Joe Heschmeyer explores what constituted Sacred Scripture in the time of Jesus.
Transcription:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. What did the Bible look like at the time of Jesus? That’s the question I want to explore today. Did it look more or less like the Bibles that we have carrying around our bone, personal KJV or RSV or ESV or NAB or whatever, or did it look radically different than that? And I think we’re going to find out the answer is it looks radically different and in some ways that are really important for how we make sense of the Bible itself. I want to start by just looking at a particular verse. This is from Luke chapter four in context here. Jesus is in Nazareth, his hometown on the Sabbath on Saturday, and he goes into the local synagogue as was his custom, and at the end of verse 16, it says that he stood up to read. So he’s reading in a kind of liturgical context, right?
He’s reading in the synagogue, he’s not just reading privately, and there was given to him the book of the prophet Isaiah. He opened the book and found the place where it was written. The spirit of the Lord is upon me. That’s what it says in the translation that I’m using the R-S-V-C-E as we’re going to see there’s a little more going on than you’re going to get in that English translation, but let’s just start there and notice a couple of things. Number one, Jesus isn’t carrying around his own Bible. Now, maybe that’s something you’ve thought about before. Maybe it isn’t, but every individual Christian having their own Bible is really only a possibility after the printing press in the 14 hundreds. Before that, if you were going to hear the words of the Bible, you were going to hear it in a liturgical communal context, in the synagogue, in the temple, or in church.
If you’re a Christian, that’s important for how we make sense of the Bible and how we listen to it and interpret it because in those contexts, one of the important things that happens is there’s someone there explaining what the text is about, and Jesus is going to serve that role here in Luke four, but there’s more to it than that. When he’s handed isn’t the entire Old Testament, what he’s handed is just Isaiah, why doesn’t he get handed the entire Old Testament? Well, it’s hidden here in the Greek. So when it says that he’s handed the book Bion, that’s a conjugation of the word biblios, which is where we get words like Bible. And it’s also where a lot of other languages get words like Bibliotech or biblioteca. So Portuguese, French, Spanish and Romanian and Italian all have the word for library bibliotech or biblioteca comes from this Greek word biblios, which comes to mean book, but it doesn’t originally mean book.
It originally means a scrap of papyrus or papyrus bark. From there, it comes to mean scroll, and then over time it comes to mean book. So what he’s handed isn’t a book in the sense that we’re thinking of What he’s handed is a scroll, and this is clearer in the Greek when you go on where in the translation I’ve been using it says he found the place, he opened the book and found the place. That’s not what it actually says, it actually says, and having unrolled the scroll, that’s what the Greek says. So have in mind not a physical book like you’re used to using, but a liturgical scroll of the kind used both then and now in Jewish synagogues.
There’s a whole story there. There’s a whole history there that’s maybe worth unpacking because as Lev Grossman points out back in 2011 for the New York Times, Christians are actually a really pivotal part of how books come to be standard. This move from the scroll to the Codex, which is the forerunner of the book, is something that Christians were really quick to jump on as a way of compiling all of the books together in the Bible. Because here’s the thing, here’s why this matters. If you have a bunch of scrolls, you don’t have your Bible all in one place, and you see this in a lot of ways. So for instance, maybe you’ve noticed first and second Kings are pretty clearly one continuous story broken up into two books. Why is that? Well, because the story is so long, it didn’t fit on one scroll. On the flip side, sometimes a prophet’s writings would be so short that they’d actually put a bunch of different books together on a single scroll.
For instance, in the Jewish Bible you have the 12 minor prophets, not minor like their messages and unimportant but minor like their messages short. And so you can put 12 of them together on a single scroll and still find your place. But there’s a size limitation to scrolls before they’re just unwieldy. The Codex revolutionizes that because you can turn the pages and so you can get a much larger amount of text in an accessible, easy to read kind of format. But there’s another reason this is important as well, because once you do that, when you’re putting all of the books of the Bible together in a single volume for the first time, and this is Christians doing it, you have to ask a question, which books go in and which books don’t? But notice you don’t really have to ask that question in the same way until you have books, until you have codices the plural of codex.
Until then you have scrolls and some of the scrolls are inspired by God and some aren’t. But an ordinary person may never stop to think exactly which scrolls are in which category because the limitation of having a book with a front and back isn’t forcing that question upon them. So with that said, which books were in the Bibles of Jesus’ Day? And as we’re going to see there are basically two answers to that question. On the one hand, you have a widespread scholarly answer, which is Judaism is really fractured at the time. You’ve got the Pharisees Sadducees of scenes, you’ve got all these different groups. They believe different things and they have different books that they consider inspired scripture. On the other hand, you have a lot of outspoken, popular level Protestant apologists and speakers who claim the opposite and say, no, actually this is all really well settled at the time of Jesus. So I want to point to a couple of people in that second group, look at maybe why they’re saying that and then show how modern scholarship shows that they’re wrong, that they’re telling things that are not true, and we can say that definitively, but let’s start by giving a fair hearing to the position. I’m going to begin with Dr. Brian Edwards who is explaining why he believes in a 66 book Protestant Bible.
