HistoricalChristian.Faith

Do the deuterocanon's historical errors (the book of Judith) disqualify it from the canon?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: weak — as a disqualifier. The factual observation is sound: read as plain history, the book of Judith opens with striking anomalies — it makes Nebuchadnezzar "king of the Assyrians" reigning at Nineveh (Judith 1:1, 1:7), where in fact he was king of Babylon and Nineveh had fallen c. 612 BC, before his reign; and it frames the action in a Judea "newly returned from the captivity" with the temple freshly re-sanctified (4:3), a post-exilic setting that cannot be sequenced under a Nebuchadnezzar-era invasion. Those anomalies are real and worth conceding plainly. But the inference — "a book with historical errors cannot be inspired, therefore the deuterocanon is excluded" — does not hold on its best case. It assumes the very inspiration-status it must prove (one cannot adjudicate inerrancy before inspiration: in a book granted inspired, an unresolved difficulty is treated as apparent, awaiting context or manuscript); it applies a standard the protocanon itself would fail (Mark 2:26's Abiathar, Matthew 23:35's "Zechariah son of Berechiah" — both harmonized, neither used to unbook its Gospel); it passes over the live, mainstream literary judgment that Judith's impossibilities are deliberate signals of a didactic novella, not blunders; and even at its strongest it is narrow — a single book's anomalies cannot disqualify the other six deuterocanonical books

See also: the companion removal argument from the books' own words — Do the deuterocanonical books disclaim their own inspiration? (which weighs the second half of James White's "the books refute their own canonical standing" thesis, their reference to the already-closed canon) — and the patristic-lists case, Did the early church reject the deuterocanon? The protocanon double-standard turns on the identity puzzle weighed at Which Zechariah does Jesus name?, which is not re-argued here.

Here the sub-claim is a Protestant removal argument: that the deuterocanonical books contain demonstrable historical errors — the book of Judith above all — and that a book with historical errors cannot be inspired Scripture, so the deuterocanon is excluded.

The claim

There's some problems with these books, there's historical errors in them. For instance, in the book of Judith … it says that Nebuchadnezzar reigned in Nineveh. How many of you guys remember where Nebuchadnezzar reigned? It was in the city of Babylon … But it has another problem. It also declares that Nebuchadnezzar was the king of the Assyrians — but he wasn't, he was the king of the Babylonians. It's so bad that some Catholic apologists trying to defend Judith have said "well it's an allegory." … It doesn't seem to be an allegory.

— Mike Winger, How we got the OT Canon: Evidence for the Bible pt11, at 39:15.¹ The reasoning, stated as a syllogism: the deuterocanonical books contain historical errors; a book with historical errors cannot be inspired Scripture; therefore the deuterocanon is not Scripture. Judith is the flagship exhibit.

Who advances it

The proponents. The argument is a staple of popular Protestant apologetics. James White makes it programmatic: "The books themselves refute the claim of their own canonical standing, either by containing clear and irreconcilable contradictions and historical errors, or by themselves making reference to the already closed canon of the Old Testament," and presses Judith specifically — "a mishmash of historical errors so obvious, and so extreme, that defenders of its canonicity have been forced to say it is actually an allegory" — adding a temple-chronology charge ("if the temple is destroyed in 586 BC, and Judith says it's rebuilt in 637 BC or so … doesn't that cause us a problem?").² Allen Parr folds the same "inconsistency and errors" into his case that the books are not inspired.³ White's first prong — the books "making reference to the already closed canon" — is a distinct argument weighed on its own page (do the books disclaim their own inspiration?); this page weighs only the historical-errors prong.

The adversaries. Catholic apologists answer at three levels. On the philology, the text calls Nebuchadnezzar king of "the Assyrians" — the people he rules — not "Assyria," and Babylon (with the Medes) had conquered Assyria c. 612 BC, so a Babylonian king described by the conquered Assyrian nation is unusual but not flatly false.⁴ On the genre, Catholic and critical scholars alike read Judith as a didactic novella whose impossibilities are deliberate. And on the epistemology — the load-bearing answer — Gary Michuta (debating White) and Trent Horn press that the move is "the same tactic atheists do for the rest of scripture": you cannot judge a book's inerrancy before settling its inspiration, and Protestants do not apply this standard to their own protocanon.⁵

The evidence for

The Judith anomalies are genuine, and should not be hand-waved. The book opens: "In the twelfth year of the reign of Nabuchodonosor, who reigned in Nineve, the great city" (1:1), and calls him "Nabuchodonosor king of the Assyrians" (1:7).⁶ On the plain historical record the historical Nebuchadnezzar II was king of Babylon (reigned 605–562 BC), and Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, had been sacked and effectively destroyed by the Medo-Babylonian coalition c. 612 BC — before his reign began — so neither "reigned in Nineveh" nor "king of the Assyrians" fits the man.⁷ The chronology compounds the difficulty: the story is set in a Judea "newly returned from the captivity," its temple "vessels, and the altar, and the house … sanctified after the profanation" (4:3), and Achior's speech presupposes the exile and return as already past (5:18–19) — a post-538-BC, second-temple frame laid over a Nebuchadnezzar-era invasion, which cannot be sequenced on a literal reading.⁸ (White's specific "rebuilt in 637 BC" figure is his own reconstruction and need not be granted; the underlying point — that the narrative's timeline will not line up as literal history — is the sound part.) So the proponents are right that, read as a chronicle, Judith is full of "errors." The question is what follows.

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The factual observation is sound and conceded: on a strict-history reading the book of Judith contains conspicuous anomalies, the Nebuchadnezzar-king-of-Assyria-at-Nineveh frame above all. No amount of apologetic should pretend otherwise.

