Transcript — Fr. Stephen De Young on the formation of the Canon of Scripture
Auto-generated captions (timestamps link to the video). See the summary · watch.
00:00 I don’t I don’t know how well you can comport that with soloscriptor. I I’m not defending soloscriptor. I don’t have to defend soloscriptor. So that’s not a problem for me. Um but I I know I know a professor who got fired from Westminster Seminary for suggesting what I just said. Um so there are some proponents of solos scrips sura who think that is incompatible. But that’s the reality of the situation. That’s not just me putting forward an argument. Just the reality of the Bible as we have it. >> Luca asks, “Hello, how can Protestants claim solos scriptura yet reject books from the Septuagent, the scriptures of Christ and the early church?” Thank you. >> Okay. Well, I will answer that question, but first I have to kill an urban Uh, the Septuagent, the way you’re referring to it, does not exist.
00:55 It is not a thing. There is not a septuagent cannon. There is no such thing. [laughter] So, so this is the people who told you that are guilty of an oversimplification. They’re not lying to you. They’re not trying to mislead you. It’s just super oversimplified in a way that can be kind of misleading, right? If you just take that oversimplification and run with it without nuance, right? Uh so technically speaking the septuagent the work of the 70 that’s what septu septuagenta means the work of the 70 is a reference to a a translation of the that was made in Alexandria in 250 BC into Greek and the rest of the Hebrew Bible plus some other books that didn’t end up in the Hebrew Bible were translated into Greek.
01:51 over the course of subsequent centuries with a couple exceptions like the book of wisdom or wisdom of Solomon was written in Greek in the first century >> AD. [clears throat] >> Um and evidence of that is not just from scholarship. If you look at the earliest canon lists that include the book of wisdom, they list it in the New because they knew it was written in Greek and they knew it was written [laughter] in the first century. Um but so that’s over time. So there is not sort of this one book that you can point right that has a Greek cannon. The correct way to refer to that first layer of Greek translations is the old Greek which includes the Septuagent which is that first translation of the Torah and then the other original Greek translations.
02:45 There were in the first and second and third centuries attempts by three different Jewish folks, Aquillis, Amacus and Theodocian to re-ransate the Hebrew into Greek to make it less less Christian, right? Um with varying degrees of excess success. Aquilla is the most interesting one of those guys because he was Jewish and became a Christian and then went back to Judaism. And the reason he went back to Judaism was the Christians told him he couldn’t do astrology anymore. And so [laughter] he said, “Well, nuts to this.” And went back to being Jewish because they’d let him practice >> So [laughter] the constellations >> Yeah. And then did and then did this new do new Greek translation.
03:33 So the nuances of this get really messy. For example, when we read from the book of Daniel on Holy Saturday, the version of Greek Daniel that we read from is Theodocian’s re-ransation. So, we read a Greek translation of Daniel liturggically that was made in the 3rd century AD by a non-Christian Jew who was trying to make the text less Christian and clearly failed. But so this gets really complicated. Um the uh there is not a single old testament cannon in the orthodox church. Um what really happens in the early church is that the local Christians take the canon of the local Jews and make it their old testament.
04:31 That’s why in Ethiopia, right, the Christians in Ethiopia have this gigantic Old Testament cannon because the Ethiopian Jews have this gigantic cannon. >> Mhm. [clears throat] >> And so they just took it over. Same thing in Alexandria, right? And so what’s sometimes called the Septuagent cannon in this oversimplification or the Greek cannon is actually the Alexandrian Jewish cannon. Yeah, that’s that’s interesting that you bring that up because I was going to I didn’t know if I was going to have time to get to this. People get really mad at me for kind of trashing on the canon conundrum question in apologetics. And I’ve I’ve always picked it apart even when I was a Protestant. I I would love when people would ask me this question because it was the easiest one for me to uh dive into historically or even even in modernity and kind of pick apart and show how it doesn’t quite work.
05:24 Um, but the you’re you’re familiar with the canon conundrum. It’s like >> the what fallible list of infallible books. Is that the >> Yeah, they they try to say so they say, well, how do you how do you um how do you know what the canon is? If you hold a solar scripture or something, you’re going to have a fallible list of infallible books. Isn’t that a contradiction or whatever? We’ve got an infallible list of infallible books or something, you know, like then they would point back and it’s it’s obviously it’s a broader topic than that. It’ll get into church authority. >> There’s bunches of problems with that. >> Right. So, in in my in my assessment though, people get very mad at me because people will say, “Well, but the canon conundrum made me convert, so that means I’m dumb if if you don’t like that argument.” That’s not the case. If you like the argument, it’s, you know, that’s okay.
06:10 Uh, but I don’t think it’s a it’s a very good argument. I still don’t. um especially uh for you know orthodox use to use because if we were to look at the the councils in which the canon is is mentioned or defined or people that people try to look at like Trulo it’s multiple different lists right it’s different it’s different regional councils that are being affirmed there and then if you were to look at the somebody I believe it was Ubie brought up uh the confession of Dyius and it was well but it only says the mcabes it doesn’t tell you how many mcabes so where is it infallibly defined that’s kind like my UNO reverse that I would use. So, I don’t know. I don’t particularly think it’s a convincing argument. You might be able to use it. I think a better way. It’s it’s it’s even more it’s even worse for I think a Roman Catholic to use the argument because in the early church they held to a tiered distinction between the Deuteronomical books and the uh you know and the other books.