Video:
So what is the evidence for our collection of 66 books? How certain can we be that they are the correct books to make up our Bible? No more and no less? Well, let’s start with the canon of the Old Testament. Now, the Jews had a clearly defined body of scripture. This was fixed early in the life of Israel, and there was no doubt as to which books belonged and which didn’t. They didn’t order them in the same way as our Old Testament, but the same books were there
Joe:
As we’re going to see most of what he just said. There is completely indefensible. Historically, we can find evidence even after the time of Christ of major debates, even among the rabbis about which books do and don’t belong in the scriptures. But there’s one thing that he says it’s true. I think maybe only one thing he says is true, and that’s this, that the Jewish books are divided these days into a structure called the ak, the Torah ne ve. The TNK is an acronym for Torah law ne prophets. Vem writings also sometimes called the hagiography or sacred writings. So you’ve got those sections in other words, whereas Catholic and Protestant and Orthodox Bibles tend to be more or less chronological. So we got the same first five books. But then after that, we tell basically a chronological story, not perfectly, but more or less the Jewish ordering of the books is more or less thematic.
After you have the books of the law, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, numbers, Deuteronomy, you then have all the prophetic writings, and then you have all the writings that don’t neatly fit into law or prophecy. Things like the Psalms, for instance. The order of the books is going to be very foreign if you go from a Christian Bible to a Jewish one or vice versa, more than just old and New Testament. The ordering of the old and New Testament, the ordering of the Old Testament is very different. Significantly though, saying someone holds to the what’s called the tripartite structure, TNK doesn’t tell us which books are in their Bible. It tells us which order those books are in. So there’s some scholarly debate about whether anybody had the TNK structure at the time of Jesus. There’s no clear evidence that they did. We see lots of references to the first two categories, the law and the prophets.
You find that description all over the New Testament, for instance, but the closest you get to a threefold structure is at one point in the gospel of Luke, there’s a reference to the law, the prophets and the Psalms, but that still doesn’t tell us about whether there’s a full fledge third section called the VE for that it’s going to be after the time of Christ. So I mentioned this at the outset. So Josephus who was writing at the end of the first century is the first to clearly have that tripartite structure. There’s other people who might have it earlier, but whether they have it or not, that doesn’t tell us which books are in there. That point will become more important as we go on and see people who try to claim, oh, they had the exact same Bible that modern Jews and modern Protestant Old Testaments have that we just don’t actually have that evidence.
So that’s the first Dr. Brian Edwards. I want to turn now to Dr. Michael Krueger because he’s written a lot on the canon. He focuses more on the canon of the New Testament, but he’s got plenty to say about where the Old Testament canon allegedly came from and when the books were all compiled into one. And so just as Brian Edwards is really clear that one reason that he wants to believe that the books were settled early was to defend the 66 book, Protestant Bible Krueger is just as clear that one of the reasons he wants to believe the books were settled early is to get rid of the need for anything like the church.
Video:
Do you have any thoughts on the canonization of the Old Testament books? Well, one thing that’s a big subject, as you might imagine, one thing that I think is worth noting is it seems to be well established and agreed upon in Jesus’s own day. If you think about it, the Jesus and the Pharisees and Jesus and the Jewish leaders disagreed about virtually everything, every theological thing you could come up with. They were on different sides of it, always arguing the debating, but you never hear one time in the debate Jesus quote from a scriptural book and a Pharisee say, well, that’s not in our Bible, or, well, that’s in your Bible, not in our Bible. What you realize is that Israel, as God’s people had rallied around and had received and recognized these books for quite a while before Jesus showed up on the scene. So it was an established core thing that seemed to be well in place by Jesus’s day. And here’s the thing I want you to realize. It was in place in Jesus’s day without a vote, without a church council and without some sort of decision-making body, the Council of Jamia that was mentioned a moment ago used to be thought of as a thing that did some of that in the first century ad, but it’s been shown now that it really doesn’t play that role, and scholars have changed their direction on that.
