CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SIX
THE CHRISTIAN CANON OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
B. IN THE LATIN WEST
The Bible began to be translated into Latin, so far as can be ascertained, in the latter half of the second century ad, in the Roman province of Africa. The province of Africa was Latin-speaking, so far as official usage is concerned; this was pre-eminently true of Roman Carthage, refounded as a colony in 46 bc. The need for a Latin version of the scriptures was realized here decades before a similar need was felt in Rome itself. The Jewish community in Rome was largely Greek-speaking, and so was the church, from the first beginnings of Roman Christianity in the 40s of the first century until the end of the second century.
Until Jerome produced a new translation of the Old Testament from the Hebrew text at the end of the fourth century, the Latin Old Testament was a rendering of the Septuagint, including the ‘Septuagintal plus’. There was little if anything to indicate to readers of the Old Latin version that the ‘Septuagintal plus’ stood on a different footing from the rest of the Old Testament.
TERTULLIAN
Tertullian of Carthage is the first writer to be considered among the Latin fathers: he flourished at the end of the second century and the beginning of the third. He calls the two Testaments ‘instruments’ (Latin instrumenta), using the word in its legal sense. The Old Testament is ‘the whole instrument of Jewish literature’; he gives the impression that he knows exactly what it contains, although he nowhere gives a list of its contents. His Old Testament was evidently co-extensive with the Septuagint (including the ‘Septuagint plus’); indeed, in one place he implies that it might justifiably be extended beyond the limits of the Septuagint.
It is not enough to locate and list quotations from various ‘fringe’ books, or allusions to them. A Christian writer may quote works to which he would not dream of ascribing divine authority (as Paul, for example, quotes Menander in 1 Cor. 15:33). The quotation or allusion must be accompanied by words which show that the writer did regard it as holy scripture. Thus, when Tertullian (Against Marcion, 4.11) quotes ‘Come, my bride, from Lebanon’ (Cant. 4:8), it is plain that he acknowledges the Song of Songs as divinely inspired, for he takes the words to be addressed by Christ to the church.
He regards Wisdom as a genuine work of Solomon, and the ‘Letter of Jeremiah’ as authentically Jeremiah’s. The Song of the Three Hebrews and the story of Bel and the Dragon are to him integral parts of Daniel. On the other hand, we cannot prove that he regarded Judith as canonical because he cites Judith (who remained unmarried after her husband’s death) as an example of monogamy, or 1 Maccabees because he refers to the freedom fighters’ resolution to resist their assailants even on the sabbath, to show that the weekly sabbath was intended to be a temporary provision. But the probability is that he did regard Judith and 1 Maccabees, with the rest of the ‘Septuagintal plus’, as part of the ancient ‘instrument’.
The Apocalypse of Ezra (4 Ezra) was never included in the Septuagint (for this reason its Greek text has not survived). But Tertullian knows and accepts its account of Ezra’s restoring the sacred scriptures of Israel which had been destroyed at the time of the Babylonian conquest. Another work which found no place in the Septuagint was the composite apocalyptic work called 1 Enoch (only about one-third of its Greek text has survived). The Ethiopic church is the only part of Christendom to have canonized it (for this reason it is only in the Ethiopic version that it is extant in its entirety). A number of early Christian writers mention it with reservations, but Tertullian approved of it, and would have been willing to see it included in the ancient instrumentum. (He knew that he was incompetent to include it on his own initiative; the canonization of religious writings is not an individual responsibility.) One reason for his approval of it was the fact that it was quoted, evidently as a genuine prophecy of the antediluvian patriarch Enoch, by Jude, who calls himself ‘servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James’ (Jude 1:14f.). But that in itself would not have been enough; others were disposed to exclude Jude from the New Testament because of its quoting a work of doubtful authenticity. There was the further, and quite potent reason that Tertullian’s attitude to the subject of his treatise On Women’s Dress was reinforced by the statement in 1 Enoch 8:1 that it was Azaz’el, leader of the fallen angels, who first introduced women to ‘bracelets, decorations, antimony (for eye-shadow), ornamentation, the beautifying of the eyelids, all kinds of precious stones, and all colouring tinctures’.
