HistoricalChristian.Faith

Was there a formal Pharisaic canon — the Protestant Old Testament — that Jesus and Paul accepted?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: contested — for the interpretation it serves (that Jesus and Paul stood within the Pharisaic, Hebrew-measured stream of Judaism, which did not number the deuterocanon among its Scriptures, so the church should follow the shorter canon). This is the careful, strongest form of the "the Jews rejected the deuterocanon" case: it concedes that no single canon was agreed on by all first-century Jews and relocates the claim to the Pharisaic stream Jesus and Paul belonged to — the stream that became normative Judaism with a Hebrew table. That relocation is real and is the argument's strength; serious scholarship (Beckwith, R. L. Harris) holds the Pharisaic canon was effectively closed and Hebrew-sized already in Jesus' day. But it remains genuinely disputed: the leading canon scholarship (Sundberg, Lim, McDonald, Barton) holds the Writings were not yet a formally closed category in the early first century, the very phrase the argument leans on — "the Law and the Prophets" — is read by that camp as a sign the third division was still open, and Christie's claim that the phrase was understood as "limited to only those writings found in the Protestant Old Testaments today" projects a precise, closed table and a precise lexical reach back into Jesus' day that the evidence underdetermines. Strong by the lights of the early-closure scholarship, short of proof by the lights of the open-canon mainstream: no clear winner

Related arguments: the closed Jewish canon — see also did the Jews reject the deuterocanon — was the first-century Jewish canon closed and Hebrew-only? (weak); does Josephus's twenty-two-book count prove a closed Hebrew canon? (contested); does Philo's silence show a closed, Hebrew-only Alexandrian canon? (weak); does the threefold division prove a closed Jewish canon by Jesus' day? (weak); did the Council of Jamnia close or affirm the Hebrew canon? (weak); does the Bava Batra 14b baraita attest a pre-Christian closed Hebrew canon? (weak); were the Jews "entrusted with the oracles of God" (Romans 3:2)? (contested).

See also: the umbrella this refines — Did the Jews reject the deuterocanon — was the first-century Jewish canon closed and Hebrew-only? (weak), whose defensible residue is exactly this Pharisaic-stream point; the major-premise proof-text it shares a milieu with, Were the Jews "entrusted with the oracles of God" (Romans 3:2)? (contested); the companion silence argument, Does the absence of a recorded canon dispute between Jesus and the Jews prove a settled, shared Hebrew canon? (weak); the strongest single Jewish plank, Josephus's twenty-two-book count (contested); the mirror-image positive thesis, that the apostles' Bible was the Greek Septuagint (contested); and the Rabbinic Corruption of Scripture and Septuagint's origin timelines, which gather the Septuagint-versus-Hebrew quarrel and the discarded "Alexandrian canon" question.

Here the sub-claim is the careful, relocated form of the deuterocanon-removal case: that even granting first-century canon-diversity, there was a Pharisaic Old Testament canon, identical in content to the Protestant Old Testament, which Jesus and Paul — being within or addressing that stream — would have recognized when they spoke of "the Law and the Prophets."

The claim

Most popular forms of the Jewish-canon argument over-reach by asserting that "the Jews" — flatly, all of them — held a closed canon that rejected the deuterocanon, a claim the umbrella page weighs and finds weak for lack of a settled first-century canon to reject anything from. The apologist Steve Christie advances a more careful and more defensible form. Conceding that no single Old Testament canon was agreed on by all first-century Jews, he relocates the claim to the Pharisaic stream and to what Jesus and Paul — themselves within or addressing it — would have understood by their shorthand for Scripture, "the Law and the Prophets":

As a Pharisee, the apostle Paul would have understood "the Law and the Prophets" to refer to only those writings found in Protestant Old Testaments today.

… What would the Pharisees have understood "the Law and the Prophets" to mean when they hear Jesus use this term? They would have understood it to be limited to only those writings found in the Protestant Old Testaments today.