Joe:
So here again, almost everything that Dr. Krueger says is contradicted by the best scholarship, and I’ll show why. But there’s one thing he says here again, that’s really important. If you’ve ever heard people claim, oh, the Council of Jamia settled which books did and didn’t belong in the Bible, that is a real oversimplification of the evidence itself, and scholars no longer lean in that direction first because council makes it sound like something like the First Council of Nsea like an official church body, and Judaism doesn’t have that kind of structure. But second, the role of the Jamia Rabbis, which we’re going to look into in a little bit here, is maybe less and more complicated than we originally realized. So anyone saying Council of Jamia, that is outdated scholarship. Nobody in the early church, nobody in early Judaism claims there was a council at Jamia that settled these kind of questions.
Okay, so that’s Kruger and Edwards, another person who’s really big on this is James White. If you’re familiar with James White, he regularly argues against Roman Catholicism, and one of the points that he likes to make over and over and over and over again for decades is that allegedly people in Jesus’ Day just knew which books were in the Bible and which weren’t, and they didn’t need the church. So here he is at the G three conference back in 2018, recounting an event from decades ago in which he had a debate point that he thought went really well. Well,
Video:
When we talk about the Old Testament cannon, and I’ll try to be brief on this. Back in, I think it was 1993, I did a debate at Boston College with a fellow that you’ve probably heard of by the name of Jerry Mattick.
Joe:
So he goes on for about two more minutes to setting up the story before he gets to the kicker of the question. But
Video:
Here was the question that I asked Jerry that resulted in something called dead air, which means everything just goes silent to the point where the lady who was running the program was like, so let’s take a commercial break now, and then we came back and it was still pretty much silent. Here was the question that I asked Jerry. I said, in your perspective, how did the believing Jewish person know that Isaiah and second Chronicles were scripture 50 years before Christ?
Joe:
Now, there’s a really easy answer to that question, which is a lot of believing Jewish people did not know that Isaiah in two Chronicles were inspired scripture 50 years before the time of Christ, and we’ve got abundant evidence to show that nevertheless, white thinks this is a really good argument, and he’s been repeating it for more than 30 years now and is now calling it the White question. So here he is three years ago on his own talk show representing the same story, telling the same thing. Again, I’m going to give a truncated version for your sake and mine.
Video:
Out of the blue, I came up with the question for Gerry Mattix, which eventually has become known as the white question.
Joe:
I don’t know who else calls it the white question, but here’s the question again,
Video:
Just out of the blue, I had not researched this. I was just probing for a way to be able to illustrate what the real issue is. I said, Jerry, I said, Jerry, how did the man, how did a believing Jewish man living 50 years before Christ know that Isaiah and second Chronicles were scripture
Joe:
And White says something really important in that clip? I don’t know if you caught it, he says, his question came up just out of the blue. He had not been researching it. That shows because the question presupposes the same thing that Krueger’s claiming that Edwards are claiming that the Bible is really clearly settled at the time of Jesus, which we’ve known for decades is not true. But nevertheless, he keeps telling the story over and over and over again. At this point, I’m honestly reminded a little bit of Uncle Rico
Video:
Back in 82. I used to be able to throw a pig skin a quarter mile. Are you serious? I’m dead
Joe:
Serious. But all kidding aside, how do we answer the white question? How do we answer people who claim, oh yeah, this was all settled really early in the life of Israel. The first thing you need to know is that there are a bunch of factions within Judaism. So let’s talk for a second about those Jewish factions. Jimmy Aiken does a great job of introducing us to those in his book, the Bible is a Catholic book In there, he explains that by the end of the Old Testament era, there are several different movements that had developed in the Jewish community. Now, movements is maybe even too gentle of a word because we often find them squabbling with each other, but other times we find them getting along. So movements is fine. I’m going to look at just a few of the ones that he mentions and they’re even more than the ones that he mentions.
The first of these is the Sadducees. They’re relatively small group, but they’re politically influential. They’re favored by the rich and powerful. They have access to the temple significantly. They don’t believe in the afterlife or in angels. We’re going to get into why that is. The second group is the Pharisees. Now, they’re relatively newcomers on the scene. They only seem to emerge around one 20 bc. You’re going to look in vain for a lot of references to the Pharisees anywhere in the Old Testament itself, but they have risen to prominence and according to Josephus, who is kind of aligned with the Pharisees, there are about 6,000 of them by the birth of Jesus. I mean, he doesn’t say by the birth of Jesus by around two BC or so. Third group you need to know about are the Enes, and these ones we actually know less about.
