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Candice: With reservations, as this isn't my area ... > The authors of the NT didn't really have the OT, as such, did > they? The Septuagint was compiled/translated in 250 BC, which means well before the NT is written, there's a (relatively) fixed OT canon, roughly equivalent to the one we have today. > They and their legatees were also perhaps our > first religious censors to the extent that they actively suppressed the > Apocrypha from the work which became the New Testament because it diverged > at so many points from the party line on Jesus they were proselytizing. Depends +which+ Apochrypha -- if it's the Gnostic Gospels (Thomas, Truth, etc.) I'd agree, but if we're talking about the Childhood of Jesus gospels, I'd have to say they were right on grounds of taste alone. And obviously, the Gospels-as-we-know-them are post-Pauline. James, pushing for a Judaic-centred version of "Christianity" lost out to the proselytising preach-to-the-Romans P(S)aul [the hatchetman of the Sanhedrin before he threw an epileptic fit on the way to Damascus]. Isn't there an argument that the Gnostic versions reflect James? [Sorry, Candice, I'm wittering a bit, and you'll probably cut me (rightly) down in flames.] Robin