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Daniel_Marsh
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What Jewish canons of scripture exist today and in history?
Did any of those include the apocrypha?
Did any of those include the apocrypha?
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Valke2
Guest
Jewish canon consists of the Tanakh and Talmud. Tanakh pretty much is consistant with your OT, although some large differences in translation. THere are said to have been “secret texts” that some sects of Judaism kept, but…they’re secretWhat Jewish canons of scripture exist today and in history?
Did any of those include the apocrypha?
Maybe the Dead Sea Scrolls would qualify.We have books like the book of Ezra, book of Jubilees…
Wikipedia has a comprehensive artilce on it.
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Crumpy
Guest
I can’t answer the questions in your original post, but it’s easier to address the question in the title of the thread.
The answer is no. First and Second Maccabees were never part of Jewish scripture, to my knowledge. I have Jewish friends who have a Catholic bible, just so that they can read those scrolls.
The way I’ve heard it, those scrolls would have been lost, except that the Catholic Church considers them inspired.
That, incidentally, is the same reason that protestants do not accept them, because the Jews, in the first place, never considered them to be inspired.
The answer is no. First and Second Maccabees were never part of Jewish scripture, to my knowledge. I have Jewish friends who have a Catholic bible, just so that they can read those scrolls.
The way I’ve heard it, those scrolls would have been lost, except that the Catholic Church considers them inspired.
That, incidentally, is the same reason that protestants do not accept them, because the Jews, in the first place, never considered them to be inspired.
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Crumpy
Guest
Some interesting discussions are in Jaroslav Pelikan’s book, Whose Bible is It?
As the book title suggests, it’s a valid question, since the Jews wrote the books of Maccabees but it’s the Catholics who seem to take more “ownership” of them.
As the book title suggests, it’s a valid question, since the Jews wrote the books of Maccabees but it’s the Catholics who seem to take more “ownership” of them.
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Psalm45_9
Guest
The Septuagint (Greek translation) contained the apocrypha: 1 and 3 Esdras, the Prayer of Manessah, Tobit, Judith, Psalm 151, 1, 2, 3, & 4 Maccabees, and longer texts of Esther and Daniel.What Jewish canons of scripture exist today and in history?
Did any of those include the apocrypha?
There are only three versions of the Septuagint today and all of them do not contain all of the writings mentioned above. This only shows how certain writings fell in and out of favor in certain regions and periods of the church. By the end of the 300s the Church began to question which writings are indeed the inspired writings. The Church in the East did not believe that any of the apocrypha were inspired, there was paranoia over scripture after all of the heresies that plauged the east. St. Jerome who was making his new Latin translation of the scriptures in the east also became critical of these writings. 2nd Esdras in the Septuagint was just known as Esdras in the Hebrew text, the western church divided this book into two, which are currently known as Ezra and Nehemiah, the other two books of Esdras are considered non inspired writings.
St. Jerome also did not favor the Septuagint in general and made his translation from the Hebrew texts that are still used by the Diaspora Jews today. The church in the west though held seven of the apocryphal books with the longer texts of Esther and Daniel in high esteem. Because of this these books were still put in the vulgate. Through various local councils in the west the Old Testament canon as found in Catholic Bibles, starting with the council of Rome in 382, every council in the western church that mentioned the canon of the Old Testament reaffirmed this canon. The non inspired writings of 3 (1) Esdras, 4 (2) Esdras, and the prayer of Manessah were still printed within the Old Testament where they would have been found in the Septugint as healthy and authorative writings, but still were considered non inspired. As time went on the East also began to re-accept the apocryphal books. Generally the Eastern Orthodox believe all of the apocryphal books minus 4 Maccabees to be inspired. The Slavonic Orthodox churches believe 4 (2) Esdras to be inspired, while the other Eastern churches do not.
As the reformation approached some theologians questioned the authority of these writings again. Luther actually went as far as to remove them from the canon as non inspired writings. It is coincidental that these writings also support doctrines that Luther was against. The council of Trent which combated the Protestant Reformation declared the existing Old Testament canon inspired and binding. At this point the non inspired writings of 3 (1) Esdras, 4 (2) Esdras, and the Prayer of Manessah were formally seperated from the Old Testament and put in an appendix “lest they perish altogther.”
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Psalm45_9
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It is hard to determine what the Jews at in the Holy Land at the time of Christ believed were scripture. We do know from the New Testament that the Torah, Psalms, and Prophets were held in high esteem. As for the rest of the writings, the New Testament authors and Christ don’t give us definite answer. The New Testament authors did make allusions to them along with psuedopigripha so it is hard to tell. The Essenes also favored the apocrypha and psuedopigripha, they were discoverd as the dead sea scrolls. So we do know these writings were circulated in the Holy Land at the time of Christ.