The second section of 1 Enoch, comprising chapters 37–71, is commonly called the ‘Parables of Enoch’; it is of different authorship from chapters 1–36 and probably of later date. In it God is repeatedly called ‘the Lord of spirits’. Tertullian gives this title to God in his work Against Marcion (5.11.8). Actually, he intends to quote 2 Corinthians 3:18, ‘from the Lord who is the Spirit’ (lit. ‘from the Lord the Spirit’), but he quotes it from memory, and his memory has been influenced by this similar expression, which he may owe to acquaintance with the ‘Parables of Enoch’.
Since 1 Enoch is not included in the Hebrew Bible, nor yet in the Septuagint (which was, of course, a Jewish translation), Tertullian hazards the unworthy suspicion (of a kind which he was not alone among early Christians in entertaining) that it was rejected by Jews because it spoke of Christ. He may have had in mind the figure of ‘the Son of Man’ who appears here and there throughout the ‘Parables of Enoch’; but that ‘Son of Man’ is not Jesus—he turns out, in fact, to be identified with Enoch himself.
A compilation to which Tertullian and other early Christian writers assigned genuine prophetic authority was the Sibylline Oracles. The Sibylline Oracles which they knew were Jewish and Christian poems composed in an oracular idiom at various times between 200 bc and ad 250. But those writers who quote them took them at face value as the genuine prophecies of an ancient pagan prophetess—‘the Sibyl’, says Tertullian, ‘who antedated all literature and was a true prophetess of truth.’ In an attack on idolatry he quotes from the third Sibylline Oracle (written by Jews in Egypt about the middle of the second century bc) to the effect that in the tenth generation after the flood ‘there reigned Kronos, Titan and lapetos, the mighty children of Gaia and Ouranos’ (Tertullian gives the Latin equivalents of those names: ‘Saturn, Titan and Iapetus, the mighty children of Terra and Caelum’). But it was not suggested that the Sibylline Oracles should be included in the Jewish or Christian holy scriptures: to those who took them at face value they constituted a parallel body of divine prophecy, communicated and transmitted through Gentiles. Hence the mediaeval hymn Dies Irae speaks of
That day of wrath, that dreadful day,
When heaven and earth shall pass away,
As David and the Sibyl say.
David, representing Old Testament prophecy, stands here alongside the Sibyl as foretelling the final dissolution of the created universe.
Tertullian may stand for all the Latin fathers before the time of Jerome: the Bible which they used provided them with no means of distinguishing those parts which belonged to the Hebrew canon from those which were found only in the Septuagint. It appears that in several of their copies Baruch was appended to Jeremiah rather than distinguished as a separate book: Cyprian, Hilary and Ambrose all quote from Baruch but ascribe the words quoted to Jeremiah.
JEROME
Eusebius Sofronius Hieronymus, to give Jerome his formal Latin name, was born in ad 346 or 347 at Stridon in Dalmatia. His parents, who were Christians, were able to give him an excellent education. He came to Rome in his ’teens to perfect his classical studies in the school of Donatus, one of the most celebrated grammarians of his day. In due course he became a master of Greek as well as Latin literature. As the result of a nearly fatal illness at Antioch in 374 he resolved thenceforth to devote himself to biblical, no longer to secular, literature. He spent the next four or five years leading the life of a hermit in the desert east of Antioch; he pursued sacred learning unremittingly and began to study Hebrew with the aid of a Jewish Christian. At the same time he familiarized himself with the Aramaic vernacular of the country regions around him. After this period of seclusion he returned to Antioch and was ordained to the presbyterate.
He was present in 381 at the Council of Constantinople and went from there to Rome, perhaps to attend the Council held there in 382 to review the acts of the Constantinopolitan Council. In Rome he was invited to stay on and give secretarial and other help to Pope Damasus. Among the services which Damasus asked him to perform was the revision of the existing Latin Bible—a necessary service, because of the unsatisfactory condition of the text (according to Jerome himself, there were almost as many different forms of text as there were copies). Between 382 and 384 he produced a new Latin version of the four gospels and a revision of the Latin Psalter (for which he had recourse not only to the best accessible manuscripts of the Septuagint but also to Aquila’s Greek translation). This revision of the Psalter, the ‘Roman Psalter’ (as it is called to distinguish it from his later ‘Gallican Psalter’ and ‘Hebrew Psalter’), is held by many to be the version of the Psalter still used in St Peter’s basilica in Rome.
