The Old Testament was generally divided by the Jews of that day into three parts: (1) the Law of Moses, or the Torah, the five books of the Pentateuch; (2) the books of the Prophets, including the historical books; (3) the so-called Writings, or the "other books," the poetical writings, of which the Book of Psalms was considered most notable. This threefold division was noted by Christ, when He spoke of the prophecies, "which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me" (Luke 24:44).
The exact process by which these 39 books came to be "canonized" is not known, any more than is the process by which the New Testament books were later accepted. The most realistic conclusion, in both cases, is that each book was essentially self-authenticating from the very time it was written. They were acknowledged by the people of God to constitute the Word of God by the witness of the Spirit and the divinely authoritative character of the writings, right from the start. This is the only reasonable way to account for their universal acceptance in the absence of any official political or ecclesiastical determinations of their character.
The question, then, is how the scriptural writings could have ever become so universally accepted as authentic among the Jews if, in fact, they were not authentic. If Moses did not really write the books of Moses, if Isaiah was only one of several men who wrote the Book of Isaiah, if Daniel did not write the Book of Daniel, then how did such opinions ever become established among the people who used them? There is not the slightest answer to these questions among any of the ancient Jewish writings that have come down to us.
Reliability of the Old Testament Text
Although there is little doubt that the Old Testament as we have it today contains the same books that composed the Scriptures used by Christ, the Apostles, and the Jewish scribes of the first century, we still have the question of whether the text had been transmitted to them intact as originally written. It is obvious that, if we possess no "autographs" of the New Testament, we certainly could have none of the Old Testament.
The science that attempts to determine the original text of Scripture is known as textual criticism, or sometimes, the "lower criticism." We have already given reasons for our confidence that we do possess, for all practical purposes, the complete and accurate text of the New Testament.
For the Old Testament text, we are limited mainly to the Masoretic text, the Septuagint version, the Latin Vulgate, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Syriac version, and more recently, the Dead Sea Scrolls. The text of the Old Testament which has been accepted as authoritative by both Christian and Jew is known as the Masoretic text. The Masoretes were a group of Jewish scribes who, sometime around A.D. 500, developed a more or less official text from the systematic sorting and comparison of the various manuscripts that had come down to them. In the margins of this text they were careful to write down all the variant readings which had been accumulated up to that time. These all amounted only to about 1,200 in number, or less than one per page of the Hebrew printed Bible.
As far as the transmission of the Masoretic text is concerned, prior to the printing of the first Hebrew Bible in A.D. 1526, there are about 1,000 manuscripts in existence. The oldest of these is dated at A.D. 916. However, of those that are available, there are scarcely any variations of significance, and support from other sources also warrants confidence that we have the original Masoretic text.
The basic text of the Old Testament originally consisted only of consonants, with vowels assumed to be understood by the reader from the context. However, in the present Hebrew Bible appear so-called "vowel points," indicating which vowels to use with the consonants. These were added by the Jewish scholars in about A.D. 700. Since they do not constitute a part of the original text itself, it is conceivable that these are wrong in some instances, and may need to be corrected if sound textual criticism justifies it.
As a check on the accuracy of the Masoretic text, there are several other channels of transmission of the Old Testament which can be examined. The most important of these is the Septuagint Version, so-called because it was supposedly produced by seventy scribes in about 280 B.C. These men translated the Hebrew Scriptures into the Greek language, for use by the Jews of the Dispersion. It is possible that this Septuagint translation was used by the Apostles and the other first-century Christians.
The Latin Vulgate was translated by Jerome from Hebrew and Greek into Latin in about A.D. 400. The Syriac Version was translated from the Hebrew about A.D. 200. The Samaritan Pentateuch (the Samaritans did not accept the rest of the Old Testament) had been handed down independently of the Jewish transmission line since the time of Nehemiah, about 400 B.C.
Although there are minor variations in all these versions, none are significant enough to change any doctrine or event recorded in the Old Testament. In almost all cases, the variations are trivial.
Furthermore, there are numerous ancient writings in which extensive quotations from the Old Testament were made, including the Book of Jubilees, the Book of Ecclesiastes, the Talmud, the writings of Josephus and Philo, the Zadokite Fragments, the Targums, and other early literature, as well as numerous quotations of the Old Testament in the New Testament. All unite in showing that the Old Testament text has always been essentially as we have it today, as far back as any direct evidence can take us.
This fact has been further confirmed by the discovery of the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, beginning in 1946 and continuing on to the present. These manuscripts actually date from the time of Christ or earlier and are the oldest actual manuscripts of any parts of Scripture found to date.
Many scrolls have been found, and these include, in one scroll or another, practically the entire text of the Old Testament. The agreement of all these with the received Masoretic text is remarkable, such variations as exist being insignificant.
There is thus no reasonable doubt that our present Old Testament, based on the Masoretic text, is practically identical extending back to the time when the last books of the Old Testament were originally written. That being true, there is no reason to doubt that all of the books have come down to us substantially as written. The scribes who copied the manuscripts are known to have taken extreme pains to insure accuracy of copying. Many numerical devices were used counting letters and gematria (numerical equivalents of the letters) in the various books as cross-checking devices.
Finally, it is significant that no other ancient writings of age comparable to the Old Testament have been so accurately transmitted or based on such an abundance of textual evidence. If we can rely on the accurate transmission of any ancient document at all, that document is the Old Testament.
The Strange World of Higher Criticism
The textual critic, working in the field of "lower criticism," performs a vital service as he seeks by scientific analysis of the manuscript evidence to determine as closely as possible the original text of the biblical writings. But there is another field of study, euphemistically called "higher criticism," the motivations for which are suspect, to say the least, and the results of which have been devastatingly corrosive to biblical faith.
This type of study (or, better, speculation) presumes to be able to reconstruct an accretion process by which ancient writings, especially the Bible, came to be assembled out of a miscellaneous assortment of fragments and forgeries, and then foisted on the people as divinely inspired writings of the fathers and prophets.
The "higher critics" profess to be scientific in this endeavor, but actually they are completely subjective, seeking by all means to find a naturalistic, evolutionary explanation for the Bible and the history of Israel and the Christian Church. Invariably they attempt to explain away all miracles and fulfilled prophecies, and almost always to attribute the authorship of the books to writers of much more recent date than claimed in the books themselves.
The Bible, to the higher critics, is thus a purely natural book, full of errors and contradictions and outright lies. It certainly cannot long retain any religious authority or moral value if this is its character, and yet this higher criticism has been taught as certain fact