Journey Through the Minor Prophets, Part 3نموونە

Old Testament Wrap Up: Behind the Text

One of the amazing things about the Bible is how stable and unchanging the text and the “canon” has been. A key author from the 1st century explains.

Josephus’ 22 Books

The Jewish historian Josephus references twenty-two books, rather than twenty-four, when he compares the Old Testament with the less reliable ancient histories prominent in Greek tradition:

We have not myriads of books, disagreeing and conflicting with one another, but only twenty-two, containing the record of all time, and justly accredited.

F. F. Bruce offers a simple explanation:

When Josephus speaks of twenty-two books, he probably refers to exactly the same documents as the twenty-four of the traditional Jewish reckoning, Ruth being counted as an appendix to Judges and Lamentations to Jeremiah.

Here again we see an apparent difference in canon explained by a simple re-organization of the same texts. There were a number of different ways of ordering and organizing the books of the Old Testament, and it’s important that we see this for what it is rather than as a fluctuation of the canon itself.

Quotations: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture, 1988, pp. 32-33.