They’re not mentioned in the New Testament. They seem to have been a separatist group. They refuse to engage in temple worship and they expected the temple to be destroyed and replaced. According to Josephus, there’s about 4,000 of them and they’re significant for an important reason. They are probably not certainly, but most scholars think they’re the community that leave behind the Dead Sea Scrolls. So when you’re looking at or hearing about the Dead Sea Scrolls, you’re not hearing about the kind of Judaism practice by the Pharisees or the Sadducees in Jerusalem. You’re hearing the people out in the sticks, out in the boonies, out in the hinterlands who are a little bit conspiratorial, a little bit apocalyptic, a little bit ready for the world to end. And I don’t mean that in a pejorative way because they’re right. The Messiah does come and the temple does get destroyed.
So a lot of the stuff, they’re like they’re prepping out there in the desert. They’re right to do so. But the point I want to make here is simply they are these three groups and more. And so if we want to understand the Bible being used, we need to look at these groups close up, and I want to add a fourth group to this as well, the Samaritans, and I’ll explain why I’m adding the Samaritans. The Samaritans are like then your neighbors of the Jews. They’ve diverged from Judaism at some point in the past, but they can still tell us a lot about the Jewish scriptures. So we’ll get into them. But first I want to look at the Dead Sea Bibles and even saying the Dead Sea Bibles is a little bit of a misnomer because we unfortunately don’t have any list among the Dead Sea Scrolls saying which books are and which books aren’t inspired scripture. Remember the point I made earlier, how when you have a bunch of scrolls not bound together in a book, it’s hard to know which ones are and aren’t supposed to be biblical. So Dr. John Bergman does a good job of capturing the basic evidence that we know among the Dead Sea Scroll finds. We’ve found every copy of what’s called the Proto canonical books. These are the books of the modern Jewish and Protestant Old Testament. All but one of them, Esther, we haven’t found, and I think also he says We haven’t found Nehemiah,
Sorry, I butchered that
Dr. John Bergsma does a good job of laying out the basic story that when we’re looking through the scrolls of all the different caves and all the Dead Sea scroll findings, we have all but one of the books that are found in a modern Jewish or Protestant Hebrew Bible. That’s going to be everything except Esther and Nehemiah. But we also have a number of other books that are not in Protestant Bibles and in many cases are not in any Bible of a mainstream Christian. Books like First Enoch and Jubilees are actually better represented than most of the biblical books, which suggests that they were viewed as scripture by the community, but doesn’t prove it. You can always say Maybe they just liked this book and they had a lot of copies of it, but usually one of the things we’re looking for is do you have a lot of copies here?
Because that probably tells us this is a really important book to your religious community. Additionally, there are six copies of Tobit, which is in Catholic Bibles and in Orthodox Bibles and not in Protestant or Jewish Bibles, and Tobit is actually found as frequently as Jeremiah Ezekiel or Job. Now, does this prove beyond a shadow of a doubt anything? No, it’s highly suggestive, but it doesn’t prove anything. Nevertheless, Bergman says, for this reason, most scholars believe that the sene cannon was significantly different than that of the Pharisees in modern rabbinic Judaism, right? You can’t prove it without a list saying, these are the books we find inspired or thus says the Lord sort of thing. But it’s highly suggestive kind of evidence. And so here I would actually turn to Jay Philip Hyatt who at the time was the president of the Society of Biblical Literature next to Jesus, and this is in 1956, so just a few years after the Dead Sea Scrolls had been discovered, and he says the whole question of canonicity and the date of the fixing of the cannon will have to be restudied.
This upends everything we thought we knew about when the Bible was formed. He goes on to say that the Dead Sea discoveries have helped to reveal the fluidity, variety and great vitality of Judaism in the period of the first two centuries BC and the first century of the Christian era, that we see a great insight into the life of Judaism at the time of Christ that we otherwise don’t have a ton of written evidence about. So what does it mean to kind of upend what we know about the Bible and when the Bible was formed? Well, Eugene Ulrich talks about this a little bit. He says that prior to 1947, the critical consensus in Canon’s study as Jack P. Lewis sums up postulated a collection of law closed by 400 bc. That’s the Torah. So the standard view prior to the Dead Sea Scrolls was that the Torah had been settled by 400 bc.
The profits had been settled by 200 BC and the writings were closed at the Council of Jamia about 90 ad. Now, we’ve already heard from Krueger that the Jamia thing is no longer kind of gospel, so to speak. It’s no longer widely accepted in scholarly circles, but or Richard’s point is that, but there’s actually no such thing as a Canon or Bible as such during this period, this period called the late second Temple period. So the period up until 70 ad when the second temple is destroyed, so during the lifetime of Jesus Ulrich’s argument is there is no such thing as the Bible in the sense that we think of it today. There’s not just one collection of books that everybody accepts. Instead, he says there’s a wid... Read more on Catholic.com