Friday, January 27, 2023

Oskar Skarsaune, "Justin's Canon of Scripture"

  

Justin’s Canon of Scripture

 

As Justin himself makes plain, his Christian sources would quote as Scripture passages that Justin could not find in the biblical books to which he had access. Justin concludes that Jewish scribes must have cut these passages out when they copied the relevant biblical books. The most instructive passages concerning this are found in Dialogue 71-73 and 120.5. Here Justin accuses the Jewish scribes of having deleted one passage from the book of Ezra, two from Jeremiah, one from David (i.e., the Psalms), and one from Isaiah. He quotes or paraphrases the allegedly deleted passages, which have in common that they appear as prophecies of Christ’s passion, one of which comes from a well-known apocryphon, the Martyrdom of Isaiah. This makes it likely also that the other quoted passages come from scriptural pseudepigrapha, now lost. In other words, Justin’s Christian sources could sometimes quote and use scriptural material that was not directly quoted from Scripture, but rather came from midrashic embellishments of the scriptural stories, as exemplified by some of the pseudepigraphic works of the centuries around the beginning of our era. In the Testimonia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a reference to the Songs of Joshua is treated as Scripture on a par with a quote from canonical Joshua, and the same could well be the case in Justin’s sources. But Justin’s own concept of canon and Scripture is much stricter. He therefore cannot imagine anything else that these passages must have been part of the authentic text of the biblical books of Ezra, Jeremiah, David (the Psalms), and Isaiah. It is these books and none other that he has searched for these passages and not found them. He is completely unaware of the possibility that these passages could derive from other books than those represented in the scrolls of canonical Ezra, Jeremiah, Psalms, and Isaiah. Again we observe a characteristic difference between Justin and his Christian predecessors whose work is visible in his sources. In his debates with Jews, he was leaning more than he liked on the Jewish texts and much more than he knew of the Jewish canon. Since he would only base his argument on texts and complete books recognized as canonical and authentic by the Jews, he really had no choice.

 

This fact concerning Justin’s text and canon of Scripture is an early instance of a phenomenon to be observed all through the patristic period: when it comes to questions of text and canon, the ongoing dialogue with Judaism was perhaps the one most important factor in making the church not finally abandon the Jewish canon and text of the Bible. (Oskar Skarsaune, “Justin and His Bible,” in Justin Martyr and His Worlds, ed. Sara Parvis and Paul Foster [Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2007], 63-64)