The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church

The subject of this book is the teaching of Jesus and his apostles, and the resultant beliefs of the New Testament Church, on the Old Testament canon, understood against the background of the Judaism of the first century and the centuries immediately preceding.
'Canon' is really a Greek word meaning a rule, but since the fourth century AD it has been used to denote the correct list of the Scriptures, and by consequence the collection of books so listed. Prior to the fourth century the canon was just as real, but was simply denoted by Lhe various titles of the Scriptures; and this practice had been inherited from the Jews, who, as we shall find below,1 though they made use of lists, had no proper word for a 'list', and so described lists by their contents.
What the contents of the list of the Old Testament books ought to be, has long been a matter of disagreement among Christians. The present work, by returning to the sources of the Christian faith, hopes to help the churches resolve this long-standing problem, and at the same time to throw some needed light also on an obscure though crucial period in the history ofthe Jewish canon. IfChristian evidence and Jewish evidence are given equal attention, it is believed that each will be found to illuminate the other.