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Dear catholic.com visitors: This Catholic Answers website, with all its free resources, is the world’s largest source of explanations for Catholic beliefs and practices. We receive no funding from the institutional Church and rely entirely on your generosity to sustain this website with trustworthy, accessible content. If every visitor this month donated $1, catholic.com would be fully funded for an entire year. If you’ve never made a gift, now is the time. Your donation will be matched dollar for dollar this week only. Thanks and God bless.
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Q&A

Were the books of the Hebrew canon established 50 years before Christ?

Catholic Answers Staff

Question:

An anti-Catholic I heard said we don’t need the Church to let us know what belongs in the canon of Scripture because a Jewish believer 50 years before Christ knew that books like Isaiah and Jeremiah were in the canon even without an infallible source to tell him.

Answer:

No, he didn’t. A Jewish believer 50 years before Christ didn’t infallibly know which books belong in the Bible unless he had access to an infallible source.

In his day this would have been a prophet or an inquiry of the Lord via the high priest’s Urim and Thummim. They needed an infallible source to know with certainty which books belonged in Scripture then, just as we do now.

Your anti-Catholic friend is ducking the question of how he knows which books belong in Scripture by trying to shift the burden of proof onto you. Don’t let him get away with it.

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