The OT Canon Wrap Up

To recap Sunday's lesson on the OT canon, I realize I need to spend a little more time talking about how the 39 books we do have came together. The majority of the lesson on Sunday focused on what the OT Apocrypha is and where it came from and why other Christian traditions include it in their OT and we don't. Honestly, there is not much to say about how the other 39 books came to us. There is not much historical information on exactly how and when the Jews made their decisions on which books they considered scripture, other than this process (which may have taken place over hundreds of years) seemed to be complete and settled by the 3rd century BC or so.

Through quotations made by Jesus and the NT authors, as well as some other historical references, we are pretty confident that the books the Jews considered scripture in 1st century Palestine are the 39 books we (and the Jews) have today in our OT. There has been some speculation on the inclusion of three of the books, as we discussed; Esther, Song of Solomon, and Ecclesiastes, primarily due to their content (or lack of it).

To sum up our talk on the apocrypha, I'll just cut and paste from my conclusion slide:


•The 39 books Protestants use today were most likely the books considered scripture by Jesus and the apostles, without the apocrypha
•The Christian support for the apocrypha primarily came about through the Septuagint, or Greek translation of the OT
•The vast majority of the early and medieval church (2nd - 16th centuries) embraced the apocrypha as scripture to some degree
•Today it is generally universally recognized by those that include the apocrypha that it is not as authoritative as the other OT books

I guess one take away I have from this is that we shouldn't let the fact that some traditions place the apocryphal books in their OT cause too much division. Since most of the early church has found these books valuable to their faith, they may be worth the read, though I would stop short of basing any doctrine on them.

Here is the updated deck for download:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/0h54qn

Until next time...

-casey