Development of the Old Testament canon
The Old Testament is the first section of the two-part Christian biblical canon; the second section is the New Testament. The Old Testament includes the books of the Hebrew Bible or protocanon, and in various Christian denominations also includes deuterocanonical books. Orthodox Christians, Catholics and Protestants use different canons, which differ with respect to the texts that are included in the Old Testament.
Following Jerome's Veritas Hebraica principle, the Protestant Old Testament consists of the same books as the Hebrew Bible, but the order and division of the books are different. Protestants number the Old Testament books at 39, while the Hebrew Bible numbers the same books as 24. The Hebrew Bible counts Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles as one book each, the 12 minor prophets are one book, and also Ezra and Nehemiah form a single book.
In the Catholic Church, the books of the Old Testament, including the deuterocanonical books, were previously held to be canonical by the Council of Rome, the Synod of Hippo, followed by the Council of Carthage, the Council of Carthage, the Council of Florence and finally the Council of Trent.
The New Testament quotations are taken from the Septuagint used by the authors of the 27 books of the New Testament.
The differences between the modern Hebrew Bible and other versions of the Old Testament such as the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Syriac Peshitta, the Latin Vulgate, the Greek Septuagint, the Ethiopian Bible and other canons, are more substantial. Many of these canons include books and sections of books that the others do not. For a more comprehensive discussion of these differences, see Books of the Bible.
Table of books
Hebrew Bible canon
The Hebrew Bible consists of 24 books of the Masoretic Text recognized by Rabbinic Judaism. There is no scholarly consensus as to when the Hebrew Bible canon was fixed, with some scholars arguing that it was fixed by the Hasmonean dynasty, while others arguing that it was not fixed until the 2nd century CE or even later. According to Marc Zvi Brettler, the Jewish scriptures outside the Torah and the Prophets were fluid, with different groups seeing authority in different books.Michael Barber says that the earliest and most explicit evidence of a Hebrew canonical list comes from Jewish historian Josephus who wrote about a canon used by Jews in the first century AD. In Against Apion, Josephus in 95 CE divided sacred scriptures into three parts: 5 books of the Torah, 13 books of the prophets, and 4 books of hymns:
Josephus mentions Ezra and Nehemiah in Antiquities of the Jews and Esther in Chapter 6. The canon is until the reign of Artaxerxes as mentioned by Josephus in Against Apion. For a long time, following this date, the divine inspiration of Esther, the Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes was often under scrutiny. According to Gerald A. Larue, Josephus' listing represents what came to be the Jewish canon, although scholars were still wrestling with problems of the authority of certain writings at the time that he was writing. Barber says that Josephus' 22 books were not universally accepted, since other Jewish communities used more than 22 books.
In 1871, Heinrich Graetz concluded that there had been a Council of Jamnia which had decided Jewish canon sometime in the late 1st century. This became the prevailing scholarly consensus for much of the 20th century. However, the theory of the Council of Jamnia is largely discredited today.
2 Esdras refers to the canon of 24 books which likely refers to the same canon as the Talmud has.
Not much is known about the canon of the Essenes, and what their attitude was towards the apocryphal writings, however the Essenes perhaps did not esteem the book of Esther highly as manuscripts of Esther are completely absent in Qumran, likely because of their opposition to mixed marriages and the use of different calendars.
Philo referred to a threefold canon of the Old Testament, but never made a clear list of all the books of the canon, he cites the books of Moses as inspired, but never quotes Daniel, the Song of Songs, the Deuterocanonicals, Ezekiel, Ruth, Lamentations and Ecclesiastes.
Septuagint
The Early Christian Church used the Greek texts since Greek was a lingua franca of the Roman Empire at the time, and the language of the Greco-Roman Church.The Septuagint seems to have been a major source for the Apostles, but it is not the only one. St. Jerome offered, for example, Matt 2:15 and 2:23, John 19:37, John 7:38, 1 Cor. 2:9. as examples not found in the Septuagint, but in Hebrew texts. The New Testament writers, when citing the Jewish scriptures, or when quoting Jesus doing so, freely used the Greek translation, implying that Jesus, his Apostles, and their followers considered it reliable.
