Quoting myself on my personal opinion:
Just to explain where I’m coming from (this is my general opinion):
I tend to think nowadays that the 46-book OT we Catholics use (and the additional books found in the Eastern Churches) is an early Christian innovation. I wouldn’t dispute that for the Jews of Jesus’ time, there was only the 24/39 sacred books (the ‘Hebrew Bible’).
I’m not very good at explaining things, but this is the general gist of my idea (you can ask me questions, I’ll elaborate.)
- The Jews in Jesus’ time - and afterwards -
de facto held 24 books as being special / ‘sacred’ in some way: these are the undisputed OT books. (At least, we really don’t have any evidence for that once-common idea that Greek-speaking Jews had a different, larger canon than the Palestinian Jews: the whole issue of the ‘Palestinian canon’ vs. ‘Alexandrian canon’.)
- At the same time, there were also Jewish ‘popular literature’: stuff like Jubilees or Enoch or Tobit or Sirach. These were not exactly on the same level as the ‘sacred literature’, but many of these books were widely read and used and alluded to.
- When the early Christians came into the scene, they never really distinguished between ‘sacred literature’ and ‘popular literature’. So they ascribed a status (nearly) equal to the de facto Jewish ‘sacred literature’ to some of the more-commonly used ‘popular literature’. Eventually, their choices were canonized, thereby forming the Christian Old Testament canon(s) we know today. During the Reformation, the Protestants dropped the books the early Christians had included.
I can see a parallel here with Ethiopian Jews. Ethiopian Jews seem to have a three-tier category of their literature. At the top is the Torah, or the
Orit, the most important book. On the second tier are all the other OT books, which are viewed as having secondary importance. On the third tier, you have Ethiopian Jewish literature, which, while not really considered scriptural (one of the latest works in this category was AFAIK written in the 18th century!), are nevertheless considered to be of some importance.
My idea is that something similar was probably going on for 1st century Jews: on the one hand, you have the sacred literature (the Torah, the Prophets, the Writings), the cornerstone of Jewish belief and way of life. On the other hand, you have the popular literature, which may not be of equal status with the sacred writings, but are nevertheless influential and widely-used. When Christians came into the scene, they blurred the line between the two categories: the more famous popular works were given a status equal to the accepted sacred writings. And that’s how
our OT canon was born.
(Now you often see the argument that the Ethiopian Jews use the Greek OT canon. But you have to remember that the Christian and Jewish communities in Ethiopia were historically close and had influenced each other in many ways. In fact, some argue that much of the distinctive customs practiced by Ethiopian Jews today were not really ancient, but actually reached them in the Middle Ages via the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Similarly, Ethiopian Jews could have simply been influenced by their Christian neighbors who were using the ‘Greek’ / ‘Septuagintal’ canon. In fact, there was a story that a renegade Christian monk named Qozmos wrote out the Torah for the Ethiopian Jews who rallied under him in the 15th century;
up until then Ethiopian Jews never seem to have possessed a written Scripture but were a mainly non-literate culture. In fact, it was really in the 15th century onwards that Ethiopian Jewish literature began to flourish.)
To add to this:
As far as my research has taken me, it seems to me that the specific situation differed slightly depending on the geographical area.
In Palestine, many local Christians tended to just take the 22/24/39-book Jewish canon (just the protocanon) for granted, while in other places (especially in the Latin West), Christians can be a bit more lenient about giving the ‘sacred’ status to other famous Jewish works.
It’s telling that many of the early Christians we know of who assumed the ‘Jewish’ canon were either from Palestine and/or the eastern Mediterranean region in general, traveled east and/or stayed there for long periods of time, or studied under Jewish teachers. For example, the author of the
Bryennios List (probably a Palestinian Jewish Christian),
Melito of Sardis (traveled to the Holy Land to obtain his list of books),
Origen (spent time in Palestine),
Jerome (big-time Hebrew lover),
Cyril of Jerusalem (name says it all),
Hilary of Poitiers (exiled for a long time to Phrygia).
(Note that a few of these authors, even though they mostly list only the protocanonical books, might name one or two deuterocanonical work as Scripture, or at least say that they’re a close second: for example, both Cyril and Athanasius list Baruch among the Scriptures.)
It’s also telling that the earliest canons and authors which consider the deuterocanonical books (some or all of them) as Scripture were from
the West: the councils of Hippo and Carthage, the so-called
Cheltenham canon,
Pope Innocent I,
St. Augustine, the
Decretum Gelasianum, to name a few.
