The reference to “psalms” in Luke 24:44 may well be an early sign of
an emerging third part of the Hebrew scriptures, but the early church fathers
did not pick up on this and never equated “psalms” with the Writings in the HB
or even the other poetic and wisdom texts. Although in Luke 24:44 Jesus
explained to his disciples what was written about him in “the law of Moses, the
prophets, and the psalms,” the last designation is unlikely to be anything more
than the Psalms and it is best understood in conjunction with 24:27, where
Jesus explains from the scriptures to the disciples on the road to Emmaus the
same thing “beginning with Moses and all the prophets.” The “psalms” of
24:44 is obviously included in “all the prophets” in 24:27. Nevertheless, when
“psalms” (or “David”) is listed in ancient collections of scriptures, it is
only a reference to psalms and not all of the Writings. Interestingly, when
Judas Maccabaeus encouraged his troops to go to battle by “encouraging them
from the law and the prophets . . .” (2 Macc 15:9), Barr observes that he would
hardly have ignored Ps 68:1 had the Writings been a distinct collection at that
time (Barr 1983: 54– 55).
No evidence suggests that there was a widely understood tripartite
canon of scriptures circulating in the first century CE. The most common
designation for the Jewish scriptures then and even later was “law and the
prophets” (see Lim 2013: 93– 137, 156– 165; and McDonald 2017: 160–295). While
a widely recognized bipartite collection of Jewish Scriptures existed at the
end of the first century CE, its scope was still fluid and not yet tripartite. (Lee
Martin McDonald, “The Reception of the Writings of their Place in the Biblical
Canon,” in The Oxford Handbook of The Writings of the Hebrew Bible, ed.
Donn F. Morgan [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019], 407)