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To: Campion
The closest thing to such a list was the table of contents of the Septuagint...which included the deuterocanon.

And so, per usual, the specious appeal to the Septuagint is invoked, which was already exposed as such in post 32 . Your premise requires that the LXX of the first century contained the Deuteros, which the evidence does not substantiate (manuscripts of anything like the capacity of Codex Alexandrinus were not used in the first centuries), and that the contents were (even close to) uniform in the extant mss that do contain them, which is hardly the case.

And in case you want to appeal to the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran,:

these included not only the community's Bible (the Old Testament) but their library, with fragments of hundreds of books. Among these were some Old Testament Apocryphal books. The fact that no commentaries were found for an Apocryphal book, and only canonical books were found in the special parchment and script indicates that the Apocryphal books were not viewed as canonical by the Qumran community. — The Apocrypha - Part Two Dr. Norman Geisler http://www.jashow.org/Articles/_PDFArchives/theological-dictionary/TD1W0602.pd

44 posted on 10/07/2019 7:33:31 AM PDT by daniel1212 ( Trust the risen Lord Jesus to save you as a damned and destitute sinner + be baptized + follow Him)
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To: daniel1212
For the record, here is more conformation of what I said earlier if needed.

F. F. Bruce states that no evidence has been presented that the Jews (neither Hebrew nor Greek speaking) ever accepted a wider canon than the twenty-two books of the Hebrew Old Testament. He argues that when the Christian community took over the Greek Old Testament, they added the Apocrypha to it and "gave some measure of scriptural status to them also."2

Gleason Archer notes that other Jewish translations of the Old Testament did not include the apocryphal books. The Targums, the Aramaic translation of the Old Testament, did not include them; neither did the earliest versions of the Syriac translation, called the Peshitta...

Even the respected Greek Jewish scholar Philo of Alexandria never quotes from the Apocrypha. One would think that if the Greek Jews had accepted the additional books, they would have used them as part of the Canon...

It is also significant that Aquila's Greek version of the Old Testament, made about A.D. 128 and adopted by the Alexandrian Jews, did not include the Apocrypha.

Advocates of the Apocrypha argue that it does not matter if the Jews ever accepted the extra books because they rejected Jesus as well. They contend that the only important opinion is that of the early church. But even the Christian era copies of the Greek Septuagint differ in their selection of which apocryphal books to include. The three oldest complete copies of the Greek Old Testament that we have include different additional books. (Evidence, Answers, and Christian Faith: Probing the Headlines by Jimmy Williams and Kerby Anderson, p. 120 ; Kregel Publications. October 10, 2002)

The original grounds for the Alexandrian canon hypothesis were the comprehensive manuscripts of the Septuagint. The Septuagint is a pre-Christian Jewish translation, and the larger manuscripts of it include various of the Apocrypha. Grabe's edition of the Septuagint, where the theory was first propounded, was based upon the fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus.

However, as we now know, manuscripts of anything like the capacity of Codex Alexandrinus were not used in the first centuries of the Christian era," and since, in the second century C.E., the Jews seem largely to have discarded the Septuagint in favour of revisions or translations more usable in their controversy with the church (notably Aquila's translation), there can be no real doubt that the comprehensive codices of the Septuagint, which start appearing in the fourth century, are all of Christian origin.

An indication of this is that in many Septuagint manuscripts the Psalms are followed by a collection of Odes or liturgical canticles, including Christian ones from the NT. Also, the order of the books in the great fourth and fifth-century Septuagint codices is Christian, not adhering to the three divisions of the Hebrew canon; nor is there agreement between the codices which of the Apocrypha to include. Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Alex-andrinus all include Tobit, Judith, Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus, and integrate them into the body of the or rather than appending them at the end; but Codex Vaticanus, unlike the other two, totally excludes the Books of Maccabees.

Moreover, all three codices, according to Kenyon, were produced in Egypt," yet the contemporary Christian lists of the biblical books drawn up in Egypt by Athanasius and (very likely) pseudo-Athanasius are much more critical, ex-cluding all apocryphal books from the canon, and putting them in a separate appendix. Mulder, M. J. (1988). (Mikra: text, translation, reading, and interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in ancient Judaism and early Christianity. Phil.: Van Gorcum. p. 81 )

In all likelihood Josephus' twenty-two-book canon was the Pharisaic canon, but it is to be doubted that it was also the canon of all Jews in the way that he has intended. (Timothy H. Lim: The Formation of the Jewish Canon; Yale University Press, Oct 22, 2013. P. 49)