— Steve Christie, Why Protestant Bibles Are Smaller (2019), pp. 33, 36, glossing Paul's "witnessed by the law and the prophets" (Romans 3:21, c. AD 56) and Jesus' "the law and the prophets were until John," spoken with the Pharisees in the audience (Luke 16:14–16).¹ The argument runs: (1) "the Law and the Prophets" was the Pharisees' standing name for the Old Testament; (2) the Pharisaic Old Testament was the Hebrew table — content-identical to the Protestant thirty-nine — which does not include the deuterocanon; (3) Jesus and Paul used the phrase to and from Pharisees without correction; therefore (4) Jesus and Paul recognized the shorter canon, and the church should too. Its strength over the flat slogan is that it grants the first-century plurality and rests its weight only on the one stream that became normative Judaism.

Who advances it

The proponent. Steve Christie (Why Protestant Bibles Are Smaller, 2019) gives the popular form, building much of his book on a catalogue of New-Testament phrases for Scripture — "the Law and the Prophets" chief among them — that he argues map onto the Protestant Old Testament alone. The scholarly backbone of his relocation is Roger T. Beckwith's The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church (1985), the major modern defence of an early, fixed Hebrew canon: Beckwith argues that the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes alike recognized a closed canon, that prophecy was held to have ceased, and that the non-Mosaic books had already been sorted into Prophets and Hagiographa — on his reconstruction by Judas Maccabeus and his circle, c. 164 BC. On the specific lexical point, R. Laird Harris argued that "the Law and the Prophets" was not "two-thirds of the canon" but a complete designation of the whole Old Testament, so the bipartite phrase already presupposes the closed Hebrew table.²

The adversaries. A wide swath of mainstream canon scholarship holds that the third division (the Writings) was not yet a formally closed category in the early first century, and reads the very prevalence of the bipartite formula as evidence of it. Albert Sundberg's 1964 study argued that no Jewish canon — Palestinian or Alexandrian — was yet closed in the apostolic age; John Barton presses that in the oldest sources (the New Testament, the Mishnah) Scripture is "the Law and the Prophets," with the third group a looser, open body of writings rather than a defined canonical section; Timothy Lim and Lee McDonald reach the same verdict from the plurality of Jewish collections and the range of books at Qumran.³

The evidence for the reading

The relocation is sound, and it is the right stream. Christie's move away from "all Jews" to "the Pharisees" is not an evasion but the strongest available footing. Paul calls himself "a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee" (Acts 23:6; cf. Phil 3:5), so for his Scripture the Pharisaic canon is simply the relevant one; and Jesus, whatever his quarrels with the Pharisees, granted that they "sit in Moses' seat" (Matt 23:2) and debated Scripture with them within a shared text, never over its extent. Crucially, the Pharisaic-rabbinic stream is the one that became normative Judaism, and its Hebrew table — twenty-four books by the rabbinic count (b. Bava Batra 14b), identical in content to the Protestant thirty-nine — never numbered the deuterocanon among its Scriptures. The deuterocanonical books were, on the whole, the later, often Greek-medium literature of the Diaspora and the Hellenistic age; they were not candidates for inclusion in the Hebrew-and-Aramaic, Palestinian, Pharisaic Scripture that Jesus and Paul inhabited. So the residue the umbrella page grants — that a major Jewish stream measured Scripture by a shorter, Hebrew table — is precisely Christie's stream, and locating the claim there is its best case.⁴

And serious scholarship backs the early-closure premise. Beckwith's full-scale study argues the Hebrew canon was effectively settled before the New Testament era — challenging the century-old critical "three-stage" model of Ryle — and Harris's reading of "the Law and the Prophets" as a whole-canon designation, not a two-part fragment, gives the lexical premise scholarly cover: on this view the bipartite phrase is the Pharisees' ordinary name for the entire, bounded Old Testament, exactly as Christie needs.²

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The relocation succeeds where the flat slogan fails: the Pharisaic stream is a real, Hebrew-measured reckoning of Scripture; it is the stream Paul belonged to and Jesus disputed within; it became normative Judaism; and its table did not include the deuterocanon, which was never a live candidate within it. That a weighty first-century Jewish witness for the shorter canon exists — and that it is the witness closest to Jesus and Paul — is granted, and it is a genuine contribution to the books' graded standing this timeline traces.