Damasus died in 384. Jerome may have been encouraged to think of himself as a possible successor, but mercifully (for the church’s sake and for his own) he was not elected, and soon afterwards he left Rome for good. After two years’ pilgrim journeys in the Near East, he settled in Bethlehem, where he established a monastery for himself and spent the rest of his life in biblical study and other literary activity.
To begin with, he planned to continue revising the Latin Old Testament by reference to the Septuagint. He produced a further revision of the Psalms, for which he availed himself of Origen’s Hexapla at Caesarea (this ‘Gallican Psalter’, as it is called, is the version of the Psalter reproduced to this day in editions of the Latin Vulgate). But he soon became convinced that the only satisfactory way to translate the Old Testament was to cut loose from the Septuagint and work from the original Hebrew—the ‘Hebrew verity’, as he called it. Accordingly, he gave himself to this task and completed the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Latin in 405. This work included a further version of the Psalter, the ‘Hebrew Psalter’, a rendering direct from the original; religious conservatism, however, preferred to go on using the more familiar wording based on the Septuagint.
For this work Jerome needed to perfect his knowledge of Hebrew, and did not hesitate to rely on the help of Jewish teachers. Of these he mentions three: a Jew from Tiberias who helped him with the translation of Chronicles; one from Lydda, ‘reputed to be the highest standing among the Hebrews’, whom he hired to help him to understand the book of Job; and Bar Anina, who came to him by night at Bethlehem ‘like another Nicodemus’ (fearing the disapproval of his fellow-Jews if he were known to give this kind of assistance to a Christian) to give him lessons in Hebrew. Jerome’s dependence on Jewish instructors increased the suspicion of some of his Christian critics who were put off in any case by such an innovation as a translation of the sacred writings from Hebrew (with its implied disparagement of the divinely-inspired Septuagint).
Jerome’s study of the Hebrew Bible quickly made him aware of the question of the ‘Septuagintal plus’. The first books which he translated from Hebrew were Samuel and Kings, and in his prologue to their translation (the ‘Helmeted Prologue’, as he called it) he set out the principles on which he proposed to work. He begins by enumerating the books of the Hebrew Bible. He knows the Jewish reckoning of the total as twenty-four (comparable, he says, with the twenty-four elders of the Apocalypse), but he prefers to reckon them as twenty-two (taking Ruth With Judges and Lamentations with Jeremiah), corresponding to the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet. Or, if allowance be made for the five letters which have special final forms, the total could be reckoned as twenty-seven (Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah and Jeremiah-Lamentations being split into two books each).
Then he goes on:
Whatever falls outside these must be set apart among the Apocrypha. Therefore Wisdom, which is commonly entitled Solomon’s, with the book of Jesus the son of Sirach, Judith, Tobias and the Shepherd are not in the canon. I have found the first book of Maccabees in Hebrew; the second is in Greek, as may be proved from the language itself.
It is strange to find the Shepherd listed among the Old Testament Apocrypha. But Jerome’s use of the term ‘Apocrypha’ calls for comment. Athanasius had distinguished three categories of books: canonical, edifying (but not canonical) and apocryphal. The ‘edifying’ books (the Wisdom of Solomon and of Ben Sira, Esther, Judith and Tobit, with the Didachē and the Shepherd from the New Testament age) might be read in church; the ‘apocryphal’ books were to be avoided altogether. This threefold distinction was maintained, among the Latin fathers, by Rufinus of Aquileia (c. 345–410), who referred to the second category as ‘ecclesiastical’ books. But those ‘ecclesiastical’ books are designated ‘apocryphal’ by Jerome. This term originally meant ‘hidden’; it was applicable, for example, to the seventy books which Ezra is said to have copied along with the twenty-four ‘public’ books: the seventy were to be delivered in secret to the wise among the people (4 Ezra 14:26, 46f.). But it is the usage of a word, not its etymology, that determines its meaning. Origen indeed suggests in his letter to Africanus that the story of Susanna had been ‘hidden among the Hebrews at a remote date and preserved only by the more learned and honest’; but he intends in no way to under-value Susanna. Indeed, he says, the Jewish authorities hid from the knowledge of the people any passages which contained any scandal against elders, rulers or judges, some of which have been preserved in ‘apocryphal’ writings. Tobit and Judith, he was informed by Jews, were not to be found even among the Hebrew ‘apocryphal’ books, yet they were valued and used in the church.
