Celsus

Please explain your proof for:

(1) Moses' existence
(2) Moses' literacy
(3) Moses' access to scribal tools
(4) Moses' authorship of the first 5 books
(5) Authorship of the Pentateuch around 1400 BCE

Evangelion

Are you going to answer his question, Celsus?

Celsus

From here (Dammit Evangelion, you're messing up my pretty little forum)
For the composition of the Pentateuch, I'm pretty much in favour of Blenkinsopp's dating it as a post-Exilic Constitutional document reaching final form sometime in the 4th or 3rd centuries BCE, though I previously considered the evidence to point to a pre-Exilic compilation. As for the Old Testament, its final canon seems to have been decided at Jamnia in 90 CE. The last books to be written from the Protestant Canon (Daniel and Esther) would be 2nd to first century documents.

Joel

Godless Dave

The fifth century BC (or maybe 4th century) is commonly accepted as when Jewish priests, in exile in Babylon, compiled a bunch of Hebrew writings, many of them written much earlier, into the Pentateuch.*

And no serious biblical scholar thinks Moses wrote any part of the first 5 books or any other part of the Bible.

And that explanation has been refuted many times.

*Thanks for the correction, Celsus. I'm in over my head here. All I know of Biblical criticism comes from the PBS special "People of the Book" and memories from textbooks my religious studies minor roommate used to leave around. And yet I still seem to know more about it than most Biblical literalists.

Celsus

Well I think you mistyped by writing about the "Old Testament" being completed in 500 BCE rather than the "Torah" being completed at that point (in which that is an arguable position--one I wouldn't correct you on, though I would disagree with you on it). Around 500 BCE, we hadn't even heard from some of the minor prophets yet...

Joel

Evangelion

If you believe that the OT canon was established at Jamnia and that Daniel & Esther were 2nd-1st Century documents, what do you do with...

• Josephus' reference to the canon of his day (which agrees with our modern OT canon.
  
• The LXX (which contains our modern OT canon.)

...?

CJD

You really should nuance such sweeping statements, Godless. There is no substantial reason whatsoever to deny that a Moses wrote at least a few jots and tittles in the Torah. Historians use sources. The putative Deuteronomist very well could have used Mosaic fragments in his compilation. Suffice to say that the exilic and the post-exilic writers refer to the Pentateuch as the Law, the Law of Moses, the Book of Moses, and the Book of the Law of Moses. Even Jesus refers to Exodus as the book of Moses. While these late titles do not probably signify that Moses wrote the extant books of the Pentateuch, in all probability they are conventional ways of referring to the Pentateuch's content and aim to underscore its authority, not the authorship of the book's extant form. This can go on and on, but I think I'll leave it by agreeing with Blenkinsopp's dating scheme (with some serious misgivings!), which, by the way, does not preclude the possibility that Moses wrote at least some sections of the Pentateuch (via internal authentication). If I were asked Celsus' OP, it would like this:

Please explain your proof for (assuming he's looking for external evidence):

(1) Moses' existence: yeah, right.
(2) Moses' literacy: sure.
(3) Moses' access to scribal tools: sounds good.
(4) Moses' authorship of the first 5 books: okay.
(5) Authorship of the Pentateuch around 1400 BCE: ahem.

Regards,

CJD

Celsus

LXX also contains the Apocrypha many of which date to the 1st century. I presume you are referring to the fact that the LXX was started before the 2nd century. The question is, when was it completed? Josephus' reference IIRC was that there were a certain number of books (he never listed them out specifically) in the Hebrew Bible. Does he even mention which of the Ketuvim are there? Either way, how does Josephus have any bearing on 2/1st century documents? The last decision on the canon was decided at Jamnia, though I am well aware that an unofficial canonisation was already in progress. See here for what I mean:

• Our modern use of the word "canon" has moved some way beyond its classical origins. Yet, if we want to approach Jewish canonizing from a historical perspective, we must ask ourselves what "canon" might mean in terms of Jewish writings, and return to the definitions that governed the earlier age. Indeed, we must go even further than the classical origins of the word "canon". For, even though the word (or its equivalent) may not have existed, a process of canonizing is also clearly at work in both Mesopotamian and Egyptian cultures, and it is important to place Jewish canonizing historically in the wider context of the great literary cultures to which the classical world was also indebted. Millennia before the Greeks learned to write, the civilizations of the Tigris-Euphrates and the Nile valleys had produced highly complex bureaucratic systems in which the art of writing was indispensable: this in turn necessitated a society of scribes, and over time this society defined and replicated itself through a body of literature that served as a kind of genetic blueprint of its own values and world-view, its theoretical and practical philosophy. By means of its own educational system and the constant copying and refining of this corpus, the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations produced, alongside the much more numerous but transient administrative literature which paradoxically has survived where so much creative literature has been lost, works that we would call canonical, even in the Greek sense.
  
  ...
  
