HistoricalChristian.Faith

Does Philo's silence — never quoting the deuterocanon — show the Alexandrian Jews held a closed, Hebrew-only canon?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: weak — for the inference the proponents draw, that because Philo of Alexandria quotes the Old Testament prolifically yet never cites a deuterocanonical book as Scripture, he (and Alexandrian Jewry with him) held a closed, Hebrew-only canon that excluded those books. The datum is true — Philo nowhere quotes a deuterocanonical book as inspired — but the inference is an argument from silence over a corpus that is overwhelmingly a Pentateuch commentary: of his roughly two thousand quotations only about fifty come from outside the Torah, and that same silence equally “excludes” seven protocanonical books Philo also never quotes (Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Five Rolls — Ruth, Esther, Ecclesiastes, the Song, Lamentations). What the silence will not bear is a deliberate verdict against the deuterocanon; what it does support is the narrower, negative point that no distinctively wider “Alexandrian canon” is in evidence even in Alexandria's most learned Jew — a brick in Sundberg's demolition of that hypothesis, not a proof that “the Jews rejected” the books

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); was there a formal Pharisaic canon that Jesus and Paul accepted? (contested); does Josephus's twenty-two-book count prove a closed Hebrew canon? (contested); 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 prop serves — Did the Jews reject the deuterocanon — was the first-century Jewish canon closed and Hebrew-only? (weak) — and its sibling plank, the stronger of the two, Does Josephus's twenty-two-book count prove a closed, deuterocanon-excluding Hebrew canon? (contested); the major premise of the same syllogism, Were the Jews “entrusted with the oracles of God” (Romans 3:2)? (contested); the mirror-image positive thesis the “Alexandrian canon” once anchored, that the apostles' Bible was the Greek Septuagint (contested); and the Hebrew-measure reading this timeline traces from Jerome, which is the serious live position the bare datum feeds.

Here the sub-claim is the Philo prong of the popular case: that a prolific first-century Jewish quoter of Scripture who never once cites the deuterocanon thereby shows it was not Scripture for the Jews — and, because Philo wrote in Greek in Alexandria, that even the Greek-speaking Diaspora measured Scripture by the Hebrew table.

The claim

Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BC – c. AD 50), the great Hellenistic-Jewish exegete, quotes the Old Testament across his works some two thousand times. The argument runs that this prolific Scripture-user never quotes a deuterocanonical book as inspired — so the deuterocanon was not Scripture for him, nor for the Alexandrian Jewry he represents. Its tidiest popular form is Norman Geisler's:

Philo of Alexandria … (20 B.C.–A.D. 40), quoted the Old Testament prolifically from virtually every canonical book. However, he never once quoted from the Apocrypha as inspired.

— Norman L. Geisler, “Apocrypha, Old and New Testaments,” Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics (1999).¹ The same prop appears, paired with Josephus, in F. F. Bruce's scholarly form and is repeated by John Piper, CARM, and many others; it is the weaker twin of the Josephus count, which the proponents cite in the same breath.

Who advances it

In scholarly dress it is F. F. Bruce's — “Even Jews who wrote in Greek at the beginning of our era, like Philo and Josephus, recognized only the Canon of the Hebrew Bible, although they used the ‘Septuagint’” — and John Piper's, that Josephus and Philo “used the LXX but did not accord the Apocrypha authority.” In popular apologetics it is Norman Geisler's (above) and CARM's (Matt Slick) flat “Philo never quoted the Apocrypha as Scripture.” Tellingly, even a careful popularizer who advances it — Matt Whitman of the Ten Minute Bible Hour — volunteers the rebuttal in the same breath: Philo “acknowledges all parts of the three-fold division and does not reference anything from the Jewish Apocrypha… That said… he also never quoted from several books of the established Hebrew canon.”²

The adversaries. Catholic apologists (Gary Michuta most fully) answer that the round “2,050 quotations” is misleading: the great mass are from the Pentateuch, only a few dozen from the rest of the Old Testament, and those few dozen do not even cover the rest of the Hebrew canon — so the absence of a deuterocanonical quotation proves nothing the same logic would not equally prove against Ezekiel, Daniel, Esther, and the other books Philo passes over. Mainstream canon scholarship adds that Philo renders no canon-list and pronounces no verdict, and that his evidence, far from establishing a wider Greek-Jewish canon, was one of the data Albert Sundberg used to bury the “Alexandrian canon” hypothesis altogether.³

The evidence for the affirmative reading

Philo is a real, early, Alexandrian datapoint — and that is the prop's true strength. The argument is not built on nothing. Philo is the most learned Greek-writing Jew of the apostolic age, steeped in the Septuagint, and across a vast corpus he never once introduces Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, or the Maccabees with a Scripture-formula or treats one as a divine oracle. He does attest a tripartite shape to the sacred books: describing the Therapeutae, he says they take into their holy place “the laws and the sacred oracles of God enunciated by the holy prophets, and hymns, and psalms, and all kinds of other things by reason of which knowledge and piety are increased and brought to perfection” — a Law / Prophets / hymns-and-other division that matches the threefold structure of Ben Sira's grandson, Luke 24:44, and Josephus.⁴ And his witness is the more telling for its location: if any Jew should have shown a distinctively wider, deuterocanon-inclusive “Alexandrian canon,” it is the Alexandrian Philo — and he does not. That a Greek-reading Alexandrian exegete operated with a Hebrew-measured set of Scriptures is a genuine datum, and it is the same Hebrew-measure reading this timeline treats as a serious, live position from Jerome onward.