Where the claim, as stated, outruns the evidence. Two joints carry more weight than they can bear.

1. "Already fixed and identical to the Protestant table, in Jesus' day." The Pharisees' own successors — the rabbis — were still disputing the edge of the Writings into the second century: whether Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs "defile the hands," i.e. are sacred Scripture (Mishnah Yadayim 3:5), with the quarrels reaching Esther and Ezekiel. A stream still arguing whether its own protocanonical books belong had not formally closed its canon, so "the Pharisaic canon was settled and identical to the Protestant thirty-nine already when Jesus spoke" projects a later, gradual settlement backward. The honest form of the point is narrower: those disputes were over subtracting books the Hebrew stream already had, never over adding the deuterocanon — so the Pharisaic exclusion of the deuterocanon is sound, but its precise table was not yet a closed, ratified list in Jesus' day. The leading scholarship (Sundberg, Lim, McDonald) holds no Jewish canon was yet fixed in the early first century.⁵

2. "The Law and the Prophets" does not by itself fix the third division. The phrase names two parts; the boundary in dispute is the third — the Writings, the looser edge where the canon question actually lives. The strongest scholarly opponents read the very dominance of the two-part formula (in the New Testament and the Mishnah) as evidence the third division was not yet a closed category: for Barton, "the Law and the Prophets" was the operative body of Scripture, the rest a wider, open literature. The threefold form appears (the Sirach prologue, c. 132 BC; Luke 24:44's "law of Moses … the prophets … the psalms"), but it is not what Jesus and Paul used in the texts Christie cites, and where they use the bipartite phrase it cannot be assumed to deliver a precise, closed list of the Writings. So even granting Harris's reading that the phrase names the whole canon, it does not independently demonstrate the extent of that canon's third part — which is the very thing in question.⁶

Proponent overreach to flag. Christie's "they would have understood it to be limited to only those writings found in the Protestant Old Testaments today" reads a fixed, ratified, Protestant-identical table off a bipartite shorthand and back into the lifetime of Jesus and Paul. The defensible claim is that they stood within a Hebrew-measured Pharisaic stream that did not receive the deuterocanon; the overstated claim is that "the Law and the Prophets," on their lips, was already a closed canon-list whose contents they consciously delimited against the Apocrypha. The first is the live, serious reading; the second outruns the evidence. (His audience reference, given as Luke 6:14–16, is the apostle-list; the Pharisee context he means is Luke 16:14–16.)¹

Assessment

Contested. The interpretation — that Jesus and Paul belonged to and addressed the Pharisaic, Hebrew-measured stream of Judaism, which did not number the deuterocanon among its Scriptures — is a serious, live reading and arguably the strongest form of the whole Jewish-canon case, because it abandons the indefensible "all Jews agreed" and rests on the one stream that became normative Judaism, the stream of Paul the Pharisee and of the Scripture Jesus debated within. Real scholarship supports its early-closure premise (Beckwith) and its lexical premise (Harris). But it is genuinely disputed, strong by one discipline's lights and weak by another's: the leading canon historians (Sundberg, Lim, McDonald, Barton) hold the Writings were not yet a formally closed category in the early first century; the bipartite "Law and the Prophets" is read by that camp as a sign the third division was still open, so it cannot bear the weight of proving a closed list; and the rabbinic edge-disputes over Ecclesiastes and the Song run into the second century. What is sound is the relocation and the Pharisaic exclusion of the deuterocanon — a real, weighty datum for the Hebrew-measure reading set against Augustine's reception-criterion in the contested dispute this timeline traces from Jerome onward. What is overstated, and to be flagged on the proponent, is the slide from "a Hebrew-measured Pharisaic stream that Jesus and Paul shared" (true) to "a closed canon, identical to the Protestant thirty-nine, that they consciously understood 'the Law and the Prophets' to delimit" (more than the evidence delivers).

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