A Brand New Argument for the Traditional Jewish Old Testament Canon
Steve Christie and myself would like this article to lay out a brand new argument for the smaller, traditional Jewish canon of the New Testament. We are temporarily calling this argument: the
Summary
Based on the work of Dr. Michael Rydelnik in his book "the Messianic Hope", we follow his summarization of scholarship on the structure of the Jewish canon. The contention is that the ordering of the Jewish canon has Messianic intent. The order of the books is meant to point to the coming Messiah.
The insight Steve & myself had was that this structure, being intentional, means it had to be thought out with a specific set of books. Which means the Jewish canon could not have been in flux. The books fit together like pieces of a puzzle to create a picture of the Messiah. You can't just add extra pieces and have this intentionality of a Messianic structure to the canon.
A purposeful structuring of the Old Testament canon for any reason, let alone to point to the Messiah, doesn't leave room for the Apocryphal books.
The Messianic Structure of the Jewish Canon
According to Rydelnik, "it is virtually without dispute that this threefold division was fixed sometime during the intertestamental period, although it is unknown who exactly was responsible for it. "
In the threefold division:
- The Law covers creation to the death of Moses.
- The Prophets cover the Conquest to the Exile.
- The Writings cover the Exile to the Return.
Non-narrative books in the Prophets and the Writings are not in chronological order but in order of descending size except for Lamentations & Song of Songs, showing intentionality in the construction of the ordering.
The Messianic nature of the canonical redaction can be seen in two "canonical seams." The first seam unites the Law and the Prophets. The second stream unites the Prophets and Writings.
The last paragraph of the Torah (Dt 34:9-12) and the first in the Prophets (Joshua 1:1-9) have a pattern that is reproduced in the last paragraph of Prophets (Mal 3:22-24) and the first of the Writings (Psalm 1).
Dt 34:9-12 is essentially eschatological and messianic. The prophet like Moses has not come and to look for him.
Immediately after this, Joshua 1:1-9 calls upon Joshua to exercise a new form of leadership, that of the wise scholar: "Keep this Book of the Law always on your lips; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it."
The book shows Joshua as the ideal wise man who models godly behavior until the Messiah comes.
The seam between the Prophets and the Writings is similar.
Remember the law of my servant Moses, the statutes and rules that I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel.
Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the LORD comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their faithers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.
Elijah is to come to prepare for the arrival of a prophet like Moses.
Immediately after that section, the Tanakh goes to Psalm 1, which presents the ideal wise man who meditates day and night on the Torah. The parallels between the two seems should be obvious now as an intentional redaction.
The two books of Chronicles retell the history of the Davidic dynasty. But they were not written merely to glorify the past. Rather, they were composed to remind the returning exiles of the promise God had made to David (1 Chronicles 17) and cause them to look with hope and faith for a coming messianic king. As Salihamer indicates, the conclusion of the book contains the call of the Persian king Cyrus to rebuild the temple. By focusing on the and the messianic king who would rebuild it, the last words of the book (lit. "let him go up") "become a call for the return of the Messiah ... thus provid[ing] a fitting bridge to the coming bridge of the Messiah in the New Testament." What has just been discussed is the messianic theme of the Writings. But this entire section has maintained that the point of the whole Tanak is to reveal the Messiah, from the promise of the a seed who will crush the serpent (Gen. 3:15) to the call for the messianic king to rebuild the holy temple (2 Chr 36:23). From the beginning to the end, from Genesis to 2 Chronicles, the entire Hebrew Bible is messianic.
Conclusion:
The messianic nature is throughout the Old Testament which the entirety of Rydelnik's "the Messianic Hope" addresses, but the structure of the canon is not an accident but was meant to communicate the messianic nature of Scripture as well. Since the structure of the canon was intelligently laid out, that means the books in them was not in flux. The Jewish canon was known and it was meant to communicate the Messiah, and this means the Apocryphal books wasn't part of the canon.