“The canonical books of the Old Testament are thirty-nine in number. Our Lord referred to this canonical range when He spoke of the death of certain martyrs from the Old Testament . . . (Matt. 23:35). Abel was killed toward the beginning of the book of Genesis, the first book of the Jewish canon, and Zechariah was killed in 2 Chronicles, which was the last book as they arranged the canon. Christ is referring to all the martyrs throughout Scripture, from A to Z. Thus our Lord excludes the books commonly called the Apocrypha. Although valuable for history and background, they had no part of the authoritative Hebrew canon. The more liberal Hellenistic Jews of Alexandria allowed those books into the Greek Old Testament, but this was not the view of the Jews who sat in Moses’ seat, those to whom Christ bade us listen” (Mother Kirk, pp. 51-52).
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