Adversarial assessment

What holds. Two things are sound. First, Philo nowhere cites a deuterocanonical book as Scripture — the bare fact the proponents assert is correct. Second, and more usefully, his silence is real evidence against a distinctively wider Alexandrian-Jewish canon: the “Alexandrian canon” hypothesis — that Greek-speaking Jewry held a larger, deuterocanon-inclusive Bible — cannot lean on its most prolific Alexandrian witness, who shows no such thing. That is exactly why Sundberg's case cut both ways, and it is a fair brick in the Hebrew-measure reading.

Where the inference gives way. The argument needs the silence to mean a deliberate exclusion of the deuterocanon from a closed Jewish canon. As an argument from silence it cannot bear that weight — on three counts.

1. The corpus is a Pentateuch commentary; the silence is mostly an artifact of Philo's subject. Philo's extant works are, overwhelmingly, allegorical and expository commentary on the Torah. Of his roughly two thousand Old Testament quotations, the great mass are from the five books of Moses — which he typically cites not even by individual title but as a unit, “the Holy Scripture” or “the sacred word” — and only some fifty come from the entire rest of the Old Testament. A writer who quotes outside the Pentateuch only a few dozen times in a lifetime's output tells us almost nothing, by his silences, about the canonical standing of any non-Pentateuchal book. The “2,050 quotations” the proponents brandish is a Torah figure dressed up as a whole-canon one.⁵

2. The same silence “excludes” seven protocanonical books — a reductio the proponents' own logic cannot survive. Philo never quotes Ezekiel, never quotes Daniel, and never quotes any of the Five Rolls — Ruth, Esther, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, or Lamentations: seven books out of the thirty-nine, all of them in the Protestant Old Testament. If not-quoting a book showed Philo rejected it from the canon, he would have “rejected” seven books every side receives. The neutral verdict of the reference works is that his silence here is simply accidental — it “cannot be taken as a proof that they were not in his canon” — and what is granted for Ezekiel and Esther must be granted for Tobit and Sirach. This is the precise point even the proponents who flag it (Whitman) concede, and the heart of Michuta's reply.⁶

3. The silence may not even be total, and Philo renders no verdict in any case. Scholars have registered possible echoes of the Wisdom of Solomon and Sirach in Philo — unsurprising, since the Wisdom of Solomon was composed in his own Alexandria around his own lifetime — though the standard index keeps them precisely because they read as shared Hellenistic-Jewish milieu rather than demonstrable citation. So the most that can be said is that Philo does not quote these books as Scripture; it cannot be said he was ignorant of them or had ruled them out. And Philo, unlike Josephus, gives no enumeration and no count: the Therapeutae passage names categories, not a closed list, and Philo issues no judgment on the disputed books at all. To read a canon-closing verdict off a man who pronounces none is to supply the conclusion the evidence withholds — the same over-reading the umbrella argument makes about “the Jews” as a whole.⁷

Proponent overreach to flag. Geisler's “quoted the Old Testament prolifically from virtually every canonical book” is the precise overstatement the omissions rebut: Philo quotes from nothing like every canonical book — he never quotes seven of them, and outside the Pentateuch he quotes only a thin scattering. Strip the false “virtually every book” and the argument collapses into “a Torah-commentator did not quote books mostly outside the Torah,” which proves nothing about their canonicity. Bruce's pairing of Philo with Josephus as Jews who “recognized only the Canon of the Hebrew Bible” outruns Philo's evidence, which fixes no canon-extent at all; the firmer half of that pair is Josephus, weighed separately.⁸

Assessment

Weak — for the silence inference as stated. That Philo never quotes a deuterocanonical book as Scripture is true but nearly weightless as a canon-argument: it is an argument from silence drawn from a corpus that is some ninety-five percent Pentateuch commentary, and the very same silence falls on seven protocanonical books — Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Five Rolls — that no one supposes Philo rejected. What is granted for Esther and Ezekiel (accidental silence, no proof of exclusion) must be granted for Sirach and Wisdom; and Philo, who enumerates nothing and judges nothing, renders no verdict for the inference to rest on. The defensible residue is narrow and runs partly the other way: Philo is a genuine Alexandrian witness that no distinctively wider, deuterocanon-inclusive “Alexandrian canon” can be documented even in Alexandria — the negative point Sundberg established — and a small contribution to the broader Hebrew-measure reading the timeline traces from Jerome. But that is a far cry from “the Jews rejected the deuterocanon,” and the firmer Jewish plank for that reading is Josephus, not Philo's silence. Flag on the proponents Geisler's “virtually every canonical book,” which the omissions falsify.

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