Jamnia according to Ryle didn't set canon, it appears to merely have affirmed it. And it appears, according to Ryle, that the point of Jamnia was to put an end to disputes over what had become canon. The Apocryphals had been rejected before that point and remained so. The LXX isn't even mentioned at Jamnia. So, how do you remove works from a canon of books by rewriting into Hebrew and sealing it at Jamnia if it isn't even discussed? Much less when the experts say canon was not set at Jamnia but was rather set before that and apparently didn't include the apocryphals.
Other sources state flatly that the apocryphals were not originally part of the LXX and were added later.. further adding that when the vulgate was written, it was known they were not canon and thusly the scribe involved refused to include them as canon as a result. If he knew they weren't canon and others are saying they weren't canon, including the jews, I don't know where your authority comes from on this point. It sure isn't part of history.
That said, my original summary remains. The apocryphals were not in their canon of scripture. That is what the experts are saying. They were added to the LXX at a later date, known to be non-canonical, protested as such by Jerome for all history to record, and thusly were not included at the time of Christ. Saying the LXX existed in the first century when the apocryphals were only added to it later is suspect and misleading. And that is the controversy of the LXX. I will assume you were ignorant of this as I'd hate to think you were openly trying to mistate the record.
What appears to be the case, if I may be so bold, is that someone decided to alter the Judaic canon and didn't have the authority to do so; but, needed someone of well known name to lend Judaic creedance to a canon that heretofore had not existed. Putting the eminent name of Jerome on it might by it credibility even if he included the texts knowing them to be noncanonical and under protest. Whatever the case, it would appear that the attempt has failed and history decided the point properly.
I will be happy to run that by you again.
BTW, did your stepdad, or you, go to yeshiva?
Most certainly the Jews have their opinion on the subject, and their opinion is that the Hebrew Canon is the Bible.
And Jesus was not the Son of God.
They made the decisions that effectively "closed" the canon of Hebrew scripture at the time of the writing of the Mishna, circa 90-100 AD, at Jamnia and probably elsewhere.
They rejected a number of books from the Septuagint, including the Maccabbees, Judith, Ecclesiasticus and Wisdom, among others, even though by doing so they eliminated the only Scriptural basis for Channukka. Of course they also rejected everything about Christianity, in totum, so why we should give particular authority to post-Christian Jews on the proper Biblical Canon is something of a mystery to me.
Most certainly the Scripture of the time of the Apostles and Jesus included various texts of the Septuagint which were rejected from the Jamnian Canon, but which Christians always used. Perhaps we should go through all of the various New Testament references and cites to the Septuagint books that the Jews excluded from their canon, but that the Christians included in theirs.
Certainly we can pull out the records of council after council of the early Church in which they were wrestling with both the Old and New Testament Canons, and see how various books fared in the opinion of the early Christians.
Been there, done that.
If we do go through the drill, we will discover about 100 references, direct or indirect, in the Christian Testament to Septuagint Canon books that do not appear in the Hebrew Canon. We'll also find that every Council that worked on canonical matters included some of those excluded books in the Old Testament Canon, and excluded some New Testament books. With the Council of Rome in 382 AD we have the first regional council of the Church that produced a list that is identical to the current canon in the Old and New Testaments.
The tale of what was in or out of the Scriptural Canon was an early Christian struggle, with most of the energy focused on the New Testament. There was some dissension over books of the Old Testament as well, but the real heart of the struggle over that was among the Jews, not the Christians. They finally closed their canon about 60 years after the death of Jesus, and a generation after the destruction of the Temple and the end of the High Priesthood.
Jews since then, and especially Jews of today - messianic or otherwise - live in a different religion from the Judaism of the time of Jesus. Today's Judaism is rabbinnical, not templar. And as you know from your father, the primary rabbinnical source material for the Law lies in Maimonedes and the Talmudic dissertations, and not in the Bible itself. Jews of old who insisted on what Protestants call "Sola Scriptura" are derisively referred to as "Karaites". If you didn't attend yeshiva, ask your father about all of this.
It is strange, that modern Christians should rely upon post-apostolic rabbinnical Jews as the final authority in establishing the canon of Christian Scripture, and thereby ignore all of the references of the apostles and Jesus to a different, older Jewish set of Scriptures, the Septuagint. What makes this doubly strange is that, quite unlike Sola Scripturalist Protestants, Jews do not, and never did (other than the Karaites) rely on the entirety of the Old Testament, or the Bible at all, as the final authority in anything. Nor did, or do, Jews believe that every book of the Bible is of equal authority. The Torah stands above everything else. But other than the Karaites, no serious Judaism has ever existed in which a man could pick up the Torah and say "The law is thus and so."
