Books by Former Christians

[robrecht]

That's a great question. A scholar acquaintance of mine has actually wanted to write a book about how the early Christians created the Old Testament, claiming it as their own, fixing its meaning, and thereby distorting it into Christian scriptures. 

Exactly who is this scholar? 

From where I sit it is a proposition lacking much support.

I probably should not use his name here, since I'm merely presenting my own understanding. And I'm not saying that early Christians wrote the Jewish scriptures, but they created what they very early started calling the "Old Testament," by thus contrasting the Jewish scriptures with their own "New Testament." I edited my post above to add quotation marks around "Old Testament" to make this clearer.

Evangelical or fundamentalist Christians might consider this controversial, but it is not really problematic from a scholarly perspective. What most people know of as the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures, includes not only the translation of the Torah (the original Septuagint), but old Greek translations of all the books of the Jewish scriptures as well as additional books (eg, the books of the Maccabees) that did not become part of the Jewish Hebrew scriptures. The arrangement of the order of these translated books is different in the Greek Old Testament that became relatively standard in Christianity. Instead of the Jewish order of the TaNaK, they placed the major prophets last (including Daniel), after the Ketuvim. This corresponded with the idea that the primary value of the Christian Old Testament was to point toward their prophesied Christian Christ. 

This expanded and reordered Greek Old Testament remained authoritative in the East, while Jerome in the 4th/5th century did his best to standardize a Latin version (the Vulgate) based largely on the original Hebrew. While he used the Hebrew scriptures, he also included and translated most of the additional books that were found in the Greek version. This Latin version remained authoritative in the West until Renaissance scholars popularized the return to original sources, including even a few Christian scholars who began to study Hebrew. In the early 16th century, Erasmus of Rotterdam produced a new Latin translation of the New Testament side-by-side with the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament. Martin Luther used this for his German translation of the Christian Bible. When he later added his German version of the Old Testament he also used the Hebrew Masoretic text, but placed the book of Daniel at the end of the prophets, after Ezekiel. He also included the other books and sections of books not found in the Hebrew scriptures, but placed them at the end as Apocrypha and did not consider them to be authoritative. Many later Protestant bibles leave out the Apocrypha altogether, which is why Catholics have more books (and additional sections of some books) in their Old Testament than do Protestants. The Catholic church did not endorse translations from the original Hebrew and Greek until the mid-20th century.