What is overstated. The leap from "Judith has historical anomalies" to "the deuterocanon is not canonical" fails on four independent joints.

1. The argument begs the question it must prove. Inerrancy is a corollary of inspiration, not a test applied prior to it. One cannot establish that a book is uninspired by finding an unresolved historical difficulty, because in any book already granted inspired — protocanon included — an unresolved difficulty is treated as an apparent error, awaiting an ancient manuscript, context, or lexical datum we may lack, not as a proven actual one. Geisler and Howe state the working rule for the protocanon exactly so: the scholar "does not assume that discrepancies are contradictions," and where he has no explanation "he simply continues to do research, believing that one will eventually be found." The historical-errors argument quietly switches that rule off for Judith alone — assuming the book uninspired to read its difficulties as errors, then citing the errors to prove it uninspired.⁹

2. The standard, applied evenly, would unbook the protocanon. The New Testament carries difficulties of the same kind. Mark 2:26 has Jesus place David's eating of the shewbread "in the days of Abiathar the high priest," where 1 Samuel 21:1–6 names the priest as Ahimelech (Abiathar's father, 1 Sam 22:20); a long line of interpreters harmonize it — and no Protestant proposes dropping Mark.¹⁰ Matthew 23:35 calls the murdered Zechariah "son of Berechiah," where 2 Chronicles 24 makes the temple-court martyr the son of Jehoiada; Protestants posit a second name, a descendant, or a conflation rather than declare Jesus mistaken — the identity puzzle weighed on its own page here.¹¹ The charity the protocanon receives — treat the difficulty as apparent, harmonize, keep the book — is precisely what the argument withholds from Judith. There is no principled reason the same charity should not extend, and Michuta's "same tactic atheists do for the rest of scripture" lands — most pointedly on this very Zechariah case. Reviewing a Protestant inerrancy-and-canon debate, Trent Horn and Gary Michuta note that the opponent will invoke the Jewish convention of "referring to people through other people because they had similar names" to read "Zechariah the son of Berechiah" (Matthew 23:35) as the son of Jehoiada — "and then he brings up Judith and Nebuchadnezzar," granting in the protocanon the very kind of harmonizing solution he rules out for the deuterocanon: "how come that's plausible right in Matthew, but it's implausible to give a solution with Judith?" The distinction the disqualifying argument needs is between actual errors and merely apparent ones, and it cannot be switched on for one book and off for the other.¹²

3. The "allegory" the proponents mock is a real literary judgment, not a face-saving dodge. Winger says it "doesn't seem to be an allegory" and White calls it a forced retreat — but the genre reading is not invented to escape the errors; it is the majority view of Catholic and secular-critical scholarship, and it rests on positive evidence. A second-century-BC Jewish author knew perfectly well that Nebuchadnezzar ruled Babylon, not Assyria; that the very obviousness of the anachronism is the tell that it is deliberate — the book telescopes Israel's archetypal enemies (Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Seleucid) into one symbolic oppressor, with invented geography (Bethulia) to match, in the manner of a didactic novella rather than a chronicle. On that reading the "errors" are not blunders at all but genre-markers, and the disqualifying argument mistakes the kind of book it is reading. The genre judgment is not certain (some defenders still argue for a veiled historicity), but it is a live, mainstream literary judgment that the historical-errors argument simply passes over.¹³

4. Even granting real errors, the inference over-reaches the whole deuterocanon. The conclusion is "the deuterocanon is excluded," but the evidence is about Judith. An error in Judith is no error in 1 Maccabees, Sirach, Wisdom, Tobit, Baruch, or the additions to Daniel and Esther; to disqualify the seven by this criterion one would have to exhibit a demonstrable error in each. The argument, even at its factual strongest, reaches one book — and 1 Maccabees in particular is widely regarded as sober Hellenistic history. So the disqualification it advertises is far broader than the evidence it produces.¹⁴

What the evidence really shows. Strip the disqualifying inference away and a true residue remains: read as plain history the book of Judith does not work, and that is a genuine datum about the book's literary character and about why the Hebrew-minded stream of the church ranked the disputed books below the protocanon. But it is a datum about Judith's genre and standing, not a proof that the deuterocanon is uninspired — that conclusion needs the inspiration question already settled (which it is not), a standard the protocanon would survive but is not made to face, and an error in six more books that has not been shown.

Assessment

Weak — as a disqualifier. The interpretation that the deuterocanon's historical errors exclude it from the canon does not hold on its best available case. What is sound is the narrower factual observation the argument starts from: read as literal history the book of Judith contains conspicuous anomalies — Nebuchadnezzar cast as "king of the Assyrians" reigning at Nineveh, set over a post-exilic second-temple Judea — and these should be conceded, not explained away. But the disqualifying syllogism fails four ways. It begs the question, judging inerrancy before inspiration when in an inspired book an unresolved difficulty is read as apparent, not actual. It applies a standard the protocanon would fail, since Mark 2:26 and Matthew 23:35 carry difficulties of the same kind that Protestants harmonize rather than use to unbook Mark or Matthew. It overrides without engaging the live, mainstream literary judgment — held across Catholic and critical scholarship — that Judith's impossibilities are deliberate signals of a didactic novella. And it over-reaches: a single book's anomalies cannot disqualify the other six deuterocanonical books, which would each need a demonstrated error. What survives is a real but modest contribution to the books' graded standing — Judith reads as edifying story, not chronicle — weighed across this timeline, not an independent proof that the deuterocanon is no Scripture. (Its companion removal arguments — the books' own words on the disclaim-inspiration page (weak) and the patristic canon-lists (contested) — are weighed on their own pages.)

Sources