Bible Canon

The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Canon of Scripture

In today’s Bible History Daily from the Biblical Archaeological Society there is an interesting review of a lecture by Sidnie White Crawford about the Dead Sea Scrolls. The article refers to the roughly 515 manuscripts found at Qumran and Masada and says: “Only one quarter of the religious texts found at Qumran are included in the current Hebrew Bible. Ancient Jews did not see the Bible as a single book; they viewed it as a collection, and the choice to preserve a wider range of religious literature suggests that the Qumran community considered a larger number of books to be sacred.”

The writers of the New Testament also cite or allude to several other books which are not included in our Bible, including: Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach (or Wisdom of Ben Sira), 1 Enoch, 1 – 4 Maccabees, Psalms of Solomon, Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, Tobit, Susanna, Judith, and Bel and the Dragon. Lee McDonald (The Biblical Canon, Peabody, Mass., Henrickson, 2007) has a 13 page appendix of “New Testament Citations of and Allusions to Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphal Writings” which lists approximately 550 citations/allusions to this literature. McDonald has sourced and adapted his list from two places which he acknowledged: Novum Testamentum Graece (27th ed.; ed. B. Aland, K. Aland, J. Karavidopoulos, C.M. Martini, and B.M. Metzger; Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1993), 800-806; and C.A. Evans, Ancient Texts for New Testament Studies, Appendix Two, 342-409, (Peabody, Mass, Hendrickson: 2005).

4 Ezra 14:44-48 refers to 94 sacred books. “So during the forty days, ninety-four books were written. And when the forty days were ended, the Most High spoke to me, saying, ‘Make public the twenty-four books that you wrote first, and let the worthy and the unworthy read them; but keep the seventy that were written last, in order to give them to the wise among your people. For in them is the spring of understanding, the fountain of wisdom, and the river of knowledge.’ And I did so.”

The 24 books refers to the Hebrew Bible, our Old Testament, which has only 24 (not 27) books when 1&2 Samuel, 1&2 Kings and 1&2 Chronicles are counted as three books, not six, as they are in the Jewish canon. That means that in the first century (when 4 Ezra was written) there were another 70 books which the writer(s) regarded as even more valuable.