By the first century, it is clear that the Pharisees held to the twenty-two or twenty-four book canon, and it was this canon that eventually became the canon of Rabbinic Judaism because the majority of those who founded the Jewish faith after the destruction of Jerusalem were Pharisees. The Jewish canon was not directed from above but developed from the "bottom-up." (Timothy H. Lim, University of Edinburgh: Understanding the Emergence of the Jewish Canon, ANCIENT JEW REVIEW, December 2, 2015)

In 1873, Philotheos Bryennios was working in the library of the Jerusalem Monastery of the Most Holy Sepulchre in the city of Constantinople when he discovered a manuscript (copied in 1056) containing the previously lost Didache, the two epistles of Clement, and several other compositions. Among these other compositions was a list of the OT books that has become known as the Bryennios List (BO.' The list of biblical books filled about twelve lines in the manuscript on fol. 76a, appearing between 2 Clement and the Didache itself. Bryennios published the contents of the manuscript in 1883, simply tran-scribing the list of biblical books. The surprising rediscovery of the Didache overshadowed the other works in the manuscript, so that it was not until 1950 that a full-scale analysis of this list was published. Jean-Paul Audet's seminal study brought the list to the attention of scholars and spawned further analysis.

Old Testament canon: This canon list contains a similar catalogue of books to the Jewish and Protestant canons in twenty-seven books. The identification of Esdras A and Esdras B is an open question, as well as whether Lamentations, Baruch, and the Epistle or a combination of these works are subsumed under the title of 'Jeremiah: This list does not contain any of the deuterocanonical books.

If the usual dating of BL can be accepted, then we have an early-second-century Jewish list of books received among Christians, comprising the twenty-seven books of the Old Testament. The contents of the list cohere closely with the other canonical lists preserved from the patristic era, though the order of books diverges significantly from other known examples, perhaps indicating continuing uncertainty on that matter.

The ordering of the books in BL provides more evidence for its date. The order is unique among the lists: Genesis Exodus Leviticus Joshua Deuteronomy Numbers Ruth Job Judges Psalter 1 Kingdoms (= I Samuel) 2 Kingdoms (= 2 Samuel) 3 Kingdoms (= I Kings) 4 Kingdoms (= 2 Kings) 1 Paralipomena (= I Chronicles) 2 Paralipomena (= 2 Chronicles) Proverbs Ecclesiastes (= Qoheleth) Song of Songs Jeremiah (+ Lamentations? + Baruch? + Epistle?) The Twelve Prophets Isaiah Ezekiel Daniel Esdras A Esdras B Esther (Edmon L. Gallagher, John D. Meade. The Biblical Canon Lists from Early Christianity: Texts and Analysis, Oxford University Press; 2018, pp. 70,75,78

Note that there is scope for considerable confusion with references to Esdras Αʹ (English title: 1 Esdras) and Esdras Β. The writers here believe they may refer to Ezra–Nehemiah or Esdras 1 and Esdras 2. Scholars believe the latter is Ezra–Nehemiah while 1 Esdras also First Esdras, Greek Esdras, Greek Ezra, or 3 Esdras, is an ancient Greek version of the biblical Book of Ezra in use among the early church, and many modern Christians with varying degrees of canonicity...As part of the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament, it is now regarded as canonical in the churches of the East, but apocryphal in the West; either presented in a separate section, or excluded altogether.

However,

Following the example of the Paris Vulgate Bible editions of the 13th century, and in what later became the usage of the Clementine Vulgate and the Anglican Articles of Religion, '1 Esdras' is applied consistently in late medieval bibles to the book corresponding to the modern Book of Ezra; while the modern Book of Nehemiah corresponds to '2 Esdras'. 1 Esdras here, is in the Clementine Vulgate called 3 Esdras. The 'Apocalypse of Ezra', an additional work associated with the name Ezra, is denoted '4 Esdras' in the Paris Bibles, the Clementine Vulgate and the Articles of Religion, but called '2 Esdras' in the King James Version and in most modern English bibles, as here. 1 Esdras continues to be accepted as canonical by Eastern Orthodoxy and the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, with 2 Esdras varying in canonicity between particular denominations within the Eastern churches.[3]

Overwhelmingly, citations in early Christian writings claimed from the scriptural 'Book of Ezra'(without any qualification) are taken from 1 Esdras, and never from the 'Ezra' sections of Ezra–Nehemiah (Septuagint 'Esdras B') ; the majority of early citations being taken from the 1 Esdras section containing the 'Tale of the Three Guardsmen', which is interpreted as Christological prophecy. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_Esdras

127 posted on 10/09/2019 4:58:37 PM PDT by daniel1212 ( Trust the risen Lord Jesus to save you as a damned and destitute sinner + be baptized + follow Him)
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