Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
The Exegete 165 who had authored and appealed to a bevy of apocryphal gospels.24 In the fourth century, the canon, while no longer a highly contested issue, does resurface as a concern. In 393, at a council in Hippo, the North African bishops set out an official list of books they considered authentic.25 Augustine passes on this North African canon and the principle of catholicity. From On Christian Teaching, Book 2:
(8.12) The most expert investigator of the divine Scriptures will be a person who has in the first place read them all and has a good working knowledge of them—if not an in-depth understanding, at least a basic familiarity from reading them, especially those books which are called "canonical." . . . In terms of canonical Scriptures, [the investigator] should follow the authority of the majority of Catholic churches, which, of course, includes those found worthy to have been apostolic sees and to have received apostolic letters.26 He should hold on to the following principle regarding the canon: to prefer those books which are recognized by all Catholic churches over those books which certain churches do not accept. In regard to those books not accepted by all, let him favor those which the greater number of churches and the more eminent churches accept rather than those upheld by a minority of churches or by churches with lesser authority. . . .
(8.13) The complete canon of the scriptures that we are talking about turning our attention to consists of the following books: the five of Moses, that is, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy; the one book of Joshua, son of Nun, and the one of Judges; a little book which is called Ruth, which seems to belong instead to the beginning of Kings; then four books of Kings27 and the two of Chronicles (these do not follow in sequence after [Kings], but, as it were, run alongside them, parallel to them). These are the historical books, which contain a connected narrative of the times and have an orderly arrangement. There are others, histories of a different order, which are not united to this order nor to one another, such as the books of Job and Tobit and Esther and Judith, and the two books of the Maccabees, and the two of Ezra.28 These last two follow the basic historical order which
24. With the discovery of the gnostic Nag Hammadi library in 1945 and with the publication of the gnostic Gospel of Judas in 2006, we can better appreciate the high stakes of this debate within early Christian communities. See Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1987); Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Madeleine Scopello, ed., The Gospel of Judas in Context, Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 62 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008).
25. Council of Hippo (393), Canon 38; reaffirmed at the Council of Carthage (397), Canon 47. 26. "Apostolic sees": cities such as Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome. "Received apostolic letters": towns that were recipients of Pauline letters, such as Corinth, Ephesus, and Thessalonica.
27. "Four books of Kings": 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings. 28. "Two of Ezra": Ezra and Nehemiah.