Below are links and my conclusion about this 400 years of silence as mentioned in a Sunday school class we attended in September 2023. That was the first time we had heard of that and both thought “where did that come from” and “that has to be wrong”. The links and extracts below show the bias in this 400-year statement.
- https://www.gotquestions.org/400-years-of-silence.html
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertestamental_period
- The intertestamental period (Protestant) or deuterocanonical period (Catholic and Eastern Orthodox) is the period of time between the events of the protocanonical books and the New Testament. Traditionally, it is considered to cover roughly four hundred years, spanning the ministry of Malachi (c. 420 BC) to the appearance of John the Baptist in the early 1st century AD. It is roughly contiguous with the Second Temple period (516 BC-70 AD) and encompasses the age of Hellenistic Judaism.
- Significant events
- …..
- Writing of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the rediscovery of which became central to modern and contemporary Biblical criticism[2]
- Writing of the deuterocanonical books (biblical apocrypha) and pseudepigrapha
- The intertestamental period (Protestant) or deuterocanonical period (Catholic and Eastern Orthodox) is the period of time between the events of the protocanonical books and the New Testament. Traditionally, it is considered to cover roughly four hundred years, spanning the ministry of Malachi (c. 420 BC) to the appearance of John the Baptist in the early 1st century AD. It is roughly contiguous with the Second Temple period (516 BC-70 AD) and encompasses the age of Hellenistic Judaism.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deuterocanonical_books – Includes links to deuterocanonical texts held as canonical for the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church written in the 400-year silence.
- The Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, which the early Christian church used as its Old Testament, included all of the deuterocanonical books. The term distinguished these books from both the protocanonical books (the books of the Hebrew canon) and the biblical apocrypha (books of Jewish origin that were sometimes read in Christian churches as scripture but which were not regarded as canonical).[9]
- The Council of Rome (382 AD) defined a list of books of scripture as canonical. It included most of the deuterocanonical books.[10]
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudepigrapha
- In biblical studies, the term pseudepigrapha can refer to an assorted collection of Jewish religious works thought to be written c. 300 BC to 300 AD. They are distinguished by Protestants from the deuterocanonical books (Catholic and Orthodox) or Apocrypha (Protestant), the books that appear in extant copies of the Septuagint in the fourth century or later[2] and the Vulgate, but not in the Hebrew Bible or in Protestant Bibles.[3] The Catholic Church distinguishes only between the deuterocanonical and all other books; the latter are called biblical apocrypha, which in Catholic usage includes the pseudepigrapha. In addition, two books considered canonical in the Orthodox Tewahedo churches, the Book of Enoch and Book of Jubilees, are categorized as pseudepigrapha from the point of view of Chalcedonian Christianity.[citation needed]
- In addition to the sets of generally agreed to be non-canonical works, scholars will also apply the term to canonical works who make a direct claim of authorship, yet this authorship is doubted. For example, the Book of Daniel is considered by some to have been written in the 2nd century BC, 400 years after the prophet Daniel lived, and thus the work is pseudepigraphic. A New Testament example might be the book of 2 Peter, considered by some to be written approximately 80 years after Saint Peter‘s death. Early Christians, such as Origen, harbored doubts as to the authenticity of the book’s authorship.[4]
- The term pseudepigrapha is also commonly used to describe numerous works of Jewish religious literature written from about 300 BCE to 300 CE. Not all of these works are actually pseudepigraphical. It also refers to books of the New Testament canon whose authorship is misrepresented. Such works include the following:[3]