There are differences between the Jewish canon of Scripture30 “Lawâ€Â, Nebi'im, “Prophetsâ€Â, and Ketubim, other “Writingsâ€Â. The number 24 was often reduced to 22, the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet. In the Christian canon, to these 2422 books correspond 39 books, called “protocanonicalâ€Â. The numerical difference is explained by the fact that the Jews regarded as one book several writings that are distinct in the Christian canon, the writings of the Twelve Prophets, for example.] and the Christian canon of the Old Testament.31 To explain these differences, it was generally thought that at the beginning of the Christian era, there existed two canons within Judaism: a Hebrew or Palestinian canon, and an extended Alexandrian canon in Greek  called the Septuagint  which was adopted by Christians.
Recent research and discoveries, however, have cast doubt on this opinion. It now seems more probable that at the time of Christianity's birth, closed collections of the Law and the Prophets existed in a textual form substantially identical with the Old Testament. The collection of “Writingsâ€Â, on the other hand, was not as well defined either in Palestine or in the Jewish diaspora, with regard to the number of books and their textual form. Towards the end of the first century A.D., it seems that 2422 books were generally accepted by Jews as sacred,32 but it is only much later that the list became exclusive.33 When the limits of the Hebrew canon were fixed, the deuterocanonical books were not included.
Many of the books belonging to the third group of religious texts, not yet fixed, were regularly read in Jewish communities during the first century A.D. They were translated into Greek and circulated among Hellenistic Jews, both in Palestine and in the diaspora.
