oly Scripture ; whereas the holiness of Scripture was felt even more keenly by the Jews of the early Christian era than among the Christians of the present day.
With the Jews, as we might have expected, the thought of the holiness of Scripture took a τοῖν material form. We see this in the jealousy wit which they regarded the slightest alteration in the text, and in the highly fanciful symbolica]
OLD TESTAMENT CANON
meanings that came to be attached to what were originally (many of them) the purely accidental idiosynerasies of a single Hebrew MS. The formal establishment of this as the authorized text is probably the work of the school of Jamnia in the early part of the 2nd cent. A.D. But the πες which gave rise to it was certainly much older, and is probably referred to by our Lord in Mt 5%. The words ‘one jot or one tittle’ have much more point if they ba ea the spiritual counterpart to the exact literalism of the Rabbis of His day, which made the alteration of the smallest letter or particle of a letterasin. This materialistic view of the sanctity of Scripture appears even more curiously in the definition of what we should call canonical books as those which ‘defile the hands,’ the idea being that the desecration of a holy thing, as by touch, required expiation much in the same manner as material defilement. To avoid this ‘defilement’ the books which were read in the synagogue were covered. Thus we hear that at a certain period, before the canonicity of Esther was pas d established, wrap- pings of the rolls of that book were declared b certain teachers to be unnecessary (Bab. Sanh. 100a, referred to by Buhl, p. 31).
ii. SCOPE OF THE SUBJECT.—We have, then, to consider what books belong or should belong to the Canon of the OT in the sense already explained, and if possible when and how they received ecclesi- astical sanction. The plan proposed is first to trace the evidence backwards, and afterwards to reconstruct, as far as the evidence allows, a con- nected history of the Canon.
iii. CANON OF THE REFORMED CHURCHES AND THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH COMPARED. — There is at the outset this difliculty, that Chris- tians are not at the present day agreed, at least technically, as to the extent of the Canon. In the Western Church we meet with this broad dis- tinction, that, while all Reformed Churches accept as strictly canonical only the books found in our ordinary ἘΒΡΌΒᾺ Bibles, the Roman Catholic Church includes in its Canon those also which are commonly known as the Apoeryphal Books. Not only so, but at the Council of Trent she laid special stress on the fact that all the canonical books, as she considered them, were equally inspired: ‘Sac- rosancta Oecumenica et Generalis Tridentina Synodus . . . orthodoxorum Patrum exempla secuta, omnes libros tam veteris quam novi Tes- tamenti, cum utriusque unus Deus sit auctor... pari pietatis affectu ac reverentia suscipit ac veneratur.’ Then follows a list of books, includ- ing the Apocrypha of OT, and, finally, an anathema levelled against those who refuse to accept all those books in their integrity as they were con- tained in the Vulgate (Conci. Trident. Sess. iv. Decr. 8). The Roman Catholic writers of the day did, however, recognize some sort of difference in fact between Apocryphal and other books, and sometimes called the former deutero-canonical. But this term has been understood as intended to express the fact that the canonicity of these books was fully accepted at a later time than the proto- canonical in spite of some doubt and hesitation about them, not to imply a smaller degree of authority or inspiration (see authorities quoted in Sanday, Jnspiration, v. note B). The English Church, in common with other of the Reformed Churches, gives a sort of formal but limited sanction to the Apocrypha, ‘and the other bookes (as Hierome sayth) the Churehe doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not appy. them to establish any doc- trine’ (Art. vi.). he Belgie Confession makes a somewhat similar statement: ‘ Differentiam porro constituimus inter libros istos sacros et eos
OLD TESTAMENT CANON
605
quos Apocryphos vocant: utpote quod Apocryphi legi quidem in Ecclesif possint, et fas sit ex illis eatenus etiam sumere documenta, quatenus cum libris canonicis consonant; at nequaquam ea est ipsorum auctoritas et firmitas ut ex illorum testi- monio aliquod dogma de fide et religione Christiana certo constitui possit’ [Art. vi., quoted in Harold Browne, Expos. Artt., Art. vi. sec. iii. ; see also, on the relation of the Reformed Churches to the Apocrypha, Buhl, pp. 69, 70]. On the other hand, the Westminster Confession, (i. 3) would have none of the Apocrypha, but declared emphatically that they were ‘of no authority to the Church of God, nor to be otherwise proved or made use of than any other human writings.’
he grounds upon which the Reformed Churches differed from the Roman Catholic Church in the value attached to the Apocrypha, were partl historical and literary and partly ἜΣ ΞΕ tt seemed right to limit the 5 of the OT to those which had been accepted by the Jews and formed part of the Hebrew Bible, and had also been accepted by some of the greatest of the Fathers, notably Origen, Athanasius, and Jerome; whereas the Apocrypha had been clearly distinguished by them from the Canon, and placed upon a lower level. The Reformers were also influenced un- doubtedly by the fact that quotations from the Apocrypha were frequently used by Roman Catholic writers in support of the peculiar doc- trines of their Church, such as Purgatory (Wis 35: δ), and the meritorious value of good works (To 410. 129) Sir’ 3 294s 1):