In the Early Christian Church, the presumption that the Septuagint was translated by Jews before the era of Christ, and that the Septuagint at certain places gives itself more to a christological interpretation than 2nd-century Hebrew texts was taken as evidence that "Jews" had changed the Hebrew text in a way that made them less Christological. For example, Irenaeus concerning Isaiah 7:14: The Septuagint clearly writes of a virgin that shall conceive. While the Hebrew text was, according to Irenaeus, at that time interpreted by Theodotion and Aquila as a young woman that shall conceive. According to Irenaeus, the Ebionites used this to claim that Joseph was the father of Jesus. From Irenaeus' point of view that was pure heresy, facilitated by anti-Christian alterations of the scripture in Hebrew, as evident by the older, pre-Christian, Septuagint.
When Jerome undertook the revision of the Old Latin translations of the Septuagint, he checked the Septuagint against the Hebrew texts that were then available. He broke with church tradition and translated most of the Old Testament of his Vulgate from Hebrew rather than Greek. His denigration of the Septuagint text was severely criticized by Augustine, his contemporary; a flood of still less moderate criticism came from those who regarded Jerome as a forger. While on the one hand he argued for the superiority of the Hebrew texts in correcting the Septuagint on both philological and theological grounds, on the other, in the context of accusations of heresy against him, Jerome would acknowledge the Septuagint texts as well.
The Eastern Orthodox Church still prefers to use the LXX as the basis for translating the Old Testament into other languages. The Eastern Orthodox also use LXX untranslated where Greek is the liturgical language, e.g. in the Orthodox Church of Constantinople, the Church of Greece and the Cypriot Orthodox Church. Critical translations of the Old Testament, while using the Masoretic Text as their basis, consult the Septuagint as well as other versions in an attempt to reconstruct the meaning of the Hebrew text whenever the latter is unclear, undeniably corrupt, or ambiguous.
The protocanonical and deuterocanonical books
The Roman Catholic and Eastern Churches canons include books, called the deuterocanonical books, whose authority was disputed by Rabbi Akiva during the first-century development of the Hebrew Bible canon, although Akiva was not opposed to a private reading of them, as he himself frequently used Sirach. One early record of the deuterocanonical books is found in the early Koine Greek Septuagint translation of the Jewish scriptures. This translation was widely used by the Early Christians, survives as the Old Testament in the early Greek pandect Bibles, and is the one most often quoted in the New Testament when it quotes the Old Testament. Other, older versions of the texts in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, have since been discovered among the Dead Sea scrolls and the Cairo Geniza. Nevertheless, the exact content of none of the surviving early Christian Old Testament Greek codex agrees exactly with any of the others, so there is no single definitive list.The traditional explanation of the development of the Old Testament canon describes two sets of Old Testament books, the protocanonical and the deuterocanonical books. According to this, some Church Fathers accepted the inclusion of the deuterocanonical books based on their inclusion in the Septuagint, while others disputed their status based on their exclusion from the Hebrew Bible. Michael Barber argues that this time-honored reconstruction is grossly inaccurate and that "the case against the apocrypha is overstated". Augustine simply wanted a new version of the Latin Bible based on the Greek text since the Septuagint was widely used throughout the churches and translation process could not rely on a single person who could be fallible; he in fact held that the Hebrew and the Septuagint were both equally inspired, as stated in his City of God 18.43-44. For most Early Christians, the Hebrew Bible was "Holy Scripture" but was to be understood and interpreted in the light of Christian convictions.
While deuterocanonical books were referenced by some fathers as Scripture, men such as Athanasius held that they were for reading only and not to be used for determination of doctrine. Athanasius includes the Book of Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah in the list of the Canon of the Old Testament, and excludes the Book of Esther. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, "the inferior rank to which the deuteros were relegated by authorities like Origen, Athanasius, and Jerome, was due to too rigid a conception of canonicity, one demanding that a book, to be entitled to this supreme dignity, must be received by all, must have the sanction of Jewish antiquity, and must moreover be adapted not only to edification, but also to the 'confirmation of the doctrine of the Church', to borrow Jerome's phrase."
Following Martin Luther, Protestants regard the deuterocanonical books as apocryphal. According to J. N. D. Kelly, "It should be observed that the Old Testament thus admitted as authoritative in the Church… always included, though with varying degrees of recognition, the so-called Apocrypha or deuterocanonical books."