Augustine in His Own Words
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.
had left off with the books of Kings and Chronicles. Then come the Prophets, which include David's one book, the Psalms, and Solomon's three books: Proverbs, Canticle of Canticles, and Ecclesiastes. The [next] two books, the one entitled Wisdom and the other, Ecclesiasticus, are said to be Solomon's, because of a certain similarity of style, but Jesus, son of Sirach, has been the one most consistently regarded as their composer.29 Because they have been found worthy to be included as authoritative, they are to be numbered among the prophetic books. The rest are books of those who are called prophets in the proper sense of the term. There are the individual books of the twelve prophets, which are connected with one another (since they have never been separated) and are counted as one; these are their names: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. Then there are the four prophets, each with his own volume: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, and Ezekiel. These forty-four books contain the authoritative Old Testament.
As for the authoritative New Testament, there are the four Gospel books: according to Matthew, according to Mark, according to Luke, according to John; fourteen epistles of the Apostle Paul: to the Romans, two to the Corinthians, to the Galatians, to the Ephesians, to the Philippians, two to the Thessalonians, to the Colossians, two to Timothy, to Titus, to Philemon, to the Hebrews; two epistles of Peter, three of John, one of Jude, and one of James; one book of the Acts of the Apostles and one of the Apocalypse of John.
(9.14) From all these books, those who fear God and have a docile piety seek out the will of God. The first step in this laborious task is, as I have said, to know these books. And even if we may not yet understand them, nevertheless, by reading them we can either memorize them or become somewhat acquainted with them. Then those things asserted clearly in them, whether guidelines about how to live or rules about what to believe, should be studied with greater care and diligence. The greater one's intellectual capacity, the more of these one finds. In texts where the Scriptures put things plainly and openly, we discover all the things which concern faith and moral living, namely, hope and love. . . . Then only after acquiring a certain familiarity with the language of the divine Scriptures should one try to uncover and analyze thoroughly the obscure passages, selecting examples from clearer texts to explain those that are more obscure, and allowing the testimony of indisputable texts to remove the uncertainties from doubtful passages. In this
29. "Jesus, son of Sirach": In retr. 2.4.2 (CCL 57:93), Augustine corrected himself, noting that Sirach was the author not of the Book of Wisdom, but only of Ecclesiasticus.