(On the core difference between Biblia Hebraica and the Protestant and other Christian Bibles. For those who need clarification, as to why I am specifically singling out the Protestant Bible here, see my Religion section entry The Stumbling Stone Of The Christian Canon posted on January 16, 2011 as part of the mega-entry And When She Was…Good, She Was Horrid. In a nutshell, different branches of Christianity have different established views on what should constitute the Old Testament of the Holy Bible. The Russians, and most other Orthodox Christians, have the longest Bible, followed next by the Roman Catholics. The Protestant Bible is by far the shortest, allegedly on the grounds of its correspondence to the “Jewish canon” of the Biblia Hebraica. The supreme irony of this “logic” is the subject of this entry.)
A great number of basic facts about Judaism (although by no means all of them) are reasonably accessible to the general public, should the public become seriously interested in the subject. However, such interest is not in evidence. General Christian public in America seems to be getting most of its information about the Jews and Judaism from the hearsay and innuendo of the Christian pulpit talk and the weekly Bible studies. As a result, great misunderstandings about almost everything flourish within the Christian community, as there is never any heartfelt interest expressed there, to reach beyond the unsound atmosphere of slapdash superficiality, and to find out the real thing.
The question of What is the Bible? is at the core of all Christianity. “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God.” (II Timothy 3:16.) The Catholic Church defines “all Scripture” according to the established practice of Roman Catholicism: “If anyone receive not, as sacred and canonical, the said books (referring expressly to the approved Catholic Canon) entire, with all their parts, as they have been read in the Catholic Church, and as they are contained in the Vulgate, let him be anathema,” postulates the Third Decree of the Council of Trent in 1564. Pope Leo XIII in 1893 reiterates that “it will never be lawful to restrict inspiration merely to certain portions of the Holy Scriptures,” which, again, refers to the longer, Catholic version of the Bible, but brings to mind an important logical point, namely, that the hesitancy of Saint Jerome who had originally separated canonical books from ecclesiastical books, in his preparation of the Vulgate (this separation was decisively overruled by Saint Augustine, and it was not reflected in the eventual appearance of the Vulgate), did not make much sense, as there should not have been such thing, as a “more inspired” (authoritative) and a “less inspired” (Apocryphal) Scripture, because the Judaic sources, presumably serving as a gold standard in this matter, had confused it well beyond Christian comprehension.
The Protestants, who seem to take the Bible with the utmost seriousness (in William Chillingworth’s 1637 tractate The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation, he writes that “The Bible only is the religion of Protestants”), have made their choice between the Vulgate version and the “Hebrew truth” (!) in favor of the latter. However, Martin Luther’s 1534 German Bibel still includes the disputed writings, calling them Apocrypha for the first time, and explaining that, while these books were not in the same esteem as the first kind (the Sacred Scriptures of the Hebrews), they were still edifying.(?!) Pope Leo XIII’s logical objection, quoted above, to this old line of argument, reads particularly convincing, in view of this Protestant proviso about edification.
There is a curious history to the English-language King James Version of the Bible, which is better suited, perhaps, for the Religion section, but I am keeping it here anyway. Following the judgment in the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of the Church of England, of 1562, the 1611 King James edition had the Apocrypha separately placed between the books of the Old and New Testaments. The 1642 edition was not as charitable, intentionally dropping the Apocrypha from the Bible (at least, that showed a consistency of sorts in the light of Pope Leo XIII’s future criticism). The determination to exclude the Apocrypha from all English Bibles has held up from then on, throughout the modern times.
This Protestant adherence to the “Hebrew truth, and nothing but the Hebrew truth,” does indeed appear to carry a better logic than the half-hearted inclusion of those disputed sacred texts under an inferior status. I wish, however, that such a decision had been made on the basis of fact, rather than ignorance, in a matter of such importance as what is the Word of God and what is not.
The ignorance in question concerns the misunderstanding of the unequal value of parts in Biblia Hebraica (the so-called TaNaKh) as though they were of equal value (“equally inspired”). I would not, for a moment, suggest that what I shall be writing about now is in any way a bombshell disclosure, which it is not, yet, for some strange reason, an appreciation of this fact is wholly missing from the consideration at the core of the exclusion, making its logic, supposedly, the most compelling factor in the Protestant Canon, unsustainable.
Biblia Hebraica, or TaNaKh, is itself a conflicted, confused, and confusing phenomenon, made even more confusing by the appearance of the Septuagint, or the Alexandrian canon, the Greek translation of the Old Testament made by the Jewish scholars of Alexandria, in the third century BC, where the shorter Canon is extended, to include what we now know as the Apocrypha, so making the Augustinian claim of the longer Canon legitimate.
