Commenting on Josephus, Contra Apion, 1.37-44:
Josephus does not merely express
this grouping of texts to be the Scriptures according to his opinion or to be
the canon as he received it from within his own community. Rather, he makes the
claim that every single Jewish individual on earth, from birth, recognizes
these and only these books. He further states that every one of those
individuals obeys these Scriptures and is willing to die rather than violate a
single command.
On its face, Josephus uses rather
extreme hyperbole. Newborn infants have no opinion on the relative authority of
various religious texts. Even a casual reading of the books that Josephus
endorses reveals that the vast majority of Jewish people paid little attention
to any of the commands of the Torah, let alone demonstrated a willingness to
die for them. While Jewish martyrs existed, particularly in the Maccabean
period as described in the books that Josephus here seems to marginalize, they
were certainly never the majority any more than one can generalize from the
Christian martyrs just how committed the majority of Christians were. Josephus
also denies the editorial activity within the various texts that make up the
Hebrew Bible, despite its being readily apparent even in translation.
Josephus was a member of the
party of the Pharisees. His view on which Scriptures were authoritative within
Jewish communities reflects this perspective, and the Pharisees would have
agreed with him. But, even within Palestinian Judaism, not everyone was a
Pharisee. Other religious parties existed in the first century within
Palestine, and these parties had different collections of Scriptures that
exercised authority within their communities. This is even more true of Jewish
communities scattered across Egypt, Ethiopia, Mesopotamia, and the Roman world,
reaching as far as Spain in that era. Josephus does not report objective fact
but rather asserts that he and his fellows are right, over against competing
parties. He goes a step further by asserting that everyone really knows that he
is right, even if he or she won’t admit it.
This proclamation by Josephus,
then, while an important early witness to the understanding of one slice of
Second Temple Judaism, is a flimsy basis on which to argue for the practice of
the Christian Church in contemporary society. It is especially weak given that
it conflicts with two millennia of Christian experience across the Christian
world. Among early Christians, each community received a set of authoritative
texts as its Old Testament based on the texts that held authority in the
preceding Jewish communities. Christian communities in Palestine received the
canon of Palestinian Judaism; those in Egypt, Alexandrian Judaism; those in
Ethiopia, Ethiopian Judaism.(Stephen De Young, The Whole Counsel of God: An
Introduction to Your Bible [Chesterton, Ind.: Ancient Faith Publishing,
2022], page 37 of 116, Kindle ed.)
