the-bible-and-the-dead-sea-scrolls

68 SCROLLS FROM QUMRAN AND THE CANON
The “canon” of Josephus merits closer examination: 2
It therefore naturally, or rather necessarily follows (seeing that with us it is
not open to everybody to write the records, and that there is no discrepancy
in what is written; seeing that, on the contrary, the prophets alone had
this privilege, obtaining their knowledge of the most remote and ancient
history through the inspiration which they owed to God, and committing
to writing a clear account of the events of their time just as they occurred)—
it follows, I say, that we do not possess myriads of inconsistent books, conflicting
with each other. Our books, those which are justly accredited, are
but two and twenty, and contain the record of all time. Of these, five are
the books of Moses, comprising the laws and the traditional history from
the birth of man down to the death of the lawgiver. From the death of
Moses until Artaxerxes, who succeeded Xerxes as king of Persia, the
prophets subsequent to Moses wrote the history of the events of their own
times in thirteen books. The remaining four books contain hymns to God
and precepts for the conduct of human life.
From Artaxerxes to our time the complete history has been written, but
has not been deemed worthy of equal credit with the earlier records
because of the failure of the exact succession of prophets. 3
Josephus, writing in Rome in the last decade of the first century C.E.,
asserted that there was a fixed and immutable number of “justly accredited”
books, twenty-two in number. The logic of their authority is rested
in their derivation from a period of uncontested prophetic inspiration,
beginning with Moses and ending in the era of Nehemiah. Specifically,
he excluded works of Hellenistic date and, implicitly, works attributed to
pre-Mosaic patriarchs.
In the subsequent paragraph, Josephus adds that the text of these
works is fixed to the syllable:
We have given practical proof of our reverence for our scriptures. For
although such long ages have now passed, no one has ventured to add, or
to remove, or to alter a syllable; and it is an instinct with every Jew, from
the day of his birth, to regard them as decrees of God, to abide by them,
and if need be, cheerfully to die for them. 4
2. See George W. Anderson, “Canonical and Non-Canonical,” Cambridge History of
the Bible, vol. 1, From the Beginnings to Jerome (ed. P. R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans;
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 113–59; and Rudolf Meyer,
“Bemerkungen zum literargeschichtlichen Hintergrund der Kanontheorie des
Josephus,” Josephus-Studien; Otto Mechelz 70sten Geburtstag Gewidmet (ed. O. Betz, K.
Haaker, and M. Hengel; Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1974), 285–99.
3. Ag. Ap. 1.37–41, quoted from Henry St. John Thackeray, Josephus: With an English
Translation (vol. 1; LCL; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926).
4. Ag. Ap. 1.42 (LCL).