Jerome’s precise view on the function of the works which he relegated as ‘apocryphal’ is made clear in his prologue to ‘the three books of Solomon’ (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs):
There circulates also the ‘all-virtuous’ Wisdom of Jesus the son of Sira, together with a similar work, the pseudepigraph entitled the Wisdom of Solomon. The former of these I have also found in Hebrew, entitled not ‘Ecclesiasticus’, as among the Latins, but ‘Parables’. … The latter is nowhere found among the Hebrews: its very style smacks of Greek eloquence, and several ancient writers affirm it to be the work of Philo the Jew. Therefore as the church indeed reads Judith, Tobit and the books of Maccabees, but does not receive them among the canonical books, so let it also read these two volumes for the edification of the people but not for establishing the authority of ecclesiastical dogmas.
In his prologue to Jeremiah, Jerome points out that he has not included the book of Baruch in his version of the major prophet because it is neither read nor recognized among the Hebrews; he is prepared for the abuse that will be heaped on his failure to acknowledge it. In the prologue to his version of Daniel he points out that the current Greek form of that book is not the original work of the Seventy but Theodotion’s version—‘I do not know why,’ he adds (but if he had studied the original Septuagint version carefully and compared it with the Hebrew and Aramaic text he would have discovered why). ‘Among the Hebrews’, he says, the book of Daniel contains ‘neither the history of Susanna nor the hymn of the three young men nor the fables of Bel and the dragon’, but he has appended them to his translation of the book, he adds, ‘lest among the uninstructed we should seem to have lopped off a considerable part of the volume’. He knows the argument used by Africanus in his letter to Origen about the history of Susanna, that the play on the names of the two trees cannot have originated in Hebrew, and shows how an equally telling play on their names can be made in Latin.
He translated the book of Esther from Hebrew, but was content to add the ‘Septuagintal plus’ of the book as it stood in the Old Latin. He says that he translated Tobit and Judith from Aramaic; the other books of what he called the Apocrypha he left unrevised in their existing Latin version.
What Jerome calls the Apocrypha corresponds to Athanasius’s second category of Old Testament books, called by Rufinus and others ‘ecclesiastical books’ (i.e. books for reading in church). It is, however, a little confusing to find that Jerome sometimes uses the word ‘apocryphal’ in the sense given to it by Athanasius—of those books in Athanasius’s third category which have no place in the church. Thus he argues that in 1 Corinthians 2:9 (‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard …’) Paul is giving a free paraphrase of Isaiah 64:4, and refuses to follow those writers who ‘run after the ravings of the apocryphal books’ and find the origin of the words in the Apocalypse of Elijah. When, in prescribing a reading list for the young Paula, he says, ‘Let her avoid all apocryphal writings’, it may be works of this category that he has in mind.
But it is in no pejorative sense that Jerome has bequeathed the designation ‘Apocrypha’ for the writings of the ‘Septuagintal plus’. They are not in the canon properly speaking, he says, they may not be used for the establishment of doctrine, but they retain great ethical value which makes them suitable for reading in the course of Christian worship. What authority he had for saying that ‘the church’ received them for this purpose is not clear. But he was quite happy, not only in his earlier works but some of the latest, to quote from them with the same introductory formulae as he used when quoting from the ‘Hebrew verity’ or the New Testament books. He is capable of such obiter dicta as: ‘Ruth, Esther and Judith have been given the great honour of conferring their names on sacred volumes.’
After completing his translation, Jerome continued his biblical studies with a series of commentaries on Old Testament books; he also (and less profitably) continued his activity as a bitter controversialist, when he found a foeman worthy of his steel. He died in 420. He and Origen stand alone among early church fathers for their expertise as biblical scholars; of the two, Jerome has exercised the greater and more long-lasting influence.
