselves.

See, I don't see a lack of an absolute "fixity" in either sense as
necessary for the idea of a canon to exist.

For example, the apocryphal books are accepted as canonical within the
Catholic Church, but I don't think that decision was made with any
finality until the time of the Reformation. Martin Luther wanted to
boot out the book of James and others wanted to do the same with the
book of Revelation. We're talking a good 1400 years after Christ, now,
when neither you nor I would argue that the church held to some idea of
a canon of Scripture. The fact that the boundaries of some individual
texts, and the group of texts themselves, are hazy doesn't necessarily
mean that there's no idea of a Biblical canon current in whatever
culture we're talking about.

The agreement of the DSS with either the MT or the LXX, sometimes one at
the expense of the other, or with neither, is certain testimony to the
nature of the texts that the Qumran community had in their possession.
I'm not all that sure it can be said to tell us about the texts current
in larger Hebrew culture at that time. The fragments that deviate from
both the MT and the LXX are just that...fragments...so we don't know why
they deviate.

They could be from paraphrases in other documents, much like the way the
church fathers often quoted the NT off the top of their heads and
sometimes didn't quite get the wording perfect. They could be from
older Hebrew manuscripts, yes. They could be anything...that's the
problem :). From what I understand, the full texts that do exist in the
DSS do agree pretty well with the MT.

And I have to wonder what you do with this passage from Josephus,
written about 90 AD. He begins by contrasting Hebrew literature with
Greek:

"We have not myriads of books, disagreeing and conflicting with one
another, but only 22, containing the record of all time, and justly
accredited.

Of these, five are the books of Moses, containing the laws and the
history handed down from the creation of the human race to his own
death. This period falls a little short of three thousand years. From
the death of Moses to the time of Artaxerxes, who was king of Persia
after Xerxes, the prophets who followed Moses have written down in
thirteen books the things that were done in their days. The remaining
four books contain hymns to God and principles of life for human beings.

>From Artxerxes to our own time a detailed record has been made, but this
has not been thought worthy of equal credit with the earlier records
because there has not been since then the exact succession of prophets."
>From Against Apion, 1.38-41.

The traditional Jewish division of the books makes them out to be 24 --

The first division is the Torah, comprising the five books of Moses. (5)

The second division is the Prophets, which is futher subdivided into the
four former prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings) and the four Latter
prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the book of the 12 prophets --
the 12 being the equivalent of the "minor prophets" in the Christian
Bible). (8)

The third division is called the Writings, comprising eleven books.
First the Psalms, Proverbs, and Job. (3) Then a group of five called
the "scrolls" (Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther)
(5), finally Daniel, and then Ezra and Nehemiah reckoned as one book,
and Chronicles. (3)

Total 24.

This division (and I think this may have been brought up before) seems
to be referred to as early as 132 BC in the book of Sirach, in which
reference is made to "the law and the prophets and the other books of
our fathers" and "the law itself, the prophecies and the rest of the
books." Given Josephus' comments, I think parallel statements in the NT
about the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms (which I know you said
earlier could be generic references) are more likely to refer to
specific groups of books than writing in a generic sense.

Josephus probably counted Ruth as an appendix to Judges and Lamentations
to Nehemiah.

The point is we have these books that make up, essentially, the
Christian OT being compared unfavorably to works that came afterwards.

This just sounds an awful lot like a canon.

Jim


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