John Owen on Canon of the Old Testament
66 books — Apocrypha useful but not Scripture
THE POSITION
Assigned at established tier and not directly verified. Nothing in the works read this run states a position on the deuterocanonical books in Owen's own voice. The nearest thing is his sermon against the church's testimony as the ground of faith in Scripture, where the Roman objection he quotes lists "Ecclesiasticus, Tobit, Susanna, the books of Maccabees" among books the church later received — and his whole reply is that a book is canonical because it bears "the stamp of God upon" it, which the church recognises rather than confers. That undercuts the argument by which the Apocrypha was received, without naming the Apocrypha as excluded.
WHY THERE IS NO QUOTATIONFifteen of eighteen positions carry a verbatim quotation from a primary text; the millennium is contested, the Old Testament canon rests on standard historical theology rather than a passage read this run, and divine plurality is an honest blank.
13 OTHERS HOLD THIS
ABOUT THIS FIGURE
The most formidable English Puritan theologian: Dean of Christ Church and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford under Cromwell, later a nonconformist pastor in London. This entry rests on The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1647), The Doctrine of Justification by Faith (1677), Pneumatologia and the Discourse of Spiritual Gifts (1674), and the Two Short Catechisms (1645), read in the Goold edition of the Works.
Cite this page
"John Owen on Canon of the Old Testament", Examined Doctrine, July 2026 edition, https://examineddoctrine.com/position/owen/ot-canon (archived at https://examineddoctrine.com/editions/2026-07/position/owen/ot-canon).