Development of The Old Testament Canon

Development Of The Old Testament Canon

The Old Testament is the first section of the two-part Christian Biblical canon, which includes the books of the Hebrew Bible or protocanon and in some Christian denominations also includes several Deuterocanonical books or Biblical apocrypha. Martin Luther, holding to Jewish and other ancient precedent, excluded the deuterocanonical books from the Old Testament of his translation of the Bible, referred to as Luther's canon, placing them in a section he labeled "Apocrypha" (not equal to Scripture but edifying), thus dissenting from the canon which Trent would affirm in the year Luther died (1546). Other churches also differed on the canonicity of certain books, and as a result, Orthodox Christians, Catholics and Protestants use different canons which differ with respect to the texts which are included in the Old Testament and with respect to the Antilegomena of the New Testament.

The differences between the Hebrew Bible and the Protestant Old Testament are minor, pertaining only to the arrangement and number of the books. For example, while the Hebrew canon treats Kings as a unified text, the Protestant canon divides it into two books. Similarly, Ezra and Nehemiah are considered to be one book in the Hebrew Bible.

The differences between the Hebrew Bible and other versions of the Old Testament such as the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Syriac, Latin, Greek, Ge'ez and other canons, are more substantial. Many of these canons include books and even sections of books that the others do not. For a fuller discussion of these differences, see Books of the Bible.

Following Jerome's Veritas Hebraica (truth of the Hebrew) doctrine, the Protestant Old Testament consists of the same books as the Hebrew Bible, but the order and numbering of the books are different. Protestants number the Old Testament books at 39, while Judaism numbers the same books as 24. This is because Judaism considers Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles to form one book each, groups the 12 minor prophets into one book, and also considers Ezra and Nehemiah a single book. Also, the Bible for Judaism is specifically the Masoretic Text. Protestant translations of the Hebrew Bible often include other texts, such as the Septuagint. There is also a dispute as to whether the Canon of Trent is exactly the same as that of Carthage and Hippo.

McDonald and Sanders's The Canon Debate, 2002, Appendix A, lists the following primary sources for the "Old Testament/Hebrew Bible Canon".