More From F.F. Bruce on the Canon and Tradition

By: Jay Dyer

     A certain individual has said that I purposefully misrepresented F.F. Bruce in some of my citations from his work, The Canon of Scripture.  In no way did I misquote Bruce by leaving out a section, since it’s obvious that Bruce would not accept the canonicity of the Book of Wisdom.  Of course Bruce wouldn’t think Paul was assuming that Wisdom was canonical, because he was an evangelical scholar.  Everyone who knows anything about this topic knows that obviously Bruce wasn’t arguing that it was canonical, and obviously I wasn’t saying that it was canonical because "Paul probably had it in mind."  If I was lying in my citation, it was a ridiculous lie. 

    

     I was still responding to the erroneous idea that the NT has no quotation or reference to the Deuterocanon, as some affirm.  In fact, it does: go get your Greek New Testament and look at the references.  Get MacDonald’s book, and read the appendix.  But does this automatically make the Deuterocanon canonical?  No, because even non-canonical texts are cited in the New Testament, as Bruce admits below.  Then what is the point?  Revelation can also come through non-canonical tradition!  My point is to try to get the Protestant to see this.  If he does, he cannot hold that Scripture is the only rule of faith and norm.  This tradition can, of course, eventually be written down, as in the case of the Book of Enoch, or remain oral, as is the apparent case of Jannes and Jambres being the names of Pharoah’s magicians (2 Tim. 3:8).

So what does Bruce say in the section I supposedly lied about?  He wrote:

“The Septuagint in the Church

     The scriptures known to Jesus and his disciples were no doubt the scrolls of the Hebrew bible—the law, the prophets and Writings—kept in synagogues for use during regular services possibly at other times.  When Jesus was about to read the second lesson in the Nazareth synagogue on the first Sabbath that he visited his home town after the beginning of his public ministry, and ‘there was given to him a book of the prophet Isaiah’ (Lk. 4:17), it was most probably a Hebrew scroll that he received.  But even in Palestine, and not least in Jerusalem itself, there were many Greek-speaking Jews, Hellenists, and there were synagogues where they might go to hear the scriptures read and recited in Greek.  Such was the synagogue of the Freedmen where Stephen held debate in Jerusalem (Acts 6:9).

     However much the wording of Stephen’s defense in Acts 7 may owe to the narrator, the consistency with which its biblical quotations and allusions are based on the Septuagint is true to life.  Since Stephen was a Hellenist, the Septuagint was naturally was the edition of the scriptures which he would naturally use….

     So thoroughly did the Christians appropriate the Septuagint as their version of the Scriptures that the Jews became increasingly disenchanted with it.   The day came in which one Rabbi compared “the accursed day on which the seventy wrote the law in Greek for the king to the day on which Israel made the golden calf…”

     On the other side of the frontier which divides the books of the Hebrew Bible from the ‘Septuagintal plus’, the book of Wisdom was possibly in Paul’s mind when he dictated the first two chapters of Romans, but that would not give it scriptural status: if he does allude to it, he probably contradicts it here and there.  The writer to the Hebrews probably had the martyrologies of 2 Maccabees 6:18-7:41 or 4 Maccabees 5:3-18:24 in view when he spoke of the tortures and other hardships which some endured through faith (Heb. 11:35b-38); and when he says this in the same context that some were sawn in two he may naturally allude to a document which described how Isaiah was sawn so treated.

     The Nestle-Aland edition of the Greek New Testament (1979) has an index of Old Testament texts cited or alluded to in the New Testament, followed by an appendix of allusions not only to the ‘Septuagintal plus’, but also to several other works not included in the Septuagint.  Many of these last are resemblances rather than conscious allusions; only one is a straight quotation explicitly from ‘Enoch in the seventh generation from Adam’ in Jude 14; this comes recognizably from the apocalyptic book of Enoch (1 Enoch 1:9).  Earlier in Jude’s letter the account of Michael’s dispute with the devil over the body of Moses may refer to a work called the Assumption of Moses or Ascension of Moses, but, if so, the part of the work containing this incident has been lost.

     There are, however, several quotations in the New Testament which are introduced as though they were taken from holy scripture, but their source can no longer be identified. …“ (pgs. 48-52)

Bruce then lists Matt. 2:23, John 7:38, 1 Cor. 2:9, Eph. 5:14, 2 Tim. 3:8, and James 4:5 as examples where we have no certain canonical Old Testament citation, and probably come from tradition.

    Again, what was my point in all this?  That a citation makes something canonical?  No, and for the hundredth time, no.  That all these books are reliable?  No.  That Bruce teaches that the Deuterocanon is Scripture?  Of course not.  The point is that there is apostolic Tradition that is binding: that’s what these citations demonstrate.  The Bible itself testifies to this reality.  Am I saying Bruce is always right? No, he was a heretic, and in the very book I’ve been citing he argues that Judaic hermeneutics are more faithful than typological exegesis (pg. 65-67).  But these quotations are a powerful testimony to the fact that Protestant scholars admit the very things we have been saying.  That’s the point.

Comments

[Chris]

Triablogue are being obtuse again, as is their custom.

[Jay Dyer]

Tell me about it. They are grown men, but they act like a high school debate team.

[CB]

I noticed how Triablogue suddenly cut off debate, banning users like Orthodox, and deposting comments advers to their "position". I also noticed how Brisby deposted my comments when they originally appeared in comment form, and then suddenly dissapeared when I reposted them in question form.

They behaved like EXCREMENT and should be flushed like EXCREMENT!

-cb