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46 What Books and Words Make Up the Christian Scriptures?
As for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly
believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood
you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are
able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.
(2 Tim. 3:14–15)
Those who had taught Timothy from his youth were his mother and
grandmother: “I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt
first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am
sure, dwells in you as well” (2 Tim. 1:5). We know from Acts 16:1 that
Timothy’s mother was Jewish. Therefore, there is good reason to believe
that he had been raised as a good Jew with the understanding that the
Hebrew canon, not the Apocrypha, was the inspired, authoritative word
of God. And as Paul affirms its inspiration in 2 Timothy 3:16, he makes
no attempt to include any other books than those that would be assumed
as part of the “sacred writings” of his and Timothy’s Jewish upbringing.
What Was Jesus’s Bible?
There is no record of any dispute between Jesus and the Jewish leaders of
his day over what the extent of the Scriptures was. He seemed to assume
that their Bible was his Bible, and he made remarkable claims about its
authority, like, “The Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35). Given
the hostilities between the greatest Jewish authorities and Jesus, and
given Jesus’s pervasive dependence on the Hebrew Scriptures, it is almost
certain that Jesus would have been criticized by his adversaries if
he took the position that the Jewish Scriptures should be supplemented
by other books such as the Apocrypha. There is no evidence that Jesus
did so. And there is no evidence that he was ever criticized for his understanding
of the extent of the Hebrew canon. Jesus and his adversaries
disagreed over the meaning of the Hebrew Scriptures, not their scope.
So when Jesus referred to the whole Hebrew Bible, we are not surprised
that he would use terms that reflect the standard Jewish division
into Law, Prophets, and Writings. For example, in Luke 24:44 he said,
These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you,
that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the
Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.