AUGUSTINE
Jerome’s younger contemporary Augustine (354–430), bishop of Hippo Regius in North Africa (modern Bona in Algeria) from 395 until his death, ‘the greatest man that ever wrote Latin’, was strong where Jerome was weak (in his power as a theological thinker) and weak where Jerome was strong (in linguistic training). He appreciated many aspects of Jerome’s work, but lacked his sensitivity for the ‘Hebrew verity’ (having no Hebrew himself). The two men maintained a friendly correspondence with each other. In one letter (sent in 403) Augustine expresses a strong desire that Jerome would provide a (new) Latin translation of the Septuagint rather than of the Hebrew text, for if his translation from the Hebrew is adopted by the Latin-speaking churches, discrepancies will arise between their usage and that of the Greek churches, in which the Septuagint will naturally continue to be read. He adds that even in Latin-speaking churches too much innovation in rendering may cause disorder: a riot broke out in one North African church, he says, when the bishop, reading Jonah 4:6, called the plant which shaded Jonah from the sun an ‘ivy’ (Lat. hedera), in accordance with Jerome’s new version, and not a ‘gourd’ (cucurbita), the term to which they were accustomed. The bishop was forced to change the rendering so as not to lose his congregation. Jerome replied at length, defending his practice and his interpretation with regard to this and other scriptures.
Nevertheless Augustine acknowledged that an acquaintance with both Hebrew and Greek was necessary in order to understand the scriptures properly, and especially (where the Old Testament was concerned) an acquaintance with Hebrew. Translations from Hebrew are few, but translations from Greek are two-a-penny. ‘For, in the earliest days of the faith, when a Greek manuscript came into anyone’s hands and he thought he possessed a little facility in both languages [i.e. Greek and Latin], he ventured to make a translation.’
Augustine himself has left an explicit statement on the limits of the canon of scripture, it is contained, he says, in the following books:
Five books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.
One book of Joshua the son of Nun, one of Judges, one short book called Ruth, which seems rather to belong to the beginning of Kings; next, four books of Kings and two of Chronicles—these last not following consecutively but running parallel, so to speak, and covering the same ground…
There are other books, which appear to follow no regular order, being connected neither with the order of the preceding books nor with one another, such as Job, Tobias, Esther and Judith, the two books of Maccabees and the two of Esdras [i.e. Ezra and Nehemiah]: these last seem to be rather a sequel to the continuous regular history which ends with the books of Kings and Chronicles.
Next come the prophets, in which there is one book of the Psalms of David; and three books of Solomon—Proverbs, Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes. Two books indeed, one called Wisdom and the other Ecclesiasticus, are ascribed to Solomon because of a certain resemblance of style, but the most probable opinion is that they were written by Jesus the son of Sirach. Still, they are to be numbered among the prophetical books, since they have won recognition as being authoritative.
The remainder are the books which are strictly called the Prophets. There are twelve separate books of the prophets which are joined to one another and, having never been disjoined, are reckoned as one book; the names of these prophets are Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi. Then there are the four major prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezekiel. The authority of the Old Testament is contained within the limits of these forty-four books.
Then he enumerates twenty-seven books of the New Testament as they had been enumerated by Athanasius.
It may or may not be a coincidence that the total of forty-four Old Testament books is twice the traditional twenty-two. This larger total is reached by counting the twelve Minor prophets separately (even if, as he says, they were traditionally ‘reckoned as one book’) and adding the ‘apocryphal’ books (as Jerome called them). The additions to Esther and Daniel are included in the books to which they are attached. Lamentations, Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah (which in the Latin Bible is counted as the sixth chapter of Baruch) are included with Jeremiah.
Augustine’s classification of the books is interesting; so are some of his comments on individual books, such as his remark that Ruth is rather a prologue to the four books of Kings (i.e. Samuel-Kings) than an appendix to Judges (this, no doubt, because it gives the ancestry of King David).
Augustine did not ignore completely the differences between the Hebrew text and the Septuagint, The latter, he had no doubt, was produced by seventy wise men, as the legend said, and as each of these was divinely inspired their united witness must be reckoned weightier than that of one man, even if that one man were so learned as Jerome. When there were differences between the two forms of text, whether additions, omissions or changes of wording, the student should consider their significance. Thus, according to the Hebrew text, Jonah proclaimed in Nineveh, ‘Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.’ (Jon. 3:4); according to the Septuagint, he said, ‘Yet three days …’. Augustine supposed that Jonah actually said ‘forty days’ (which might make the reader think of the forty days’ appearances of the risen Christ, according to Acts 1:3); the seventy translators, equally by the Spirit of God, said ‘three days’, in which the sensitive reader will recognize an allusion to Christ’s resurrection on the third day. As, then, the apostles themselves drew their prophetic testimonies from the Hebrew and the Septuagint alike, so Augustine concludes that ‘both sources should be employed as authoritative, since both are one, and both are inspired by God’.
