Why do people think that... (the 7 extra books)

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Gotcha…The Masoretic Text (That, I have heard of). I get your perspective now.
 
It’s always amazes me to see the claim that the Church did not define the canon until Trent. It really, really takes someone ignorant if the way council s works since the very beginning. The Church often does not define something until there is a heresy against it, especially with Councils, which have always been used for that purpose.
 
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CRM_Brother said:
  • Original copies still existed which had been made from the texts of the Second Temple of Jerusalem.
  • Those copies were in Hebrew, not Greek.
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Yes but wouldn’t you say that the Dead Sea Scrolls meet these two requirements? They may not have been available to them in AD 90 but looking back it calls into question the Synod, does it not?
 
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You are correct, the authority of the Synod is iffy, at best. If the Dead Sea Scrolls were around at the time of the Synod, then there would most likely have been more books included at the Synod. In the end, the abrupt truncation of the Ketuvim is somewhat suspect. It seems that they manipulated the books of the Tanakh to fit with Jewish numerology. Twenty-four books of Scripture, twenty-four letters in the Hebrew alphabet with which to write those scriptures.

Even during Christ’s lifetime, there were more Jews outside of Israel than there were in within its borders. The remnant of the Sadducees sought to preserve their authority after the destruction of the Temple and so united with the Pharisees’ rabbis to cement their role within Judaism as the teaching authority. They attempted to preserve the Sanhedrin outside of its place as the juridical court of the Temple. But by 400 AD it had completely disolved.

At that time, however, there were no one else to keep this power play in check. When the Zealots began the First Jewish Revolt, the Roman army almost completely wiped out the Essenes on their way to Jerusalem. At Jerusalem, the Romans wiped out the revolting Zealots and then proceeded to ravage the Sadducee polulation who tried to defend the Temple from the Romans. After leaving Jerusalem, the Romans proceeded in destroying the rest of the Essenes.

The Essenes burried their scriptures (Dead Sea Scrolls) to save them from destruction by the Romans. The Zealots had their scriptures destroyed by the Romans as they were primarily focused upon the concept of a political messiah.

The only scriptures which survived the revolt were the Pharisees whose synagogues were largely ignored outside of Jerusalem and the Sadducees who were able to smuggle out their most important books before the Romans arrived.

The only real reason the Masoretic text spread outside of Israel was that the Jews of Israel dispersed in the coming years since they were expelled from Jerusalem. They brought the Masoretic text with them and promoted it as Scriptures which were more immune to Christian conversion because they had cut out many of the Ketuvim books which could be used to support the new religion.

In the end, Egypt just didn’t care what the Pharisees and Sadducees said because they had just built and administered their own Temple on an island in the Nile delta.
 
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CRM_Brother said:
Thirty years later in 90 AD, after the destruction of the Second Temple and the expulsion of the Jews from Jerusalem, the Pharisees convened another Rabinical Synod in Joppa to address the texts of the Scriptures.
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I googled for “Synod of Joppa” but the only thing that shows up is the “Council (or Synod) of Jamnia”. Could these possibly be two names for the same conference?
 
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BartholomewB said:
I googled for “Synod of Joppa” but the only thing that shows up is the “Council (or Synod) of Jamnia”. Could these possibly be two names for the same conference?
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Contemporary scholars admit that there wasn’t a “council of Jamnia”, as such, although Reformation apologists historically use this ‘council’ as the rationale for disregarding the deuterocanon (and some continue to do so!)
 
Yes. That was my mistake. Some of the older (1850s) sources I once used for a paper on canonicity used Joppa and I had forgoten that the modern name for the Synod/ Council was Jamnia.
 
This is why I used the term Synod, not Council. The rejection of the scholars is not necessarily that there wasn’t necessarily a meeting of rabbis in Jamnia at this time. What they contest is that it was a formal convening of the Sanhedrien. It was more akin to what we now consider a local synod as opposed to a council. Sources describe that the attendance was only between 50 and 100 rabbis.
 
To Protestants - I recommend them to read:

Ecclesiasticus aka Sirach
and
Wisdom (of Solomon)

both of which fall under the category of Wisdom and are rich in Understanding

_
 
It is the other way around… The deuterocanonical books were suppressed by the non Catholics.

Arguments in the favor of these writings are:
  • The Church, by use of its authority and by Tradition, said they are canonical
  • They are part of the LXX, used in the early Church
  • There are hundreds of references from the Deuterocanonical in the NT. I don’t like James Akin but he has a good list of these references at Deuterocanonical References in the New Testament – Jimmy Akin
 
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The list is good but some references aren’t. So it needs some filtering.
 
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