Was the Jewish canon closed before Christ, and where does the canon of Scripture come from?

It depends on how you approach it. The basis on which the Jews chose their canonical books, whether the material was inspired by God, may not be, and probably is not, the same basis on which the Catholic Church chose hers, which was inspiration, dictated, as Leo XIII says, by the Holy Spirit of God. For Steve Christie it will always be up in the air, because as a Protestant he does not believe the Catholic Church, or any church, had the authority to give us a canonical list; he can say the sixty-six books are canonical, but he cannot explain where they came from or how we got them. The only place they could have come from is the Catholic Church. We use the same canon today that we have used throughout the Church's two thousand years. Pope Damasus made the first canonical list in 380, and we can point to that as the moment the highest authority in the Church told us what the canon was. He did not invent it; it came after a process, the last full listing of the twenty-seven New Testament books being the Muratorian canon in 367, only thirteen years before Damasus, and the local councils of Hippo and Carthage, ending around 419, gave the same canon. At the same time Damasus decided the New Testament canon, he decided the Old Testament canon, which is why we have seventy-three books total. The canon did not reach infallible status, however, until the Council of Trent in 1563, over fourteen hundred years later. One reason for the delay is that the Church did not know whether any books might still be added, because the New Testament itself mentions possibilities such as a third epistle to the Corinthians and an epistle to the Laodiceans, which Paul refers to. If such a letter were found and shown to be Paul's, it would be considered inspired and part of the canon. We never found it, and by Trent the Church judged that we were not going to, and so made the canon infallible.