CHURCH COUNCILS
Augustine’s ruling supplied a powerful precedent for the western church from his own day to the Reformation and beyond.
In 393 a church council held in Augustine’s see of Hippo laid down the limits of the canonical books along the lines approved by Augustine himself. The proceedings of this council have been lost but they were summarized in the proceedings of the Third Council of Carthage (397), a provincial council. These appear to have been the first church councils to make a formal pronouncement on the canon, When they did so, they did not impose any innovation on the churches; they simply endorsed what had become the general consensus of the churches of the west and of the greater part of the east. In 405 Pope Innocent I embodied a list of canonical books in a letter addressed to Exsuperius, bishop of Toulouse; it too included the Apocrypha. The Sixth Council of Carthage (419) re-enacted the ruling of the Third Council, again with the inclusion of the apocryphal books.
What is commonly called the Gelasian decree on books which are to be received and not received takes its name from Pope Gelasius (492–496). It gives a list of biblical books as they appeared in the Vulgate, with the Apocrypha interspersed among the others. In some manuscripts, indeed, it is attributed to Pope Damasus, as though it had been promulgated by him at the Council of Rome in 382. But actually it appears to have been a private compilation drawn up somewhere in Italy in the early sixth century.
Victor, bishop of Rome towards the end of the second century, is said to have been the first Roman bishop to write in Latin (Jerome, On Illustrious Men, 34). The first Christian treatise in Latin to have survived is Novatian, On the Trinity (written shortly before ad 250). In this treatise all the christological proof-texts are drawn from the Old Testament.
The ‘books’ in the possession of the Scillitan martyrs (c. ad 180) along with the letters of Paul may have been parts of the Old Testament; see pp. 183f.
On Women’s Dress, 1.3.
See below, p. 85 (on 1 Enoch).
The line ‘Evil communications corrupt good manners’ (av/kjv) comes from Menander’s comedy Thais; it had probably passed into general circulation as a proverbial saying (like so many lines from Shakespeare).
Wisdom 1:1 is ascribed to Solomon in Prescription, 7, and in Against the Valentinians, 2.
Letter of Jeremiah 3 (Baruch 6:3) is ascribed to Jeremiah in Scorpion Antidote, 8.5.
See references to Dan. 3:49f. (LXX) in On Prayer, 29.1, to Dan. 3:58–79 in Against Hermogenes, 44.4, to Dan. 3:52–68 in Against Marcion, 5.11.1.
See references in On Idolatry, 17f., in On Fasting, 7.
Judith 8:4, in On Monogamy, 17; 1 Macc. 2:41, in Answer to the Jews, 4.
See p. 47, n. 11. Its Christian prologue (chapters 1, 2) and epilogue (chapters 15, 16) are sometimes designated 5 and 6 Esdras (Ezra) respectively. When God says in 4 Ezra 7:28 that ‘my Son the Messiah’ will be revealed and then, after 400 years, die, this is the expected Messiah of David’s line (4 Ezra 12:32) but has nothing to do with the Christian Messiah (even if the Latin version calls him ‘Jesus’ in 4 Ezra 7:28).
See p. 36.
See p. 51. Since Enoch (whose name in Hebrew may mean ‘initiated’) was translated from earth to heaven (Gen. 5:24; cf. Heb. 11:5), he was envisaged as a suitable recipient of special revelations. Two other collections of Enoch literature are 2 Enoch (the Book of the Secrets of Enoch), composed in Greek but extant only in a Slavonic version, and 3 Enoch (also called the ‘Hebrew Enoch’ or the Book of the Palaces), a work of Jewish mysticism. All three are translated, with introductions, in J. H. Charlesworth (ed.), The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, I (Garden City, N. Y., 1983), pp. 5–315.
E.g. Clement of Alexandria and Origen (see pp. 75, 191).
See p. 193.
Azaz’el appears in Lev. 16:8, 10, 26, as the being to whom the scapegoat was dedicated on the annual day of atonement.
Tertullian, On Women’s Dress, 1.3.
Compare Justin Martyr’s charge (p. 66).
At the end of the Parables of Enoch Enoch is transported to ‘the heaven of heavens’ and told by an angel, ‘You are that Son of Man’ (1 Enoch 71:14).
They are edited and translated by J. J. Collins in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. Charlesworth, I, pp. 317–472.