When the Temple was up, there was the Torah, but the final authority on what the Torah MEANT was most certainly not the individual Jew playing Sola Scriptura. It was, rather, the High Priest and Sandhedrin. And since the destruction of the Temple, Judaism has not become Sola Scripturalist. Rather, what The Law is, is what the learned rabbis decide. That is why it is the Talmud that has the authority. Because the Jews know that you cannot read the Torah and understand it. For that, you must consult the rabbis. And the rabbis are extensively trained in the Talmud.
Your father certainly knows all of this.
Now, perhaps he has rejected this all in favor of Protestant Christianity. Certainly that is a choice. Perhaps he is even a minister, a "rabbi" of the Christians, so to speak. All of that is well and good and commendable.
However, being a Jew does not impart any special knowledge about what happened in the First Century and before, whether the texts were Jewish or not. Being a yeshiva-trained Jew means that one has been taught a particular polemic position on the subject, and that position was the anti-Christian position back in the First Century. There is a good reason for Christians to reject the decision of the Jews from the "Council"(s) of Jamnia: Christian pressures and uses of the books from the Septuagint canon that the Jews explicitly REJECTED at Jamnia were a strong REASON for the Councils and the separate Hebrew Canon in the first place. By that point, Christianity was a burgeoning, competing Jewish religion, and the Christians were using Septuagint texts such as the Maccabbees to bash the Pharisaic (and earlier, the Sadducee) position over the head on matters of doctrine. What better way to shore up the anti-Christian polemic than to exclude the offending books from the Hebrew Bible?
That's what happened.
The reason it is important for us is that your starting position is "Scripture Alone". I don't see anything remotely like that (emphasis on the word ALONE) in the Scriptures, nor do the Scriptures establish the canon of Scripture. So, in order to start using the authority you want to rely upon, we have to establish the precise boundaries of what that authority IS.
I find it worrying that you choose to go with the Jews' opinion on this, formed a generation after the Temple went down and two generations after Christ lived, and in doing so adopt THEIR position, which explicitly rejected the canonicity of so many books Jesus, the Apostles and the Christians relied upon.
Now, I know why Martin Luther did that: in Maccabbees, in particular, there are theological concepts that rather dramatically shore up the traditional Christian (which is to say Catholic/Orthodox) position over against what Luther was trying to do.
But this looks to me like a frank, bold amendment of the Bible to remove theologically offensive (to him!) texts. He tried to do the same thing to the New Testament, wanting to eliminate the Epistle of James from the Canon.
I see no authority for Luther to have done any of that, and relying on the fact that the Jews did the same thing two generations after Jesus, to get rid of books that the Christians used to good effect against those very Jews, seems to bolster the case that this amendment of the Canon was a move undertaken without authority.
I don't mind playing Scripture Alone, but to do it, I must insist on the use of the complete Scriptures. If you are going to take things out of the canon, like the Jews did at Jamnia, I want to see the basis of authority for that amendment. Otherwise it undermines your whole enterprise.
You can't say "Scripture Alone", but then tailor what "Scripture" is to fit the philosophical result you wish to achieve. Luther did that, and his followers went along. But on what AUTHORITY? That of the anti-Christian rabbis of Jamnia? What AUTHORITY had THEY to toss out Scriptures that Jesus and the Apostles referred to?
None that I can concern.
Prejudice and desire to acheive a theological result does not authority make.
I anticipate that the next move will be a categorical rejection that Jesus and the Apostles and early Christians referred extensively to the Septuagint books excluded by the Jews at Jamnia (which is why the Jews excluded them). And then I'll have to start trotting out the cites and references. Which will be tiring but perhaps worthwhile.
Scripture doesn't say Scripture ALONE (emphasis on the ALONE part) is the basis of authority, and it doesn't refer to what we call the New Testament as "Scripture" at all ("Scripture" in the New Testament means the Old Testament, the New Testament not existing yet when the words were written). But since certainly the Scriptures are the word of God, and good, I don't mind playing a bit of Sola Scriptura.
But to do it, we have to agree on what "Scripture" is. I am unwilling to use a Canon of Scripture abridged by the Jews of the early Christian era in order to get rid of the Jewish books most persuasive for the Christian argument, unless there is a very strong reason for doing so. I have never heard one.
The strongest argument for the longer Christian canon is that its books were in wide use in Jesus' day, and he and the apostles cite to them so much.
If we could get to a common canon of Scripture, we would have a basis for taking the next step. But as it is, we are asserting competing authorities and cannot get past "Go".