With regard to sacred canonicity, only the Torah portion of the TaNaKh has a comparable religious value to the esteem, in which the whole Bible is held by the Christians. Only the Torah, as a venerated scroll, is an integral part of the Jewish religious services, in all denominations of Judaism, comparable to the place held by the whole Christian Bible in the Christian churches. According to the Jewish tradition, only the Torah is the true word of God, often claimed to be written by God’s finger, not by Moses himself, in all its parts, and not just in the portion of the Ten Commandments.
For those who need an explanation, The Torah includes only the first Five Books of what the Christians call The Old Testament. They are identified in Judaism not by their individual content, but by their incipits, that is, by the semantically distinctive first words in each Book. They are accordingly Bereshit/ In the beginning (Genesis), Shemot/ The names (Exodus), Vayikra/ And He called (Leviticus), Bamidbar/ In the wilderness (Numbers), and finally, Devarim/The words (Deuteronomy).
The other two parts of the Biblia Hebraica are of a demonstrably lesser value in their progressive sequence. The Neviim, Prophets, includes the original Prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings), the latter greater Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel), and the twelve lesser Prophets. (Daniel not among them!) Section Three, the Khetuvim, or Writings, has caused the greatest dispute with regard to its canonicity, unresolved at the time of the Septuagint translation, and settled only centuries later, in 90 AD, in favor of a strict cutoff date, to preclude spurious inclusions, which had the automatic effect of omitting several revered Khetuvim (naturally included in the Septuagint before this decision), just because they happened to be the unfortunate casualties of the cutoff verdict.
The mechanical axing of cherished Jewish religious literature did not rise to the level of sacrilege, however, as the TaNaKh has never been claimed to be the Word of God, but only the Torah part of it being claimed as such. Unfortunately, in the Christian dispute about the canonicity of the Bible in toto, the fight had not been over some spiritually edifying literature, but about the sanctity of the Word of God! And now, the Protestants are sacrilegious in the eyes of other Christians of the longer Canons for denying the status to the Books they consider Sacred Scripture, and the Russians denounce both Protestants and Roman Catholics for throwing God’s Word out of their respective Bibles!
…In Homer’s Iliad, an apple was the cause of the fall of the great city of Troy. No Christian will ever admit this, but Biblia Hebraica may have been just that kind of apple that was to forever destroy Christian unity in its own version of the Achilles’ heel--- the Sacred Canon of the Bible.
A great number of basic facts about Judaism (although by no means all of them) are reasonably accessible to the general public, should the public become seriously interested in the subject. However, such interest is not in evidence. General Christian public in America seems to be getting most of its information about the Jews and Judaism from the hearsay and innuendo of the Christian pulpit talk and the weekly Bible studies. As a result, great misunderstandings about almost everything flourish within the Christian community, as there is never any heartfelt interest expressed there, to reach beyond the unsound atmosphere of slapdash superficiality, and to find out the real thing.
The question of What is the Bible? is at the core of all Christianity. “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God.” (II Timothy 3:16.) The Catholic Church defines “all Scripture” according to the established practice of Roman Catholicism: “If anyone receive not, as sacred and canonical, the said books (referring expressly to the approved Catholic Canon) entire, with all their parts, as they have been read in the Catholic Church, and as they are contained in the Vulgate, let him be anathema,” postulates the Third Decree of the Council of Trent in 1564. Pope Leo XIII in 1893 reiterates that “it will never be lawful to restrict inspiration merely to certain portions of the Holy Scriptures,” which, again, refers to the longer, Catholic version of the Bible, but brings to mind an important logical point, namely, that the hesitancy of Saint Jerome who had originally separated canonical books from ecclesiastical books, in his preparation of the Vulgate (this separation was decisively overruled by Saint Augustine, and it was not reflected in the eventual appearance of the Vulgate), did not make much sense, as there should not have been such thing, as a “more inspired” (authoritative) and a “less inspired” (Apocryphal) Scripture, because the Judaic sources, presumably serving as a gold standard in this matter, had confused it well beyond Christian comprehension.
