We know that the books that were laid up in the Temple were laid up by the Sadducees whose canon did not accept the Deuterocanon.
According to John Martignoni from EWTN, the LXX was completed by around 134 BC, which was before most (if not all) of the Deuterocanon was either written or translated into Greek (even Sirach wasn't translated until around 120 BC by his grandson).
Baba Bathra 14b enumerates the identical list of the second division of "the Prophets" from the Protestant OT, and states this was based on what "the rabbans taught," which the phrase was first borne by Gamaliel I, who was the mentor of the apostle Paul.
The Greek additions to Daniel & Esther, as well as Psalm 151, were written centuries later after their Hebrew/Aramaic predecessors were written. The DSS had a huge library, including books not found in Catholic OTs. And they viewed the books from the Hebrew Bible differently from the Deuterocanon.
The concept of a 22 book canon dates back to Jubilees a couple hundred years before Christ, around the time of Judas Maccabeus. The 22 book canon that Josephus speaks of could not include the Deuterocanon, based on how books were combined, but included every book from the Hebrew Bible.
BornAgain,
I recall discussing with someone about the Deuterocanon/Apocrypha last year here on CARM and the person mentioned Josephus having 22 books listed for the OT. This is good information because Josephus is an important source for information on 1st century Judaism and even Christianity.
I have seen lists of 22 OT books that include Deuterocanonical texts. This is because the "22 books" that you are talking about are not really what Jews or Christians today would normally count as "22 books." Protestants count 39 books in the OT. The rabbis today accept these same books, but number them as 24. The reason is that some of those "books" actually include other books, and this is certainly the case, considering that Jews and Christians normally count much more than 22 books in even the Protocanon of the Protestant OT. Some of the enumerations of the "22 books" that includes other books, as I recall, count multiple books of Jeremiah and Ezra as either just Jeremiah or Ezra. For example, in the Protocanon of the OT, we have both "Jeremiah" and "Lamentations", which is also called the "Lamentations of Jeremiah". Then in the Deuterocanon we have the "Epistle of Jeremiah" and "Baruch", who was Jeremiah's scribe. There is a book called Ezra in the Protocanon, and also a separate Greek-language book in the Orthodox Deuterocanon called "Esdras". On the other hand, Josephus' acceptance of "22 books" suggests that he didn't accept the full Deuterocanon, such as Maccabees, as being canonical.
One issue is whether when we establish the OT "canon", do we need to follow what the Jewish establishment of the 1st century AD followed, or should try to look for what the Christian Church defines as the canon.. I can see arguments both for and against following either. It seems that since we are talking about Christianity, we would actually more precisely look to see how Christianity, especially of Jesus, the apostles, and the NT, defines the canon. To give an analogy, the rabbinical establishment did not consider John the Baptist to be an OT prophet, but Christianity looks at John that way. I find it remarkable that almost all of the NT was written in Greek and quotes quite often from the "LXX"/Greek version of the OT instead of the Hebrew version. This implies to me that the OT authors found the pre-Christian Greek version of the OT to be legitimate.
In general, my impression of the early Church fathers, both in the 1st-2nd century AD, as well as the Church fathers before the Reformation, is that typically they accepted some, but not all of the Deuterocanon. More specifically, the Eastern Fathers typically accepted only some of the Deuterocanon, and which books of the Deuterocanon that they accepted varied between the fathers.
The Muratorian Canon from the 2nd century AD seems to be the first official collective "canon", and it accepts the Deuterocanonical book of Solomon. IIRC, much of the text of the Muratorian canon has been lost where it would talk about the OT books. But my guess is that it just would most likely have just accepted the Protocanon (the TaNaKh). You can read the text here:
bible-researcher.com/muratorian.html
I researched the status of the Deuterocanon more after my conversation with you, and am still learning more about it. I found that before the Reformation, the Christian Church did not have a solid consensus on their status, and that the Orthodox Church still doesn't today. Typically the Greek Church since the Counter-Reformation considers the Deuterocanon to be Canon, whereas the Russian Church tends not to, but still considers it part of "Church Tradition." In contrast, Protestants and Catholics each have a pretty rigid idea of the boundary of the OT canon since the Reformation. Personally, I can see arguments on either side.
Let me address more specifically what you wrote above:
- The Sadduccees put the books in the Temple and they didn't accept the Deuterocanon. This implies that they didn't include the Deuterocanon in their Temple books, as they didn't accept it. However, the Pharisees didn't accept most of the 22 books of the Protocanon either as canon - it's commonly considered that they only accepted the 5 books of the Torah. So in fact, whether the Sadducees accepted something as canon doesn't seem to decide whether they put a book in the Temple with the Torah or not. That is, they also included the Pharisees' TaNaKh (the 22 books).
- I don't see how the completion of the LXX by 134 BC would eliminate the Deuterocanon from the canon, because most of the Deuterocanon has been found in Hebrew form in the Dead Sea Scrolls, together with the Biblical canon. One theory is that the Dead Sea Scrolls were placed at Qumran by Temple priests, and this discovery shows that most of the Deuterocanon was originally made in Hebrew.
- Is Baba Bathra part of the Talmud, written in 200-500 AD? By that time, I think that the Tanakh would have been standard in official Judaism as their canon. I remember hearing a theory that Jamnia (70 AD) didn't establish the rabbis' canon, but I'm inclined to think that the rabbis' canon was rather solid at that point.
- The special sections of Daniel were arguably written in Hebrew and at the same time as the Protocanonical portion. One evidence is that there is an "Old Greek" LXX version of these three sections and a separate 2nd century Greek version included in Theodotion's 2nd century translation of Daniel. These two versions are so different that it implies that both Greek translators were working with a separate Hebrew original, according to the Orthodox Encyclopedia (
www.pravenc.ru)
- Psalm 151 was found at the end of the "Great Psalter" at Qumran, put together with the protocanonical Psalms.
- Jubilees doesn't appear to specify 22 books of the OT canon. An article online pointed to Jubilees 2:23 as supporting the idea of 22 OT books, but the verse only says:
"There (were) two and twenty heads of mankind from Adam to Jacob, and two and twenty kinds of work were made until the seventh day; this is blessed and holy; and the former also is blessed and holy; and this one serves with that one for sanctification and blessing."
My expectation is that the official Jewish establishment in the start of the 1st century AD just accepted the TaNaKh that the rabbis in the Talmud did. I recall reading on CARM that some pre-Christian rabbinical source treated just the Protocanon (Tanakh) as canonical. But the issue is not clear to me. We've found versions of the TaNaKh that agree with the LXX in places over the rabbis' most common version of the TaNaKh, and some of these places appear more original and are used in Christian Bibles. One example is the word "light" appearing in the LXX version of Isaiah 53. I also sense that the Christian OT canon in the 1st century was rather fluid on the Deuterocanon topic. There are a decent number of allusions and citations of the Deuterocanon in the NT and 1st-2nd century patristics.
Interesting discussion.