To the Nations, 2.12.
Sibylline Oracle, 3.108–111.
The David reference may be to Ps. 102:26 (cf. Heb. 1:11f.); the Sibyl reference is to Oracle 2.196–213, which describes the destruction of the universe in the final conflagration (cf. 2 Pet. 3:10–12).
Cyprian in Testimonies against the Jews, 2.6 (quoting Baruch 3:35–37), Hilary, On the Trinity, 4.42:5.39 (quoting the same passage); Ambrose, On the Faith, 1.3.28 (quoting the same passage), On Penitence, 1.9.43 (quoting Baruch 3:1f.).
Jerome, Apology against Rufinus, 1.16, 30.
It was at this time that he had his vision of the day of judgment in which he was charged with being a Ciceronian rather than a Christian (Epistle 22.30).
See p. 97.
Epistle Prefatory to the Gospels (addressed to Damasus).
Epistle 32.1; 36.12.
Epistle 45.3.
Epistle 106.9; Apology against Rufinus, 2.33.
Similarly the Great Bible version of the Psalms (1539), naturally used in the Edwardian editions of the Book of Common Prayer (1549, 1552), was not replaced by the superior av/kjv rendering when the Prayer Book was repromulgated in 1662, but remains in use to this day.
Prologue to Chronicles (translation from the Septuagint).
Prologue to Job.
Epistle 84.3.
For example, Rufinus, who had formerly been a friend of Jerome’s but ceased to be so after Jerome’s criticisms of his translation of Origen, accused him of hiring help from the ‘synagogue of Satan’; the authority of the Seventy, he said, inspired by the Holy Spirit and confirmed by the apostles, cannot be overthrown by the authority of one man ‘under the inspiration of Barabbas’ (Apology against Jerome, 2.30, 33).
Prologus galeatus, because it stood in front of his translation to defend the principles on which he carried it out.
So also in the prologue to Daniel he says: ‘I point out that, among the Hebrews, Daniel is not included among the Prophets but among those who composed the Hagiographa (sacred writings). By them all scripture is divided into three parts, the Law, the Prophets and the Hagiographa—that is, into five plus eight plus eleven books’.
In this reckoning the third division comprises nine, not eleven books, which Jerome enumerates thus: Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Daniel, Chronicles (for which the Latin Bible took over the Greek title Paraleipomena), Ezra-Nehemiah (in the Latin Bible, 1 and 2 Esdras), Esther.
Jerome follows the Greek spelling Sirach (see p. 31).
In the Greek Bible Tobit is the father (after whom the book is named), Tobias is the son. In the Latin Bible both father and son (and book) are commonly called Tobias.
The Hebrew text has disappeared, but may occasionally be discerned behind the translation-Greek. For the title of the Hebrew book see p. 74 with n. 26.
See p. 46.
See p. 166.
Rufinus, On the Creed, 38: ‘our fathers’, he says, ‘called them “ecclesiastical”.’ A generation earlier, Hilary of Poitiers (c. 315–367) follows Origen’s list when enumerating the Old Testament books (Tractates on the Psalms, introduction, 15) but in his writings generally cites the ‘Septuagintal plus’ in much the same terms as the books found in the Hebrew Bible.
See p. 36.
Letter to Africanus, 12 (see p. 76).
Letter to Africanus, 9.
Letter to Africanus, 13. See R. T. Beckwith, The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church: p. 325, n. 30.
This adjective (Gk. panaretos) was applied to the wisdom literature generally (see p. 71 with n. 11).
One should beware of translating Jerome’s words here as though they meant ‘another pseudepigraph entitled the Wisdom of Solomon’. Jerome must not be suspected of supposing that Ben Sira’s wisdom book was ascribed to another than its real author.
A substantial part of the Hebrew text has survived.
See p. 166 with n. 23.
The original Septuagint version of Daniel is a free and interpretative rendering; Theodotion’s version follows the Hebrew and Aramaic text more closely (see p. 000). About half of Daniel (2:4b–7:28) is in Aramaic; the rest is in Hebrew. Other parts of the Old Testament which have Aramaic, not Hebrew, as their original text are Ezra 4:8–6:18; 7:12–26; Jer. 10:11.
He was charged with doing this very thing by Rufinus (Apology against Jerome, 2.33).
