The Origins of the Canon of the Hebrew Bible

Download or read book The Origins of the Canon of the Hebrew Bible written by Juan Carlos Ossandón Widow and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-09-11 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Origins of the Canon of the Hebrew Bible: An Analysis of Josephus and 4 Ezra, Juan Carlos Ossandón Widow examines the thorny question of when, how, and why the collection of twenty-four books that today is known as the Hebrew Bible was formed. He carefully studies the two earliest testimonies in this regard—Josephus’ Against Apion and 4 Ezra—and proposes that, along with the tendency to idealize the past, which leads to consider that divine revelation to Israel has ceased, an important reason to specify a collection of Scriptures at the end of the first century CE consisted in the need to defend the received tradition to counter those that accepted more books.