The Protestants, who seem to take the Bible with the utmost seriousness (in William Chillingworth’s 1637 tractate The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation, he writes that “The Bible only is the religion of Protestants”), have made their choice between the Vulgate version and the “Hebrew truth” (!) in favor of the latter. However, Martin Luther’s 1534 German Bibel still includes the disputed writings, calling them Apocrypha for the first time, and explaining that, while these books were not in the same esteem as the first kind (the Sacred Scriptures of the Hebrews), they were still edifying.(?!) Pope Leo XIII’s logical objection, quoted above, to this old line of argument, reads particularly convincing, in view of this Protestant proviso about edification.
There is a curious history to the English-language King James Version of the Bible, which is better suited, perhaps, for the Religion section, but I am keeping it here anyway. Following the judgment in the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of the Church of England, of 1562, the 1611 King James edition had the Apocrypha separately placed between the books of the Old and New Testaments. The 1642 edition was not as charitable, intentionally dropping the Apocrypha from the Bible (at least, that showed a consistency of sorts in the light of Pope Leo XIII’s future criticism). The determination to exclude the Apocrypha from all English Bibles has held up from then on, throughout the modern times.
This Protestant adherence to the “Hebrew truth, and nothing but the Hebrew truth,” does indeed appear to carry a better logic than the half-hearted inclusion of those disputed sacred texts under an inferior status. I wish, however, that such a decision had been made on the basis of fact, rather than ignorance, in a matter of such importance as what is the Word of God and what is not.
The ignorance in question concerns the misunderstanding of the unequal value of parts in Biblia Hebraica (the so-called TaNaKh) as though they were of equal value (“equally inspired”). I would not, for a moment, suggest that what I shall be writing about now is in any way a bombshell disclosure, which it is not, yet, for some strange reason, an appreciation of this fact is wholly missing from the consideration at the core of the exclusion, making its logic, supposedly, the most compelling factor in the Protestant Canon, unsustainable.
Biblia Hebraica, or TaNaKh, is itself a conflicted, confused, and confusing phenomenon, made even more confusing by the appearance of the Septuagint, or the Alexandrian canon, the Greek translation of the Old Testament made by the Jewish scholars of Alexandria, in the third century BC, where the shorter Canon is extended, to include what we now know as the Apocrypha, so making the Augustinian claim of the longer Canon legitimate.
With regard to sacred canonicity, only the Torah portion of the TaNaKh has a comparable religious value to the esteem, in which the whole Bible is held by the Christians. Only the Torah, as a venerated scroll, is an integral part of the Jewish religious services, in all denominations of Judaism, comparable to the place held by the whole Christian Bible in the Christian churches. According to the Jewish tradition, only the Torah is the true word of God, often claimed to be written by God’s finger, not by Moses himself, in all its parts, and not just in the portion of the Ten Commandments.
For those who need an explanation, The Torah includes only the first Five Books of what the Christians call The Old Testament. They are identified in Judaism not by their individual content, but by their incipits, that is, by the semantically distinctive first words in each Book. They are accordingly Bereshit/ In the beginning (Genesis), Shemot/ The names (Exodus), Vayikra/ And He called (Leviticus), Bamidbar/ In the wilderness (Numbers), and finally, Devarim/The words (Deuteronomy).
The other two parts of the Biblia Hebraica are of a demonstrably lesser value in their progressive sequence. The Neviim, Prophets, includes the original Prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings), the latter greater Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel), and the twelve lesser Prophets. (Daniel not among them!) Section Three, the Khetuvim, or Writings, has caused the greatest dispute with regard to its canonicity, unresolved at the time of the Septuagint translation, and settled only centuries later, in 90 AD, in favor of a strict cutoff date, to preclude spurious inclusions, which had the automatic effect of omitting several revered Khetuvim (naturally included in the Septuagint before this decision), just because they happened to be the unfortunate casualties of the cutoff verdict.
The mechanical axing of cherished Jewish religious literature did not rise to the level of sacrilege, however, as the TaNaKh has never been claimed to be the Word of God, but only the Torah part of it being claimed as such. Unfortunately, in the Christian dispute about the canonicity of the Bible in toto, the fight had not been over some spiritually edifying literature, but about the sanctity of the Word of God! And now, the Protestants are sacrilegious in the eyes of other Christians of the longer Canons for denying the status to the Books they consider Sacred Scripture, and the Russians denounce both Protestants and Roman Catholics for throwing God’s Word out of their respective Bibles!
…In Homer’s Iliad, an apple was the cause of the fall of the great city of Troy. No Christian will ever admit this, but Biblia Hebraica may have been just that kind of apple that was to forever destroy Christian unity in its own version of the Achilles’ heel--- the Sacred Canon of the Bible.
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