Second, from their external form.
Second, from their external form.
§ 70. (2) From their external form, namely, from the language in which these books were written. Every canonical book of the Old Testament is written in the prophetic language, namely, Hebrew. Those controversial books were not written in Hebrew. Therefore. Regarding the major proposition, observe that some brief passages of the canonical books (Daniel 2-7, Ezra 4-6, and Jeremiah 10) were written in Chaldaic; however, because Chaldaic differs from Hebrew only in inflection and because Chaldaic began to be familiar to the Jews in later times, especially after the Babylonian captivity, none of the force of the argument is lost because of this. Proof of the major premise can be taken from the preceding argument. You see, whatever books the prophets of the Old Testament wrote, they wanted to write them in their vernacular and in the language proper to the Israelites, that is, in Hebrew. Justin, Apol. 2. pro Christian., p. 56: “They have preserved the prophecies of the prophets who were kings in Judea in their day in such a way that when they were published and spread about, they also were written in the vernacular voice of the Hebrews in books composed by those prophets.”
Regarding the minor proposition, note what Jerome relates in his preface to the books of Solomon, that the Book of Sirach and 1 Maccabees were found in Hebrew. Likewise, in the prefaces that he wrote for Tobit and Judith, he wrote that those books existed in Chaldaic and that he translated them into Latin. However, because all those books are not extant today except in the Greek and Latin idioms and because one cannot demonstrate their prophetic and canonical authority from other bases, Jerome correctly concludes: “Those books nonetheless are apocryphal.” If they were canonical, divine providence would never have permitted their original text to have been lost.
We must also note carefully that if the canonical authority of a book is to be proved, each and every requirement for canonical books must be connected. After all, if only one requirement has been established, one cannot immediately infer that a book is canonical. Instead, all the requirements must be established and proved at the same time. Negatively, we can prove that a book is not canonical from the lack of a single requirement; but affirmatively, we cannot infer the canonical authority of a book except from the joint occurrence of all the requirements. If the Papists were to urge quite fastidiously that some of the controversial books once were written in Hebrew, we can set against them correctly that even 4 Ezra gives the scent of a Hebrew style, yet they themselves exclude it from the canon.