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Daniel_Marsh
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Mystophilus
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The Scrolls contained quite a few of the early texts not admitted to the Tanakh. In fact, they seem to be the most prominently represented group after versions of the Torah texts. The Essenes seem to have had esoteric reading tastes.Jewish canon consists of the Tanakh and Talmud. Tanakh pretty much is consistant with your OT, although some large differences in translation. THere are said to have been “secret texts” that some sects of Judaism kept, but…they’re secret
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Mystophilus
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By definition, a canon cannot include apocrypha
If we assume that you only mean the texts which are excluded from Protestant Bibles but included in Catholic Bibles, then the answer would be “No”, inasmuch as there was never a Jewish canon which included more texts than the Tanakh, which was the basis for the Protestant OT.
See the Jewish Encyclopedia, on the formation of the Jewish Bible, and on the apocrypha, and the current Jewish Bible today.
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Psalm45_9
Guest
I should also note that the Septuagint was a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures. The Septuagint is sometimes abbreviated
LXX, because it means “Seventy” based on the legend that 72 scribes translated it. With the discovery of the dead sea scrolls, we now know that these books in question were written in Hebrew and/or Aramaic.
Today the Jews of Ethiopia still use the LXX canon, which has been translated into their language. They do not regard IV Maccabees as scripture, as do the Eastern Orthodox. The Ethiopian Jewish canon also contains three additonal books: Enoch, Jubilees, and Pseudo-Joesephus.
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Daniel_Marsh
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I am weak from my radiation thearpy.
I am interrrested in the ot canon.
I am interrrested in the ot canon.
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Mystophilus
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Apparently, a few Catholic websites include this claim, most likely because others do. If you look at the contents of the scrolls, you will see that they do not include Hebrew or Aramaic versions of the seven texts which are included in Catholic Bibles but not in Protestant ones. In fact, they only include a fragment of Tobit in Aramaic (4Q1962) and most of chapter 6 of Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) in Hebrew (2Q18). I think that someone may have picked up on the comment that the scrolls contain a considerable proportion of the apocrypha, and thought that it meant what Protestants most often designate as such, when it actually refers to the apocrypha to the Tanakh: the scrolls contain quite an impressive collection of the texts which did not make it into the Jewish canon.
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Maranatha
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I find it interesting that the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah celebrates the Maccabean victory but the record of that victory is not found in their cannon but in the Catholic cannon.
The current Jewish cannon was decided upon in council well after the startlingly quick growth of Christianity. Their excuse for removing the books was the lack of Hebrew originals but it’s just as likely they didn’t like the book’s support of Christian doctrines.
The real question is what did Jesus and the apostles use. If you follow tier teaching, you should use what they used.
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jmcrae
Guest
The Jews don’t really have a “canon” as such, since they have no one with the authority to set one.What Jewish canons of scripture exist today and in history?
Did any of those include the apocrypha?
There are various lists used, depending on the Jew - the ultra-Orthodox stick to the five Books of Moses (known as the ToraH), and other groups also include other sets of books - the Wisdom, the Prophets, and so on, and even the Talmud, in some cases.
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Valke2
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No. That is not correct. There is a canon, as has been said in this thread it is the TaNaKh – an acronym for Torah, Neviium (Prophets) and Ketuvim (Other Writings). Ultraorthodox, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionsts read from the same set of texts.
In addition, we have the Talmud. I’m not sure what you meant by “in some cases” but except for possible the reform movement, Talmud is as important as all the other books, including Torah, for Jews. In fact, as you may know, it is called the Oral Torah, because we believe it was transmitted to Moses at Sinai and then orally transmitted from rabbi to rabbi before it was finally written down between 200 BCE and 200 CE.
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Valke2
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How does the book of Maccabees support Christian doctrines? I’m assuming you are referring to book 1?
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mdgspencer
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The Septuagint, the ancient Greek version of the Bible, was produced by Jews for Jews and was widely used in ancient times by the Jews. This version includes the apocrypha. Some of the New Testament writers quote from the Septuagint version, in fact. The apocrypha were read as Scripture by the Jews until some time after Christ, though modern Jews no longer consider them Scripture. This is just to more fully answer the original question.
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Psalm45_9
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Fragments of the Epistle of Jeremiah, part of the book of the Prophet Baruch was also found with dead sea scrolls. I have also read that before the dead sea scrolls were discovered two Hebrew copies of Judith, that differ on some ways from each other, were found.
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Maranatha
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We have 2 Mac 15:11-16 which shows prayers to saints in heaven have the power of intersession and 2 Mac 12:39-46 which show how the prayers of those on earth can help the dead - an implicit example of souls in purgatory.
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Valke2
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Well, we certainly believe that prayers here can help the dead. That is why we say mourner’s kaddish for the first 11 months after a parent or sibling dies.
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