Thank you, Patrick. That is very illuminating.
Based on your information here, would it be fair to say that:
By the time of Alexander the Great (333 BC) the Torah (Pentateuch) was already fixed in its present form, but the other two parts were not yet settled and some of the books possibly not even written yet.
I’ve heard that the concept of a canon was a Jewish concept, and that although the Council of Jamnia is basically fictitious and we can’t put an exact date on when official decisions were made, an agreed-upon canon for the Hebrew books was in use by the end of the first century or early second at the latest. Again though, that’s the part we’re pretty certain of, while the details of who made decisions, exactly when, and by what rationale is not known to us.
By the end of the 2nd century, the Mishnah had been compiled, and this includes some details about the debates over the status of certain books. There’s not complete scholarly agreement on this, but the bulk of estimates seem to be end of first century to beginning of second. And as most of us probably know, this was previous to when the heretic Marcion made the first attempt at a Christian canon. We can all guess where he got the idea from.
