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The Texts of the Canon
Which texts should we consider “authoritative” as Christians?

1. The Jews solidified their Tanak (Torah, Niv’m, Kotvim: Pentatuch, Prophets, and Writings) into a count of 22 books (what we have in the Christian OT is the splitting of some of these books into a total of 39, but the actual texts are the same).
2. The Jews later (4th Century AD/CE) added the Mishnah which later evolved into the Talmud(s). Jews would cringe at reading the Tanak without these texts. For them, these commentaries are as important as the actual Tanak.
3. Early Christians thought of the current NT as also authoritative.
4. Until the Reformation and Luther, the (now called) Apocrypha were included in the Bible as Scripture. These were Jewish texts “for scholar use only.” Luther used Jerome’s description of these 15 books to exclude them from the Protestant canon. The Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches still consider these as part of their canon.
5. Both some of the Hebrew writers and the Christian writers (i.e. OT and NT) quoted/alluded to other books as well. These books are considered psuedipigrapha. One major example of a canonized psuedipigrapha is the book of Daniel. Scholars agree that it was written well after the Exile period (some argue it to be around the Maccabean period) under the guise of someone living during the Exile in Babylon. All other psuedipigrapha are not considered authoritative by current Jews or Christians (even though some of their writers regarded at least part of them worthy of quoting).

The Translations

1. Jewish texts were written in Hebrew. In many ways, the Septuagint (LXX: major Greek translation of these texts) is more of a paraphrase than a word-for-word translation. Given that, it is still considered an important piece of contemporary Bible translation.
2. In both the Hebrew and the Greek, there are words that are used once and only once. These words have been regarded as the most difficult to translate because there are no other references to the usage of these words.
3. Some claim that the only way Matthew and Luke can have a virgin birth is if they use the LXX (mis)translation. This argument is defended by Christians who claim that the Hebrew word used in Isaiah (almah, literally “young woman of a marriageable age”, and found 9 other times in the Hebrew texts) implies being a virgin (Hebrew word betulah, also used other times in the Hebrew texts to specify a virgin). Therefore, the Greek translation of almah as “virgin” (parthenos) is acceptable. But, is that kind of added interpretation acceptable to translation?