ABSTRACT
The Christian use of the term Old Testament is open to, and has in the past led to a misunderstanding and demeaning of the Jewish faith. One fixed point of reference in deciding when a list of canonical books was established comes from a Jerusalem scribe of the second century BCE, named Jesus ben Sirach. The production of sacred books was an important aspect of Israel's communal history. In the post-exilic period, sacred books replaced, to some extent, or at least supplemented the Temple at the centre of the Jewish symbolic system. By the end of the first century, early Christian groups were emerging from beneath the shadows of the synagogue, becoming recognisable as distinct from their Jewish neighbours. This chapter gives an account of how two overlapping but different collections of writings were in circulation in the first century, both the product of Jewish people's experiences in the homeland and the Diaspora from the Persian to the Roman period.
