The key text in Against Apion is as follows:
Naturally, then, or rather necessarily— seeing that it is not open to
anyone to write of their own accord, nor is there any disagreement present in
what is written, but the prophets alone learned, by inspiration from God, what
had happened in the distant and most ancient past and recorded plainly in their
own time just as they occurred—among us there are not thousands of books in
disagreement and conflict with each other, but only twenty- two books,
containing the record of all time, which are rightly trusted. Five of these are
the books of Moses, which contain both the laws and the tradition from the
birth of humanity up to his death; this is a period of a little less than 3,000
years. From the death of Moses until Artaxerxes, king of the Persians after Xerxes,
the prophets after Moses wrote the history of what took place in their own times
in thirteen books; the remaining four books contain hymns to God and
instruction for people on life. From Artaxerxes up to our own time every event
has been recorded but this is not judged worthy of the same trust, since the
exact line of succession of the prophets did not continue.
(Against Apion 8: 37– 43).
Some scholars interpret Josephus’s twenty- two- book collection as
evidence that the canon was closed before the end of the first century CE and
that the number of books corresponds exactly to the Hebrew canon. John Barton
and Lee McDonald doubt this appraisal. McDonald notes the “obvious apologetic
tone” of the writing and concludes that Josephus was “ahead of his time in
terms of limiting the books of the Jewish sacred collection” (2007: 154, 157;
Barton 1986: 58– 62). Citing the freedom of the Jews at Qumran (the Dead Sea
Scrolls) to alter their sacred texts and the lack of a “clear parallel” to
Josephus’s position in this period, McDonald concludes there was “no
universally accepted closed biblical canon in the first century CE” (2007: 156–
157). Similarly, Barton concludes that Josephus is “out of step with his
contemporaries” (1986:59). On this reading, Josephus’s claim is anachronistic
and thus unreliable.
This assessment of the evidence is problematic. Yes, the work is
polemical and Josephus is prone to exaggeration, but if his ideas were his own
invention, it is odd that they correspond exactly to later information. Most
early church lists of authoritative books in the second to fourth centuries
confirm Josephus’s claims of a twenty- twobook canon with a few exceptions in
the fourth and fifth century CE (Ellis 1991; Stone 2013: 98). It is unlikely
that Josephus, by himself, could fabricate something later proven true,
especially since these lists give no indication of following Josephus’s
singular division of the books and thus likely developed their understanding of
the collections’ scope independently of Against Apion. (Timothy J.
Stone, “The Canonical Shape and Function of the Writings,” in The Oxford
Handbook of The Writings of the Hebrew Bible, ed. Donn F. Morgan [Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2019], 420-21)