Thus the reply ‘under a holm-oak (sub ilice) could meet with the riposte ‘you will perish forthwith’ (ilico); ‘under a mastic tree’ (sub lentisco) could be countered with ‘may the angel crush you into seeds’ (in lentem).
Portions of Tobit in both Aramaic and Hebrew have been identified among the fragments from Qumran Cave 4. The Semitic original of Judith is no longer extant.
No doubt he has Origen in mind, though he does not name him; Origen gives this as the source of the quotation in his Commentary on Matthew (on 27:9). See also p. 162 with nn. 8, 9.
Epistle 107.12.
Epistle 65.1.
On Jerome see P. W. Skehan, ‘St Jerome and the Canon of the Holy Scriptures’ in A Monument of St Jerome, ed. F. X. Murphy (New York, 1952); also E. F. Sutcliffe, ‘St Jerome’s Pronunciation of Hebrew’, Biblica 29 (1948), pp. 112–125; ‘St Jerome’s Hebrew Manuscripts’, Biblica 29 (1948), pp. 195–204; ‘Jerome’, CHB II (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 80–101; W. H. Semple, ‘St Jerome as a Biblical Translator’, BJRL 48 (1965–66), pp. 227–243; J. Barr, ‘St Jerome’s Appreciation of Hebrew’, BJRL 49 (1966–67), pp. 281–302; J. Barr, ‘St Jerome and the Sounds of Hebrew’, Journal of Semitic Studies 12 (1967), pp. 1–36; H. F. D. Sparks, ‘Jerome as Biblical Scholar’, CHB I (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 510–541; J. N. D. Kelly, Jerome (London, 1975).
A. Souter, The Earliest Latin Commentaries on the Epistles of St Paul (Oxford, 1927), p. 139; ‘For me, at least’, said Souter in the same sentence, ‘he is the greatest Christian since New Testament times.’
Augustine, Epistle 71 = Jerome, Epistle 104. Augustine had made the same request to Jerome eight or nine years previously (Epistle 28.2 = Jerome, Epistle 56.2). Cf. Augustine, Epistle 81.34f.
Jerome, Epistle 112 = Augustine, Epistle 75.
On Christian Learning. 2.16.
In his Retractations 2.2 Augustine withdraws his mention of Jesus Ben Sira as author of Wisdom.
In his Retractations 2.3 Augustine acknowledges that this customary use of ‘Old Testament’ has no apostolic authority; the one biblical instance of the expression (2 Cor. 3:14) refers to the covenant at Sinai.
On Christian Learning, 2.13.
City of God, 18.42, 43.
City of God, 18.44. A similar argument appears in his Exposition of Ps. 87:10 (rsv 88:11), where the Hebrew reads ‘Do the shades (translated ‘giants’ in Jerome’s Hebrew Psalter) rise up to praise thee?’ but the Septuagint rendering (followed in Jerome’s Gallican Psalter) is ‘Will physicians raise them up and give thee thanks?’ Augustine’s exposition combines the ‘giants’ and the ‘physicians’. On Augustine see further S. J. Schultz, ‘Augustine and the Old Testament Canon’, eq 28 (1956), pp. 93–100; A.-M. La Bonnardière (ed.), Saint Augustin et la Bible (Paris, 1986), and (more generally) P. R. L. Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (London, 1967), and Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine (London, 1972).
See NPNF, series 2, XIV, pp. 453f.
Innocent, Epistle 6.7. His order is unusual: after the four books of ‘Kingdoms’ he continues with Ruth, the Prophets (four major and twelve minor), five books of Solomon (including Wisdom and Ben Sira), Psalms, Job, Tobit, Esther, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, 1 and 2 Esdras (= Ezra-Nehemiah), 1 and 2 Chronicles.
A critical edition was issued by E. von Dobschütz, Das Deretum Gelasianum … = TU 38.4 (Leipzig, 1912). See also C. H. Turner, ‘Latin Lists of the Canonical Books, I: The Roman Council under Damasus, ad 382’, JTS I (1899–1900), pp. 554–560; J. Chapman, ‘On the Decretum Gelasianum “De Libris recipiendis et non recipiendis” ’, Revue Bénédictine 30 (1913), pp. 187–207, 315–353; E. Schwartz, ‘Zum Decretum Gelasianum’, ZNW 29 (1930), pp. 161–168.