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131 - The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church |
The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church
By Roger Beckwith
Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1985. 528 Pp. $35.00.
As the title of this book indicates, Beckwith contends that there was in the first century New Testament church a rather universally accepted
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132 - The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church |
closed canon. In fact, he argues that the canon of the Old Testament had already been a largely settled affair by the second century B.C.E., probably under the influence of Judas Maccabaeus when the great warrior, in about 164 B.C.E. after the Antiochene persecution, effectively fixed the list of books we now know as the Hebrew Bible.
Beckwith engages the significant work of three recent authors, Albert C. Sundberg, Jack P. Lewis, and Sid Leimann, reads them from a quite conservative perspective, and comes to the above conclusion. He accepts major points from each, namely that (a) there was no Alexandrian canon, (b) that the meeting of leaders at Jabneh (Jamnia) after the fall of Jerusalem but before the Second Revolt was indeed not an authoritative council in the later sense of that term, and (c) that one should distinguish between canonical and inspired in dealing with the plethora of Jewish literature of early Judaism. Most of us have accepted those findings, but have felt it necessary to go on struggling with uncertainties about Jewish pluralism in the era before the fall of Jerusalem, and with the very real problems of an open-ended canon at the time of the rise of Christianity.
Beckwith shows with riveting clarity that the old consensus about the Hebrew Bible reaching canonicity in three stages, the Torah by the fourth century B.C.E., the Prophets by 200, and the Writings by 90 C.E., can no longer be sustained. Most of the book is given to establishing that point and therein lies its real value. If there was anyone left still holding such a view, surely there cannot now be a single adherent left. It is finished. Beckwith deals with "the three schools" (Pharisees, Saducees, and Essenes) and the five disputed books (Ezekiel, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, and Esther) at great, even tedious, length. He cannot be faulted with omitting a single list from any pertinent source from antiquity. And he has certainly read an imposing number of efforts by recent scholars on the problems that are addressed.
Then why is the reader not convinced? Why does one feel we still must go on struggling with the issues the concept of canon raises in the light of all we have learned in the past forty years? One reason is that if one has been immersed in manuscript study for most of that time, and the new concepts and methods involved in text criticism, one simply is not comforted by these assurances. There are entirely too many problems not faced in Beckwith's study. One searches in vain for recognition and appreciation of the work done either by the Hebrew University Bible Project or the United Bible Societies' Hebrew Old Testament Text Project, not only the work of Dominique Barthelemy, but also of Moshe Goshen-Gottstein and Shemaryahu Talmon, especially on the question of textual fluidity-stabilization and its bearing on canonization. One has the uneasy feeling that even the work of Leimann, on which Beckwith depends heavily in certain matters, has been rather co-opted. Much the same feeling comes with review of the work of Lewis and Sundberg. One
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also misses serious struggle with the issues of Jewish pluralism in the Second Temple Period, a rich field narrowed to study of three "schools." Even Louis Finkelstein's suggestion of fifty years ago that much of the canon beyond Torah was settled by the Men of the Great Synagogue in the time of Ezra is ignored!
Despite the fact that I am unconvinced by the major thesis of the book and feel we must still continue our struggles with the problems at hand, we can all be grateful for the sheer volume of information compiled by Beckwith. Especially impressive are the data collected in the five appendices. Conclusions drawn by the author need not be followed to appreciate the valuable work here shared with the scholarly community. At crucial intersections, where Beckwith's conservative hermeneutic leads him to take one path, the reader may need to take another; but the parting can be amicable. Beckwith's "economy of explanation" of the massive amount of data observed may not be the stance necessary to reflect the realism of history's rich ambiguities. So, with great appreciation, one goes back to work, with the continuing hypothesis that for many denominations in early Judaism, especially those most influential on Christianity, the third section of the canon simply was not yet closed before the last third of the first century C.E., just as the text beyond the Torah was not yet fully stabilized.
JAMES A. SANDERS
Claremont School of Theology
Claremont, California