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Responses to Miscellaneous Canon Questions and Objections
1) What is the canon? Is it an “authoritative list of books”? It’s better to think of the canon as the list of authoritative books. An official canon may itself be in some sense authoritative, but in that case it is an authoritative list of authoritative books. Even before any “authority” pronounces what the list…
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Tobit – One Reason to Reject its Alleged Canonicity
The book of Tobit is told from a first person perspective by a man called “Tobit.” The book begins: “The book of the words of Tobit, son of Tobiel, the son of Ananiel, the son of Aduel, the son of Gabael, of the seed of Asael, of the tribe of Nephthali …” (Tobit 1:1). One…
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Did Jesus Quote from the Apocrypha?
I introduced this short series in a previous segment (link). In brief, I’m responding to a Roman advocate who wrote under the handle or nick, “dgor.” In this segment, I’m responding to the issue of whether Jesus quoted from the Apocrypha. Up front, I should note that there are two reasons that this argument is…
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The Modern Roman Canon and the Book of Esdras A
The following was originally written by Sir Henry H. Howorth, as “The Modern Roman Canon and the Book of Esdras A,” The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume VII, pp. 343-54 (Oxford: 1906). I’m simply republishing this as a scholarly discussion of the issue of Septuagint Esdras 1 or “Esdras A” (Ἔσδρας Α) and the North…
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Canon Debate – Are Tobit, Baruch, and other Deuterocanonicals Inspired Scripture?
On August 12, 2010, I debated on the topic of the canon of Scripture with Mr. William Albrecht (Roman Catholic). The issue was whether the Apocrypha (what the Roman Catholics call the Deuterocanonicals) are inspired Scripture. I demonstrated that they could not be, since they make various mistakes, particularly focusing on Baruch and Tobit. Additionally,…
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>Canon Debate with William Albrecht
>Yesterday, Mr. William Albrecht (Roman Catholic) and I (Reformed) debated the topic of the Canon of Scripture, specifically the question of whether the so-called Deuterocanonical books and parts of books are Scripture (link to mp3). The most interesting part of the debate, as I believe Mr. Albrecht would agree, were the four cross-examination segments immediately…
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Jerome Regarding the Septuagint
I recently happened to stumble across this interesting translation of Jerome’s Prologue to Chronicles (link). Jerome makes a number of interesting comments about the Septuagint: 1) Jerome begins by noting that the Septuagint is not a pure translation: If the version of the Seventy translators is pure and has remained as it was rendered by…
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Psalm 151
Thomas Hartwell Horne, in his “Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scriptures,” remarks: The number of the canonical psalms is one hundred and fifty: but in the Septuagint version, as well as in the Syriac, Arabic, and Ethiopic translations, there is extant another, which is numbered CLI. Its subject is the…