CANON
270
CANON
The ancient Greek Old Testament known as the
Septuagint was the vehicle which conveyed these
additional Scriptures into the Catholic Church. The
Septuagint version was the Bible of the Greek-speak-
ing, or Hellenist, Jews, whose intellectual and literary
centre was Alexandria (see Septuagint). The oldest
extant copies date from the fourth and fifth centuries
of our era, and were therefore made by Christian
hands; nevertheless scholars generally admit that
these faithfully represent the O. T. as it was current
among the Hellenist or Alexandrian Jews in the
age immediately preceding Christ. These venerable
MSS. of the Septuagint vary somewhat in their con-
tent outside the Palestinian Canon, showing that in
Alexandrian-Jewish circles the number of admissible
extra books was not sharply determined either by
tradition or by authority. However, aside from the
absence of Machabees from the Codex Vaticanus (the
very oldest copy of the Greek O. T.), all the entire
MSS. contain all the deutero writings; where the
manuscript Septuagints differ from one another, with
the exception noted, it is in a certain excess above
the deuterocanonical books. It is a significant fact
that in all these Alexandrian Bibles the traditional
Hebrew order is broken up by the interspersion of
the additional literature among the other books,
outside the Law, thus asserting for the extra writings
a substantial equality of rank and privilege.
It is pertinent to ask the motives which impelled the Hellenist Jews to thus, virtually at least, canonize this considerable section of literature, some of it very recent, and depart so radically from the Palestinian tradition. Some would have it that not the Alex- andrian, but the Palestinian, Jews departed from the Biblical tradition. The Catholic writers Nickes, Movers, Danko, and more recently Kaulen and Mul- len, have advocated the view that originally the Palestinian Canon must have included all the deu- terocanonicals, and so stood down to the time of the Apostles (Kaulen, c. 100 b. a), when, moved by the fact that the Septuagint had become the O. T. of the Church, it was put under ban by the Jerusalem Scribes, who were actuated moreover (thus especially Kaulen) by hostility to the Hellenistic largeness of spirit and Greek composition of our deuterocanonical books. These exegetes place much reliance on St. Justin Martyr's statement that the Jews had muti- lated Holy Writ, a statement that rests on no posi- tive evidence. They adduce the fact that certain deutero books were quoted with veneration, and even in a few cases as Scripture, by Palestinian or Babylo- nian doctors; but the private utterances of a few rabbis cannot outweigh the consistent Hebrew tradi- tion of the canon, attested by Josephus — although he himself was inclined to Hellenism — and even by the Alexandrian-Jewish author of IV Esdras. We are therefore forced to admit that the leaders of Alex- andrian Judaism showed a notable independence of Jerusalem tradition and authority in permitting the sacred boundaries of the Canon, which certainly had been fixed for the Prophets, to be broken by the insertion of an enlarged Daniel and the Epistle of Baruch. On the assumption that the limits of the Palestinian Hagiographa remained undefined until a relatively late date, there was less bold innovation in the addition of the other books, but the wiping out of the lines of the triple division reveals that the Hellenists were ready to extend the Hebrew Canon, if imt establish a new official one of their own.
On their human side these innovations are to be accounted for by the free spirit of the Hellenist Jews. Under the influence of Greek thought they had con- ceived a broader view of Divine inspiration than that of their Palestinian brethren, and refused to restrict the literary manifestations of the Holy Ghost to a certain terminus of time and the Hebrew form of language. The Book of Wisdom, emphatically Hel-
lenist in character, presents to us Divine wisdom as
flowing on from generation to generation and making
holy souls and prophets (vii, 27, in the Greek). Philo,
a typical Alexandrian-Jewish thinker, has even an ex-
aggerated notion of the diffusion of inspiration (Quis
rerumdivinarum haeres, 52; ed. Lips., iii,57; Demigra-
tione Abrahae, 11,299; ed. Lips, ii, 334). But even
Philo, while indicating acquaintance with the deutero
literature, nowhere cites it in his voluminous writings.
True, he does not employ several books of the Hebrew
Canon; but there is a natural presumption that if he
had regarded the additional works as being quite on
the same plane as the others, he would not have failed
to quote so stimulating and congenial a production as
the Book of Wisdom. Moreover, as has been pointed
out by several authorities, the independent spirit of
the Hellenists could not have gone so far as to setup
a different official ('anon from that of Jerusalem, with-
out having left historical traces of such a rupture.
So, from the available data we may justly infer that,
while the deuterocanonicals were admitted as sacred
by the Alexandrian Jews, they possessed a lower de-
gree of sanctity and authority than the longer ac-
cepted books, i. e. the Palestinian Hagiographa and
the Prophets, themselves inferior to the Law.
For the Canon among the Jews. — Catholic works: Mullen - , Canon of the Old Testament (New York, 1S92); Glatigny. Les commencements du canon de I'Ancien Testament (Rome, 1906); Fracassini, Le Oriami del canone del Vecchio Testamento in Rivista Sloricrj-cntica delle Scun;, Teologiche, II, 1906, 89-99, LM9-6S — N, , i, -Catholic works. \V. R. Smith, Old Testament in the Jewish Church (New York, 1891); Rtle, Canon of the; (Jlrl Testament (London, 1892); Wildeboer, Origin of the Canon of the Old Testament, tr. Bacon (London. 1895).
II. — The Canon of the Old Testament in the Catholic Church. — The most explicit definition of the Catholic Canon is that given by the Council of Trent, Session IV, 1546. For the O. T. its catalogue reads as follows: "The five books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), Josue, Judges, Ruth, the four books of Kings, two of Para- lipomenon, the first and second of Esdras (which latter is called Nehemias), Tobias, Judith, Esther, Job, the Davidic Psalter (in number one hundred and fifty Psalms), Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Canticle of Canti- cles, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Isaias, Jeremias, with Baruch, Ezechiel, Daniel, the twelve minor Prophets (Osee, Joel, Amos, Abdias, Jonas, Micheas, Nahum, Habaeuc, Sophonias, Aggeus, Zacharias, Malachias), two books of Machabees, the first and second". The order of books copies that of the Council of Florence, 1442, and in its general plan is that of the Septuagint. The divergence of titles from those found in the Protestant versions is due to the fact that the official Latin Vulgate retained the forms of the Septuagint.
(1) The O. T. Canon (including the deuteros) in the N. T. — The Tridentine decree from which the above list is extracted was the first infallible and effectually promulgated pronouncement on the Canon, addressed to the Church Universal. Being dogmatic in its pur- port, it implies that the Apostles bequeathed the same Canon to the Church, as a part of the deposition fidei. But this was not done by way of any formal decision; we should search the pages of the N. T. in vain for any trace of such action. The larger Canon of the O. T. passed through the Apostles' hands to the Church tacitly, by way of their usage and whole attitude toward its components; an attitude which, for most of the sacred writings of the Old Testament, reveals itself in the New, and for the rest, must have exhibited itself in oral utterances, or at least in tacit approval of the special reverence of the faithful. Reasoning backward from the status in which we find the deutero books in the earliest ages of post- Apostolic Christianity, we rightly affirm that such a status points to Apostolic sanction, which in turn must have rested on revelation either by Christ or the Holy Spirit. For the deuterocanonicals at least, we needs must have recourse to this legitimate pre-
