At the time of Christ Israel certainly had scriptures: the Torah, Prophets, and Psalms were universally considered to be inspired and authoritative. However, Israel did not have a canon understood as a fixed, closed list of inspired scriptures.
A key researcher, the Protestant scholar Albert C. Sundberg, Jr., writes that “the church received ‘scriptures’ from Judaism but not a canon.” “The Bible and the Christian Doctrine of Inspiration.”
Interpretation 29 (1975):356, 358.] He goes on, based on evidence amassed in this article and his works below, “we now know that the Jewish canon [post-90 AD] was not the scriptures of Jesus and the apostles.” (358) Further, he notes elsewhere, “Two different communities [the Jewish and Christian] were involved in defining canons out of the common material of pre-70 Judaism.” “The Old Testament of the Early Church,”
CBQ 28 (1966):201] “In the days of Jesus and the apostles, the status of the Jewish canon (and this prevailed throughout Judaism) was that of a closed collection of Law, a closed collection of Prophets, and a large undifferentiated number of Jewish religious writings consisting of a later defined collection of ‘Writings,’ the books later called Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, other books known to us only by name, and perhaps other books unknown and lost. And it was this canonical situation that passed from Judaism to Christianity as the Scriptures of the early Church.” (199)
See also Sundberg’s The Old Testament of the Early Church.
Harvard Theological Studies 20, Cambridge Mass., Harvard University, 1964.
**A good summary of his work is a short address he gave available on the web and this might be a good place to start.
department.monm.edu/classics/Speel_Festschrift/sundbergJr.htm
Regarding historical scholarship, the majority opinion with access to the primary sources for the past fifty years rejects the idea of a distinct Palestinian Hebrew canon and a distinct Alexandrian Greek canon at the time of Jesus. There were many Greek-speaking Jews living in Palestine at this time and they used the Septuagint as a collection of undifferentiated religious writings. There was even a Palestinian revision of the Septuagint. (Sundberg, 1975, p. 353, 355-6.)
Regarding Alexandria and the Septuagint, we do not find a clearly defined list here either. The manuscripts we have of the Septuagint mix the so called apocryphal books (“deuterocanonical” from now on) with the Prophets and the writings indicating no awareness of a hard and fast assignment of these writings to a category either way. Scholarship in recent decades has concluded that many of the deuterocanonicals in the Septuagint, rather than being composed in Greek at Alexandria, were actually composed in Hebrew (Ecclesiasticus, Judith, 1 Macc) or Aramaic (Tobit) in Palestine. A Hebrew text of Sirach was found in Egypt.
On the Hebrew side the Qumran community (Dead Sea Scrolls) came from Palestine. Esther was not included among the scrolls which did include every other book in the remaining 38. I should also point out the Esther was not included in Christian lists of OT books up until Gregory of Ansus (380 AD). In addition, some deuterocanonical books in Hebrew are among Dead Sea scrolls with no distinction made between them and others later included in the Jewish canon. This shows that at least some of the deuterocanonical books were in circulation in Palestine and accepted by Jewish groups there.
Sirach is a good case in point. The 1st century BC Jewish community at Masada had a Hebrew copy of Sirach as did the Pre-Christian Qumran community. In both cases it was written out one verse per line in the same manner as the Law and Prophets. Likewise in Palestine from the early 1st century BC the book underwent a series of critical revisions in both Hebrew and Greek. There is no doubt that at the time of Christ Jews in Palestine considered Sirach to be one of their sacred writings. Nonetheless it was ultimately excluded from the Jewish canon. Albert C. Sundberg, Jr., again, is good on this.
Some early usage:
The
Epistle of Barnabas 6 written about 74 AD quotes Wisdom (2:12).
The
Didache 4,5 (~90 AD) quotes Sirach (4:31).
Clement of Rome (+101) quotes Wisdom (12:12 then 11:21) in (
To the Corinthians 27).
Hermas (+155) in
The Shepherd draws upon Tobit in (II,6,2) and Sirach in (II,8; II,9,24).
Polycarp (+156) in
To the Phillipians 10 quotes Tobit 4:10; 12:9.
Irenaeus (~180 AD) cites Susanna (
Against Heresies IV,26,3) and Baruch 4:36-5:9 (
Against Heresies V,35,1).
The Muratorian Canon (170-210 AD) includes Wisdom in its canon of the New Testament!
Clement of Alexandria (150 – 215) quotes Sirach and referred to it as “Scripture” twice (
The Instructor 1,8; 3,4), quotes Tobit (12:8) calling it “Scripture” (
Stromata 6,12); also quotes Wisdom (7:17-18; 16:26) in (
The Instructor 2,1) and Baruch (4:4; 3:9) in (
The Instructor 1,10).
The list goes on . . .
