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Testimony of Christ to the Old Testament Let us refer, first, to what is contained or necessarily implied in the Lord’s testimony to the Old Testament Scrip tures, and, secondly, to the critical value of His testimony. I. TH E LORD’S TESTIMONY TO TH E OLD TESTAMENT Our Lord’s authority—though this is rather the argu- mentum silentio —may be cited in favor of the Old Testament canon as accepted by the Jews in His day. He never charges them with adding to or taking from the Scriptures, or in any way tampering with the text. Had they been guilty of so great a sin it is hardly possible that among the charges brought against them, this matter should not even be alluded to. The Lord reproaches His countrymen with ignorance of the Scrip tures, and with making the law void through their traditions, but He never hints that they have foisted any book into the canon, or rejected any which deserved a place in it. Now, the Old Testament canon of the first century is the same as our own. The evidence for this is complete, and the fact is hardly questioned. The New Testament contains, indeed, no catalogue of the Old Testament books, but the testimony of Josephus, of Melito of Sardis, of Origen, of Jerome, of the Talmud, decisively shows that the Old Testa ment canon, once fixed, has remained unaltered. Whether the steady Jewish tradition that the canon was finally deter mined by Ezra and the Great Synagogue is altogether correct or not, it is certain that the Septuagint agrees with the Hebrew as to the canon, thus showing that the subject was not in dispute two centuries before Christ. Nor is the testimony of the Septuagint weakened by the fact that the common Old Testament Apocrypha are appended to the canonical books; for “of no one among the Apocryphal books is it so much as hinted, either by the author, or by any other Jewish writer, that it was worthy of a place among the sacred books” (Kitto’s Cyclo., art. “Canon”). The Lord, it is observed, never quotes any of the aprocryphal books, nor refers to them.
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