07:07 But they don’t they don’t do that in the modern Roman Catholic Church. In fact, and Trent says it’s been a Monday. >> It’s [laughter] because of Trent. Yeah. >> Yeah. And we and Orthodox never had a Trent. We don’t have >> right a whole Yeah. And I mean even in the 9th century St. Nichaporus of of um who was the patriarch of Constantinople is a saint because he’s a confessor suffered for the faith. He wrote a list of canonical and uh disputed and uh apocryphal books as of the 9th century AD. And he said there were still churches there that churches were divided on what we call the dudero cannon now. And there were still churches that didn’t accept >> in the east, the New Testament cannon.
07:59 >> That’s part of why it’s not read lurgically in the Orthodox church. um generally there’s a couple exceptions to that like there is with everything there’s always nuance but that’s for the most part it’s not read uh lurgically so the reality is Luther and nobody they didn’t take books out of the Bible in the west there were debates so the west we have to remember originally had two parts they had North Africa Latin North Africa and western Europe and they were divided on canon North Africa, Latin speaking North Africa followed the Alexandrian cannon. So St. Augustine for example, right? And Western Europe basically followed the Palestinian >> And you see that reflected like in St.
08:52 Jerome and this is why St. Jerome and St. Augustine got into it about this, [laughter] right? Um, and so throughout the medieval West there were debates. There were people in Rome, so we’re not taking the Orthodox out of the picture, just Rome, right? In the West on both sides of that issue with the Old Testament, all the way through history right up to the Reformation. And then, as with most things in the Reformation, when the Reformation happens, the Protestant reformers line up on one side of the issue, and the Roman Catholic Church retrenches on the other side of the issue. right? What previously was an in-house right, gets gets split like that. That happens on the Eucharist with the Lutheran. That happens like a whole bunch of issues. >> Yeah.
09:37 It’s it’s interesting even in the even in the Latin West. Um you see like Pope Gregory basically paring the opinion of Jerome on the on the cannon with the distinctions as well. >> Oftentime I don’t I don’t want to get too much in the weeds because people get really really upset when I talk about the cannon. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because that’s how they knew. That’s how they knew of my channel when I was a Protestant. So, it’s like all weeds on this, man. >> It’s giving them like World War II flashback, like Vietnam flashbacks. Uh me talking about the cannon. But, um yeah, I mean that that was a subject that I was really I was super interested in studying. But I I appreciate the comments on the Septuagent because that was something that I had said for quite some time. It’s not like there was one set corpus, right? Uh you know, so >> here you go. Question. Proverbs differ notably between the LXs and the MT with chapter variations, omissions, editions.
10:28 Which textual tradition is more reliable? How does textual criticism from the OT impact solos scriptura? so the the what what we have to realize is that the Old Testament I I prefer to talk Old Testament and New Testament one of the things people have from the west is this idea that there’s we got to find the one text, right? Like this one, this is it, right? Um, this is the real one and anything that varies from this is wrong and an error and that’s not really the way it was for like the apostles and the earliest fathers.
11:22 So for example in the Dead Sea Scrolls Jeremiah right radically different in Greek Jeremiah and uh Maseretic text Jeremiah um Greek text is about twothirds the length and this material they have in common is completely rearranged in in one or the other right um but we found Hebrew copies of both versions in the Dead Sea Scrolls side by died. So apparently they didn’t think one was real and one was fake, right? They thought they had two different collections of the prophecies of >> And if you watch like say St. Paul, we have a really good writing sample, right? Like St.
12:08 James, we have one epistle, but St. Paul, we have him writing a fair amount on a fair number of topics, right? And what you find him doing is he will quote the Greek version. He will do his own Greek translation from Hebrew. Uh he will do half and half. Uh he [laughter] will sort of whatever best suits his needs, right? And he will just he will throw in extra biblical St. Paul just casually drops them in all the time, right? Like first Corinthians, he says Israel had a rock that followed them in the wilderness and that rock was Christ. It’s like wait followed them Huh? Well, you start reading Midash, you find out that they were like, well, they get water from the rock at the beginning.
12:57 40 years later, they get water from the rock at the end. Where were they getting their water in the desert all that time? So, it was this tradition that the rock followed them right in the wilderness. St. Paul just refers to this casually, >> He’ll refer to stuff from the Aramaic Tarums just casually. He doesn’t serious say now this isn’t in scripture but traditionally the names of the the magicians of Pharaoh were Janice and Jambas right like he doesn’t make that distinction so we have an Old Testament tradition we have a New Testament tradition because we’ve got a variety of New Testament um that the Holy Spirit has preserved for us down to this day and we’ve got different translations and different versions and all of these things all of this richness is ours and part of our So we should feel free to access and draw from all of it, right?
13:51 We don’t have to pick one and say this is the real one, right? And everything else is set aside. So I think both Greek proverbs and Hebrew proverbs are both good, right? And we should read both and we should understand both and look at the differences in both between them because the differences may be edifying, right? and may we may find important important things there. Um when you when you learn Hebrew especially, you learn that uh the Hebrew Bible is full of word plays and and rhymes and word plays and words that can mean two different things that are used ambiguously on purpose, right? To suggest multiple different levels of meaning. Like they do that all the time.
14:38 And because the authors of the New are all Semitic language speakers first, they’re kind of thinking in Hebrew and Aramaic and writing in Greek. They try to do the same thing as much as they can in Greek. Right? So you get things like Christ’s conversation with Nicodemus. Is he saying you need to be born again or born from above? Yes. [laughter] Right. Yes. Anin can mean either one of those things, right? Um, so yeah, I I I I think that’s good. I don’t I don’t know how well you can comport that with Solos Scriptor. I I’m not defending Soloscripura. I don’t have to defend Solura, so that’s not a problem for me. Um, but I I know I know a professor who got fired from Westminster Seminary for suggesting what I just said.
15:30 Um, so there are some proponents of solos scripts sura who think that is incompatible, but that’s the reality of the situation. That’s not just me putting forward an argument. That’s just the reality of the Bible as we have it.