THE HEBREW CANON IN THE FIRST CHRISTIAN CENTURY.
§1. According to Josephus.
THE evidence of this writer, who was born about 37 A.D., is not at all welcome at the bar of modern rationalism. He reckons, as we have already said (chap. 2), twenty-two Books, made up of the five Books of the Law, thirteen Prophets, and four Poetical Books. The Prophetical Books in his classification are, according to the received opinion—
1. Joshua 8. Isaiah.
2. Judges and Ruth. 9. Jeremiah.
3. Books of Samuel. 10. Ezekiel.
4. Books of Kings. 11. Daniel.
5. Books of Chronicles. 12. The Minor Prophets
6. Ezra and Nehemiah. as one whole.
7. Esther. 13. Job.
The Poetical Books would be—
Psalms. Ecclesiastes.
Proverbs. Canticles.
What assistance do we get from free critics,' or scientific' writers—to turn to such—in estimating this evidence?
Davidson, after indulging his rationalism by the remark that the idea of an immediate divine authority does not appear to have dominated the mind of the great Synagogue in the selection of books,' is confronted byJosephus' explicit assurance that the Books of which he speaks have been justly credited as divine,' in his own day no more nor less than previously, τὰ δικαίως θεῖα πεπιστευμένα. This, he says, was instilled into every Jew from his birth. Observe that he says, not δεδογμένα, but credited,' believed.' On turning to the “Canon of the Bible” to clear our ideas, we find the credibility of the witness impeached in the following terms: His authority is small,' `he wrote for the Romans.' We ask, Then why did he pitch his standard so high? We are silenced by, One who believed that Esther was the youngest book in the Canon, who looked upon Ecclesiastes as Solomon's and Daniel as an exile production, cannot be a competent judge.' Well, Josephus and his judge shall change places: we prefer to be guided by the ruling of this Jew. To the self-sufficiency which sets up witnesses or dismisses them in the fashion of this pseudo-criticism, beset with prejudice, we cannot close our eyes, but we do turn a deaf ear. Another Jew, who was only a great skeptic of the seventeenth century, says, 'The Canon was the work of the Pharisees'—to which sect Josephus belonged. In Spinoza we have a Jewish witness after this critic's own heart; there is no doubting his testimony 1700 years more or less after the event Yet Davidson himself holds it is a mistake to attribute to the other Jewish faction the rejection of a single Book of the Canon we are asked to believe they had no hand in shaping, so far as it is a question of the Canon being then still open. This critic casts a slur upon Josephus because his conduct was not that of a patriot. How then can he be looked upon as a mere spokesman of the Pharisees? We regret that Professor Robertson Smith (Lect. VI) should take a similar view to David-son's of the testimony of Josephus. He seems to have contributed nothing fresh to the discussion.
§ 2. According to Philo.
With Josephus we obtain the testimony of a Palestinian Jew, a Hebrew.' Have we a similar witness amongst the Jews of the Dispersion, the Hellenists'? An indirect witness, whose veracity is without reproach, is found in the Alexandrian Philo, of a character, Pusey well says, the most opposite to that of Josephus. Variety of evidence may always be appreciated. Philo was already growing old when Josephus was born. He appears to reckon exactly the same number of Books as Josephus, and strange to say, living always amidst Egyptian influences, he quotes only from the Books of the Hebrew Canon, using of course the Septuagint Version. No one is foolish enough to suppose he was not acquainted with the books of the Apocrypha. We may conclude that there was no Alexandrian Canon ' in the strict sense.
§3. The Well-Grounded Credit Attached to the Hebrew Scriptures.
As to the authenticity of these Old Testament writings, it will be well to quote one of many helpful remarks of Dr. Payne Smith: The forgery of writings did not begin until books were made marketable commodities.' The activity of the Egyptian Jews in the two last centuries before Christ doubtless borders upon it.
And next, as to the principle of selection. We must demur to Plumptre's statement, which seems little in advance of Davidson's views, that what we have in fact is an anthology of the wider religious literature; if by that be meant choice extracts which Jewish scribes first admired and then revered. Such an expression would do scant justice to the exquisite diction of Isaiah, and on the other hand, be entirely inappropriate to the constrained style of Haggai. No: these ancient Israelites and Jews had a trust which we can thankfully acknowledge they fulfilled. Even if we suppose, as Kuenen and Smith invite us to do, that Lectures, some rapprochement existed between spiritual prophecy and the priesthood after the Exile greater than before, the Scribes—whose interests seem to have been identical with those of the Priests, as later the Pharisees—none the less evidently had divine instincts: they multiplied the copies' of, e.g. Malachi, who, if he did use different language from that of Isaiah, or Amos, or Micah, as to sacrifice, certainly did not flatter the priests themselves. Men recognized through spiritual sentiment the voice of God in Ecclesiastes and in Canticles amongst the rest of the sacred oracles.
It was not left to Rabbi Akiba, as Mr. Smith represents, to establish their canonicity amongst the Jews has neither deprived us of such Books as Esther, nor effectually added any, as Baruch.
But indeed, when doubts in the days of the Talmud were mooted as to certain Books, it was only, Oehler rightly says, as to whether they should retain their place in the Canon: there they were.
Spiritual men had been able in early times to discriminate between the wheat and the chaff (cf. Jer. 23: 28 with 1 Cor. 14:3737If any man think himself to be a prophet, or spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things that I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord. (1 Corinthians 14:37)), and so Josephus, we have seen, could speak of the Books which have been justly credited as divine.' We shall afterward draw out the distinctive features of the Hebrew canonical Books, and the Apocrypha of the Alexandrian Bible.
Before passing on, let us take but two characteristics of Sacred Scripture, for which the reader would search with no result in Greek or Latin classics that have long formed the taste of men of letters. We would invite attention to the thoughtful remarks of the late Isaac Taylor who points out 'a remarkable difference' in the manner in which the sacred writers present marvelous occurrences from that employed by profane authors. He says: The marvelous events reported by the Greek and Roman authors may, with few exceptions, be classed under two heads; namely—allegory and poetical combinations, which were so obviously fabulous as to ask for no credence, and to demand no scrutiny; or they were mere exaggerations, distortions or misapplications of natural objects of phenomena. But the Jewish historians and poets do not describe as actually existing, any such allegorical prodigies: and their descriptions of real animals are either simply exact, or they are evidently poetical (like those in the books of Job), but they are not fabulous. They do not throw a supernatural coloring over ordinary phenomena, or convert plain facts into prodigies. The supernatural events they record—as matters of history, are such deviation from the standing order of natural causes, as leaves us no alternative between peremptory denial of the veracity of the writers, or a submission to their affirmation of divine agency The Antiquities preserved in the Assyrian Galleries of the British Museum suggest the other characteristic to which we allude. Any reader of the Hebrew prophets is struck with the extent to which denunciation of Assyrian or Babylonian violence and corruption is carried by them, and some pause to ask themselves if it is possible that, as with classical' writers, the picture drawn is an exaggeration from national hate. As Taylor says, we have but to walk up and down, gazing in awe upon these monstrous sculptures to know that the answer is at hand. The Hebrew writers... have not calumniated those remorseless tyrants—even the men of these colossal busts and these bas-reliefs, when they recount their deeds of blood, their spoliations and their oppressions.'