The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls: The ... - josephprestonkirk

26 IMPACT OF SCROLLS ON TEXT AND CANON
The churches’ insistence on keeping the Old Testament in the
Christian canon, and indeed, on insisting on a double-testament Bible, in
reaction to Marcion and others, was largely to advance the growing
Christian conviction in the second and third centuries that Christianity
had superseded Judaism as God’s true Israel. 3 Keeping the old or first
part of the double-testament Bible was anything but pro-Jewish in terms
of the ongoing debates between Christians and Jews over exegesis of the
First Testament—or in terms of the ongoing debates within Christianity
between Jewish Christianity and Gentile Christianity. The latter, of
course, had completely won out by the time of Constantine. Jerome’s
conviction that the churches should have a translation directly from the
Hebrew was much the same as Origen’s intention had earlier been in
providing the Hebrew text of the Old Testament alongside the various
Greek translations in the Hexapla: to counter Jewish arguments outside
the church as well as pro-Jewish or Judaizing arguments within it. 4
Despite their having the same text base and the same contents, the
Protestant First Testament and the Tanak convey quite different messages
precisely because of their different structures. And the Protestant structure
is basically the same as all other Christian canons, Roman Catholic
and the various Orthodox canons, except that the latter have more books
in them than the Protestant. The two major differences between the
Jewish canon and the Christian First Testament are the position of the
Latter Prophets in each, and the tendency in the Christian canon to
lengthen the story line, or history, that begins in Genesis, to include
Ruth, Esther, Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah, Judith, Tobit, and the
Maccabees. And each of these major differences in structure makes a
clear statement of its own, even before consideration of content.
In the Jewish canon, the story line that begins in Genesis ends at the
close of 2 Kings, with the defeat of the united-then-divided kingdoms of
Israel and Judah. The fifteen books of the Latter Prophets then come
immediately next, to explain the risings and fallings, victories and
defeats, the weal and the woe that had happened since the two promises
made by God to Abraham and Sarah (Gen 12:1–7), which started the
venture and which were so completely fulfilled in the time of Solomon (1
Kings 10), now clearly had failed. The Prophets have the major function
in the tripartite Jewish canon of explaining the uses of adversity in the
3. See David P. Efroymsen, “The Patristic Connection,” in Antisemitism and the
Foundations of Christianity (ed. A. T. Davies; New York: Paulist, 1979), 98–117; and J.
G. Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983),
160–67.
4. See Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism, 188–89 and 162–66.