Believing What Jesus Believed About the Old Testament Canon
Different communities of people who call themselves Christians use different Old Testaments. Here’s what I mean: Everyone agrees about thirty-nine of the texts in the Old Testament, but—if you attended Mass in a Roman Catholic congregation this weekend—the Old Testament readings would come from a canon that includes seven books more than the thirty-nine books in the Old Testament at the Protestant church down the street. A few blocks further down the street at the Jewish synagogue, a reader who probably doesn’t believe in the resurrection of Jesus at all will be chanting a Hebrew or Aramaic text from the same Old Testament canon that the Protestants are studying in translated form. The Orthodox Church across town will be reading an Old Testament that encompasses a total of ten more texts than Jews and Protestants recognize. All of these disparities spawn a difficult question: If people who claim to be Christians can’t be sure about which books belong in the Old Testament, how