  The impossibility of dealing with canonizing in the shadow of later lists can be illustrated by the following scenario. If we were to find in some church's library in, say the second century CE, some codices of the Mosaic canon alongside a codex of some letters of Paul (let us say excluding Colossians and Ephesians), a scroll of Enoch and a codex of the letters of Ignatius, how would be decided which of these were canonical? We would have before us (a) a clearly recognized Mosaic canon (b) a collection of works that would be canonized in the Western "New Testament" but does not match the final list, (c) a work that was canonized but not in the Western church, and (d) a collection that was not later canonized. An illustration such as this shows not only how difficult it is to decide what "canonical" might mean at any given time or place, and indeed how inappropriate it is to allow the category "canonical" to get out of hand. "Canonical" does not imply only a fixed status in a list but can reflect a number of degrees of "canonization" prior to that. Even where it does make someone's list, it may fall out of another's.
  
  Canonizing begins and continues as an open-ended process. To canonize a work is not an entirely conscious process at all stages and does not entail that other works have to be barred from being canonized, or definitely excluded from such a status. Only when definitive canonical lists emerge does the canonizing process stop. While canonizing does entail listing, organizing and labelling, a single definitive list is not, indeed, the purpose of the canonizing process, any more than death is the purpose of life: just its end.

Clearly, to answer the question, one must go into the cultural context in which "authoritative" decisions were made, and Jamnia is simply a convenient marker by which we believe that the canonisation process ended. The question of the formation and closing of the canon is as applicable to the Hebrew Bible as it is to the LXX.

Joel

Evangelion

The Christian version did, yes. The original Jewish version did not. Many of the apocryphal books hadn't even been written by the time the LXX was completed.

Correct.

At some point between 250-200 BC.

He defines the parameters of the canon with particular care, and confirms that it is definitely closed.

No, he doesn't need to. He refers to the books in accordance with their respective groupings: the Law, the prophets and the writings. These designations were already familiar to his audience, who knew exactly what they contained.

Thus:

• The books of the Hebrew Bible are divided up into three sections. That of (i) the Law - Penteteuch; (ii) The Prophets; (iii) The Hagiographa - writings.
  
  This arrangement is often mentioned in the Talmud, but it goes back to an earlier period. There is evidence from long before the Christian era that the books were grouped into these three sections.
  
  Jesus ben Sira, who translated his grandfather's book, Ecclesiasticus, from Hebrew into Greek, added a prologue of his own in which he makes mention of three parts of the Jewish canon three times.
  
  "This passage can hardly have been written later than about 130 BCE". [Beckwith, p.110.]
  
  He not only states that there is a threefold canon - that is closed and distinguished from all other writings - but he goes as far as to imply that this was also the case in his grandfather's time, this would give a date as early as the third century BCE for the canon. The words of Jesus also suggest a tripartite canon when he spoke in Luke 24:44 of words written in the Law, Prophets and the Psalms.
  
  There is some discussion as to whether or not 'the Psalms' refers just to the Psalms or whether it implies the whole Hagiographa: the latter seems to be the most likely. It would be surprising to think of Jesus meaning that the third section of Scripture was the Psalms alone since he regularly used the book of Daniel in the Gospels.
  
  The De Vita Contemplatina mentions the threefold structure of the Bible. Authorship of the De Vita Contemplatina has been ascribed to Philo, an older contemporary of Jesus.
  
  "Philo of Alexandria seems to have been the first to use the term, canon, to indicate the collection of books normative for faith". [Soggin, p.13.]
  
  Also Josephus, Jerome and the Talmud all speak of the three divisions in Hebrew Scripture.
  
  "It is thus a well-attested fact that, by the first century CE, the division of the canon into three groups of books was widespread in the Jewish world and that it was familiar to Jesus". [Beckwith, p.118.]
  
  Reed, Peter (2000), The Old Testament Canon.

Because he writes before the 2nd Century AD, presents us with an OT canon which already contains both Daniel & Esther, and confirms that this canon is already closed.

In any case, 1st-2nd Century AD would seem to be a bit late for the composition of Daniel & Esther. Are you sure this is the date you're working with? Or did you mean BC?

Josephus provides us with the parameters for canonicity:

• From Artaxerxes to our own time a detailed record has been made, [he refers here to the period of the Maccabees, etc] but this has not been thought worthy of equal credit with the earlier records because there has not been since then the exact succession of prophets.
  
  Versus Apion.

Celsus

Hi Evangelion,

Rather than getting into a mindnumbing debate on the dating of books, why don't we have a much more interesting debate on the issues about the Jewish canon as raised in the article I linked? As in: What are canons? What was the process of canonisation like to the Jews themselves? Was it a conscious act? It raises plenty of questions that your response ignores, and which seems to make the same mistakes as addressed in the Prolegomena. Again, if the Septuagint was open to Christian additions, how can you be confident that it was closed to the Jews c. 250-200 BCE (especially considering that the Christians and Jews weren't even distinguishable till at least the 70s)? And of course what Reed fails to mention is that while Sirach mentions the sections of the OT, he doesn't mention Daniel in his list of Biblical heroes. Further, since Sirach is writing from Egypt, to what extent is his writing authoritative? There are so many questions here that would make for a good debate.

(Yes, I meant that Daniel/Esther were 2nd/1st century BCE documents, hence the reversed order in numbering--as indeed were all my dates with the exception of the 90 CE date which was specified. Sorry to be unclear.)

Joel