Question 3: Whether Ezra restored corrupted books.
Question 3: Whether Ezra restored corrupted books.
§ 114. (III) The question arises: Did Ezra at the time of the Babylonian captivity at least restore corrupted books, if he did not restore lost ones? Some of the ancients say that he did. Their idea is that Ezra was the restorer of the sacred books not by dictating everything again but by gathering and putting the Scriptures in order into one corpus (parts of which he had found in various places) and also by correcting whatever had been corrupted by the negligence of the scribes because, during the entire time of the captivity, the Law was kept carelessly because the Jews did not have a temple and tabernacle. In his preface to the Psalms, Theodoret says, “Ezra restored the ancient Scripture that had been corrupted at the time of the captivity.” It is in this sense that some accept the statements of Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Clement of Alexandria, whom others make supporters of the prior opinion.
We, however, cannot approve this opinion, because: (1) Divine providence kept those books free of corruption (Matt. 5:18). (2) No trace of this corruption can be shown also before the time of Ezra. (3) It is evident from Philo (De egress. filior. Israûl. ex Aegypto) and from Eusebius (De praeparat. evang., bk. 8, c. 2) that up to the time of Philo nothing in the Law was changed and any Jew would have died a hundred times rather than allow the Law to be changed in any way. (4) It is mentioned that Ezra read in the Book of the Law before the Israelites (Neh. 8:2), but it nowhere says that he corrected the Book of the Law. At the time of the captivity, therefore, he guarded the sacred books at his home; but after the captivity, he brought them out to the public, freed them from destruction, and put them into a single corpus, according to the testimony of Athanasius (synopsis, c. De libris Esdr.), Hilary (preface to the Psalms), and Chrysostom (homily 8 on Hebrews). Nowhere, however, did he restore books corrupted by the lack of care of men or by injury of the times.