Robert C. Newman: THE COUNCIL OF JAMNIA AND THE OLD TESTAMENT CANON
ABSTRACT
| A basic feature of most liberal theories of the Old Testament canon is an alleged council held at Jamnia about AD 90 which is supposed to have canonized or at least finalized the Writings or Hagiographa, the third division of the Hebrew Old Testament. In this paper--a reprint of the article appearing in the Westminster Theological Journal 38 (Spring, 1976)--the Talmudic evidence for such a council is surveyed. It is concluded that there is no real evidence for such a council nor for any binding canonical decisions at that time. Instead there appears to have existed a consensus on the content of the Old Testament in the first century AD which was already ancient at that time.. |
