1 & 2 Maccabees and other books were added after this first Greek translation. All 46 books that we have in our modern Old Testament translations were the same 46 books that Jesus read and studied. Saint Peter and the first century Church adopted the Septuagint translation and the 46 books of the Old Testament (Covenant) as the official Bible of the New Covenant Catholic (Universal) Church.
It’s really hard to say; for one, it is likely that there was yet no fixed canon of Scripture at the time of Jesus, and the whole idea of having various books of Scripture under one cover is a relatively late development. For one, even if we suppose that a Scriptural canon was already in existence in the 1st century, in a world where most of the population is illiterate, where printing machines did not yet exist and book-copying was expensive, it would have been
impossible to make a scroll that contained all the books. That would have been time-consuming, obscenely expensive, and not to mention very unwieldy. Even if we grant that each book had its own scroll/s, not every individual/synagogue could have afforded to commission and buy them all: at best, they would have only possessed those books which are more frequently read than others. So IMHO it’s
highly unlikely that Jesus and the disciples had a ‘Bible’ in our modern sense of the word, which is what your source may seem to be implying here.
In the first century AD Christians were effectively using the Septuagint Old Testament translation to prove that Jesus Christ was the promised Davidic Messiah who fulfilled the covenant God made with King David in the 10th century BC; a promised repeated ever since that time in the books of the holy prophets. For this reason the Septuagint Greek translation became an anathema to the Jews who rejected Jesus as the Messiah
The Jewish rabbis were desperate to save their Old Covenant faith but with the death of almost all the priestly families and the destruction of the Temple [the only place where sacrifice to Yahweh could be offered] they would have to re-invent the Jewish faith. Yohanan ben Zakkai, a disciple of the great rabbinic scholar Hillel, and recognized as one of the great surviving Jewish scholars, took the few surviving priests, rabbis and scribes with him to the village of Jamnia where they settled and began to assess the situation. The rabbis were determined to fight Christianity and to preserve the “sacred trust”, as they understood it.
Oh no, not the ‘Council of Jamnia’…
I would again shamelessly quote myself (sorry for being so repetitive
):
Before the fall of Jerusalem, Rabbi Johanan ben-Zakkai established an academy at Yavneh which proceeded to function like a Sanhedrin between the period between the Jewish revolts of AD 70-132. He was then succeeded by Rabbi Gamaliel II. Somewhere between AD 80 and AD 117 Gamaliel was deposed for a time; Eleazar ben-Azariah was installed as head of the Yavneh academy. According to the Mishnah, at the day of Eleazar’s installation, the sages ruled that both Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes “
make the hands unclean” (i.e. holy). The same passage goes on to state that “
all the Holy Scriptures render the hands unclean”, and so it is clear that the point at issue was whether the two books ranked among the Scriptures. This passage is then followed by a series of enactments introduced by the phrase “
on that day” (Mishnah
Yadaim 3.5-4.4). Later tradition (Talmud, tractate
Berakhoth 28a), taking this formula at face value, claimed that every ruling prefixed by the phrase were indeed made on the same occasion.
This is where
Heinrich Graetz and his ilk seem to get the idea of a ‘
Council of Jamnia’. But even if we grant that something similar to it did exist, it should not be interpreted in the same way as Christian use of the term ‘council’, Nicaea- or even Vatican II-style. Admittedly, the term ‘council’ does have the disadvantage of making people assume official action taken at specific meetings held at specific dates.
On the contrary, it would seem that the deliberations at Yavneh were closer to the character of a school, academy, or court. All that the story about the Songs of Songs and Ecclesiastes tell us was that there was some debate about the exact status of these books. In fact, it would seem that the dispute were not terminated by the decisions at Yavneh: even as late as the late 2nd century, Rabbi Meir (circa 135-170), famous as one of the greatest of the
Tannaim of the fourth generation, was disputing the idea that Ecclesiastes defiled the hands! There is no evidence that the status of other Writings was debated, or that a final decision was reached in Yavneh.
Thus, the idea of a Council of Jamnia that is analogous to Christian Church councils has no foundation. The Jamnia hypothesis however, admits of a looser definition. Hence, many of those who continue to accept the hypothesis now define the term as a loose one (and an unsatisfactory one at that), more of a convenient catch-all symbol designating the decisions that the schools that gathered at Yavneh had reached, which could represent the crystallization of long processes that occurred in early Judaism. In any case, it is even doubtful whether the actions of the academy at Yavneh were official decisions; there was probably no body in Judaism that functioned in an ‘official’ capacity post-AD 70.
