Wesley Huff

By the Jews themselves.

So the Jews decided which 38 books to put in?

Yes.

So you have conversations by individuals like there's a guy named Josephus who is writing at the end of the first century.

Part of what he argues is that the Jewish people don't have kind of an innumerable number of religious texts like the Greeks do.

They have a specific number and he uses this terminology that they were laid up in the temple.

So the idea is that, you know, these are the books, they're housed in the temple, and they're a set number.

And he gives the number of the same number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet, 22.

So you usually see this 22 or 23 number, but they group them differently.

And he gives an argument that one of the reasons that we can find a timeline for what the Jews consider scripture is he says there's nothing written before Moses and there's nothing written after the time of Artaxerxes, which is the Persian Empire.

So the book of Esther in the Bible is that time period.

So though there are writings after that, there's this agreement that –

the voice of God in, say, the prophets giving a thus saith the Lord statement, like communicating messages to the people of Israel, has ceased.

But the Jewish canon, though there's like a closing of it, there's a soft closing, there's an idea that there's going to be a new covenant.

God's going to make new promises with his people, and so there are going to be more writings.

At least that there was a stop point at Malachi.

So it's sometimes referred to as the 400 years of silence for that reason.

So the debate, so it's a question if John's gospel...

is written before 70 AD or after 70 AD.

And if it's written after 70 AD, it's written in the 90s.