As every schoolboy once knew, the Church of Rome accepts the Longer Old Testament Canon rather than the shorter one read by Protestants and Jews. This means that she can invoke OT authority for the immortality of the soul (Wisd. 3. 1—9) and for the propriety and efficacy of prayers for the dead (2 Macc 12. 43—45). Apart, however, from a few proof texts of this sort, it is doubtful whether the so-called Deuterocanonical books and passages have much influence on Catholics. Take the case of the Book of Daniel. When they set out to expound Daniel Catholic writers tend either to give scant attention to the passages peculiar to the Longer Canon (so, e.g. Delcor, 1971 and Collins, 1981) or, as the present writer did in his brief commentary on Daniel (Robinson, 1971), to ignore them altogether. Should we not, perhaps, take our Canon more seriously?

In what follows, I shall first consider some general problems involved in taking one’s Canon, whether the Shorter or the Longer, seriously, without however getting entangled in the ‘canonical criticism’ debate.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the early Christian Church did not simply inherit an OT Canon from the Jewish people. The Jews, in fact, did not possess a fixed Canon for the OT as a whole until the late first or early second century of our era: the contents of the Pentateuch and of the Prophets had certainly been settled by the time of the beginning of Christianity, but the extent of the third division, the Writings, remained unclear.