Transcript

Protestants and Catholics have the same New Testament, but they disagree about the contents of the Old Testament.

Protestant Old Testaments have 39 books, whereas Catholics have 46, with the inclusion of Tobit, Judith, Sirach, Baruch, Wisdom, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and portions of Daniel and Esther.

But what kind of Old Testament did the first Christians have?

It's not accurate to say Christians unanimously agreed about these books of the Old Testament until Martin Luther and other Protestant reformers tried to move these Catholic books from the Old Testament from the Bible to create their own Protestant Bibles.

There was a dispute among some Christians in the early church because rabbinic Jews rejected these books' scriptural status.

The fact that they were controversial is why in 1566, a Jewish convert to Catholicism named Sixtus of Sienna created a three-tiered classification system for the books of the Old Testament.

At the top was the protocanon, the 39 books of the Old Testament that Catholics and Protestants agree are the inspired word of God.

At the bottom were the apocrypha, works that both Catholics and Protestants did not regard as the inspired word of God, books like the Book of Enoch.

But between the protocanon and the apocrypha were a group of books Catholics believed to be inspired, but Protestants did not.

Sixtus called these the deuterocanonical books, or the second canon, although many Protestants would say they should just be treated as apocrypha, the hidden books.

Did the first Christians think the deuterocanonical books were scripture?

And by first Christians, I mean those who lived before the Council of Nicaea in AD 325.

One mistake Protestants make when answering this question is to just report canonical Old Testament lists of books that were created throughout church history and say that these canonical lists show what early Christians believed about the Old Testament canon.

But this ignores another important set of data: How did those first Christians use these deuterocanonical books in their own writings?

Most of those Christians don't give us a canonical list of scripture, but we can see which books they thought were scripture based on whether they avoided those books or cited them in a particular way, and we can see how they did this with several of the deuterocanonical books of scripture.

The fathers of the first two centuries before Saint Irenaeus rarely cited the New Testament as scripture.

Their primary source of apostolic authority was not apostolic writings.

It was apostolic succession in the form of following authentic bishops.

They were much more likely to cite from the Old Testament if they wanted to make a scriptural point, which for them also included the deuterocanonical books of scripture.

First century Clement of Rome used the Book of Wisdom to confirm God's sovereignty, and he said Judith was on par with Esther as having grace from God.

In the second century, Athenagoras said that Baruch represented the writings of a prophet and used his writings to confirm monotheism.

Irenaeus likewise said Baruch contained a prophecy of the incarnation, and Irenaeus cites Tobit with other New Testament authors.

Hippolytus said the Book of Wisdom contains the mysteries of Christ.

In the third century, Clement of Alexandria called Sirach scripture, used the Book of Wisdom to prove martyrdom leads to sanctification, and said 2 Maccabees fulfilled prophecy.

Cyprian said Wisdom and Sirach were scripture and cited Sirach and Tobit to defend almsgiving and the role of angels in prayer.