Now, space does not allow me to go into detail here, but the Protestant Canon is mainly the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of how one determines manuscript accuracy during the Renaissance. These Renaissance men reasoned that the contemporary manuscripts of the day in the “original languages” were markedly more accurate than the Greek and Latin translations common to the day, because, heck, they were in the original languages! There is certainly a logic to it–the original ideas of the writers of Scripture can be obscured, if not lost in translation. Further, passages and even
whole books alien to the people who still speak those languages must have never been recognized by them, right?!?
When we put this armchair scholar sort of reasoning aside, we can see that the methodological error of the Renaissance writers stems from the fact that they were not nearly as well trained in archaeology and textual criticism as scholars are today. Concerning archaeology, for example, manuscript discoveries have shown that the
Septuagint accords much more closely to the earliest Hebrew Manuscripts than the Masoretic Text.
As for textual criticism, scholars now have a much more in-depth way of searching for original renderings of manuscripts. Serious scholars don’t simply stop at the Masoretic Text like the Renaissance men and declare that this is what the Hebrew must have always said. In fact, they make judgments based upon several factors.
For one, they look at the age of manuscripts and try to find out when ancient textual variants arose, the most ancient renderings perhaps being the most accurate. Further, they look at early quotations in the church fathers and from the many translations that exist (Greek, Arabic, Syriac, Vulgate, Old Latin, etcetera). This further helps us trace the history of not only textual variants preserved in each ancient tradition, but also decipher the meanings of words across languages instead of slavishly trusting a medieval Jew’s rendering of a certain word.
In fact, the Masoretic Text might not even be the best place to look for what the Scripture of the ancient Jews looked like. Many scholars actually will look at the Vulgate because the Vulgate preserves, in Latin, an earlier textual Hebrew tradition than the medieval Masoretic Text does.
So, the modern Biblical scholar is much more well rounded in his approach to manuscripts than the Renaissance scholar was. After all, the Renaissance scholar was making it up as he goes because the professional discipline of history did not exist. Today, we have had centuries to see if certain methodologies actually bear themselves out in manuscript discoveries, which gives us greater confidence in scholarly conclusions. This is especially important given the fact that as early as the 2nd century AD (Justin Martyr in Dialogue with Trypho), we had reports of the Jews corrupting Christological passages of the Scripture. Hence, being that we know that corrupt traditions existed as early as the 2nd century, it is incumbent upon us to study textual variants and come to an understanding, assessing for probability, which variants are the most accurate.
So, in retrospect, the Renaissance man’s desire to “go back to the basics” by slavishly relying upon the original languages was really not all that strong of a position, intellectually. In many ways, we persist in Renaissance-era error when we do not at least consider the Deuterocanon on its merits and simply discount it because “the Jews do.”