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John F. Hobbins
jfhobbins@gmail.com
A comment by Doug Chaplin on his excellent blog provided the impetus for
this post. I thank Doug for noting my proposal that the Hebrew Ben Sira
tradition be fully presented in study Bibles of the 21st century, and both
Doug and Peter Kirk for their comments. The post now reflects their input.
Remaining errors, of course, are my responsibility alone.
Paul’s confidence that God has not and will not turn his back on those in
times past God mightily gifted leads him to an open-ended view of God’s
work among his fellow Jews. The tensions within his discussion (Rom 9-11)
are not of his own making. The one who wanted to be “all things to all
people” embraced a set of crisscrossing particularisms and univeralisms all
of which have roots in the Hebrew Bible. Jewish thinkers who like Paul and
even more than Paul have simultaneously embraced particularisms and
univeralisms include Franz Rosenzweig and Yehezkel Kaufmann.
Most Jews and Christians to this day are nonetheless at a loss when it comes
to articulating a sense of God’s ongoing involvement in the life and worship
of those who read the same scriptures as they do, more or less, but within the
framework of a religious metanarrative incompatible with their own. At the
very least, in my view, it ought to be admitted that God speaks to Jews and
Christians of whatever persuasion when Genesis, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and
so on are read in their presence. Whether they hear rightly, of course, is a
separate question.
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The historical facts, in any case, are these. All of the texts in the first two
divisions of what is now the Tanakh, as well as the majority of the texts in its
third division, were accepted by Jews in general for the purposes of hearing
God speak and knowing how to speak and “walk” with God from the mid-
second century before the current era forward. As the evidence of Old Greek
translations and the Dead Sea Scrolls suggests, the situation was nevertheless
fluid in terms of the exact content and arrangement of said texts, and the
degree to which other texts such as Enoch, Jubilees, and the Temple Scroll
were held to be binding and revelatory as much as and even more than texts
now in the Tanakh within specific strands of Judaism.
Among Christians, some books found in all Christian Bibles today, for
example Esther and Revelation, were not universally accepted among
Christians for the purposes referred to above. On the other hand, additional
texts, such as Enoch, Baruch, and 2 Baruch, were deemed fit for said
purposes, first by one or more streams of pre-Christian Judaism, then by one
or more branches of Christianity. Enoch and Jubilees are accepted for said
purposes in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church to this day.
(1) The canon lists of the historic Christian churches. A handy collection of
lists is found here. Note that the Ethiopic Orthodox canon, the Coptic
Orthodox canon, and the Armenian Orthodox canon include books that,
based on their attestation among the Dead Sea Scrolls, were understood to
constitute authoritative revelation by one or more streams of Judaism before
the Christian movement came into existence. The following books
incontestably fall into this category: Enoch, Jubilees, and the Testament of
the Twelve Patriarchs.
(2) Examples of the use of an excerpt from a book in the liturgy of one or
more branches of Judaism or of one or more branches of Christianity. A
distinction must be made between attributed and unattributed use. The
unattributed use of parts of the Hebrew ben Sira tradition in Jewish liturgy to
the present is one thing. The attributed use in worship of a passage of 2
Baruch to which lectionary manuscripts of the Syriac church tradition attest
is another, and much stronger witness to the sense that Syriac-speaking
Christians had that God continued to speak to them through said 2 Baruch.
(3) The great Bible manuscripts of antiquity. The Hebrew and Aramaic
Codex Aleppo and Codex Leningradensis, the Greek Codex Vaticanus and
Codex Alexandrinus, the Syriac Codex Ambrosianus, and the Latin Codex
Amiatinus come immediately to mind. The inclusion of books like Joseph
and Aseneth and the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs in Armenian
manuscripts of the Bible attests to the fact that said writings were deemed
worthy of devoted study in the context of a larger authoritative corpus.
Whether or not Joseph and Aseneth and the Testament of the Twelve
Patriarchs were read in worship or taught to catechumens are separate
questions.
In essence, I agree with one of the positions Chaplin ably articulates for his
readers: “[T]he inspired text is the one the church reads, which brings
tradition, text, church and translation together in a rather complex
relationship.” To suggest otherwise, it seems to me, posits the supervisory
presence of God in too limited a set of contexts. I say this while
simultaneously holding to the principle reemphasized by the Reformation, to
wit, that scripture is meant to stand in judgment of those who read it, not the
other way around.
I look forward to the day in which distinctions made in antiquity by the likes
of Athanasius, Rufinus, and Jerome will be reappropriated by Orthodox,
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Whether the public reading of excerpts from extra-canonical books will ever
be widely countenanced among, say, Lutheran, Reformed, and Methodist
Christians is difficult to say. In those contexts, it is nonetheless easy to
imagine using the following texts and many more in the form of unison
prayers, responsive readings, or explanation on appropriate occasions: Tobit
8:5-16; 13:1-17; Judith 16:1-16; Esther (Greek) 14:1-19; Wisdom 6:12-25;
ben Sira 28:12-26; 50:22-24; Baruch 5:1-9; The Prayer of Azariah and the
Song of the Three Jews among the Additions to Daniel; and Prayer of
Manasseh 11-15. Given the understanding of canon and the function of
preaching characteristic of the churches of the Reformation, it is possible to
cite passages from non-canonical books as illustrations in a sermon based on
a canonical text, but it is not possible to make a non-canonical text the
unsupported foundation as it were, of a proclamation of God’s word.
In what sense and to what degree a non-canonical text that is consonant with
the witness of texts within the canon might be used in worship by Baptists
and Pentecostals, for example, is a question I do not know how to answer.
For my part, I will continue to teach and preach from the NIV or ESV or
NRSV as the case may be in accordance with practice in my neck of the
religious woods. Precisely those books Jerome regarded as canonical, it
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might be remarked, are contained in the above translations. The text form
(proto-MT) that served as Jerome’s primary but not exclusive point of
departure for his translation of the “twenty-two books,” furthermore, served
the same purpose for the NIV, ESV, and NRSV translators. To be sure, I do
not hesitate to depart from a standard translation in the text I presuppose and
the nuances I highlight if my conscience so prods. My parishioners know I
work from the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. I work in references to the
wording in the original languages as the occasion permits.
I may never cite them or expound on them for more than a sermon
illustration, and I may never include more than a few lines from them as part
of a unison prayer, but I still want both the Hebrew and Greek ben Sira
traditions in the next study Bible I purchase. On top of the other extra-
canonical books printed in the NRSV study Bibles available today, add in
Enoch, Jubilees, 2 Baruch, Psalms of Solomon, and Testament of the Twelve
Patriarchs as well. The matrix from which rabbinic Judaism and early
Christianity developed is documented by these writings in unique and
illuminating ways. And if you are like me and hold a position like that of
Jerome, for whom “all the apocryphal books” contain “many faulty elements
in them,” but still some “gold in the mud,” I say to you as I do to myself, let
the gold rush begin.
NB: The Jerome quote in the last sentence is from Epistle 107,12 (trans. F.
A. Wright, Select Letters of St. Jerome (Loeb Library) as cited by H. F. D.
Sparks in his indispensable essay on “Jerome as Biblical Scholar” in The
Cambridge History of the Bible. From the Beginnings to Jerome (ed. P. R.
Ackroyd and C. F. Evans; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970)
510-40.