HistoricalChristian.Faith

The African councils of Hippo and Carthage on the Biblical Canon

Dates: 393 (the Synod of Hippo, canon 36) · 397 (the Third Council of Carthage, re-enacting the Hippo list) · reaffirmed 419 (the Code of Canons of the African Church, canon 24) · Wikipedia
Summary: A generation after Athanasius's Festal Letter, the boundary is for the first time drawn by a council. The North-African synods gathered around Augustine and Aurelius of Carthage — Hippo in 393, Carthage in 397, reaffirmed at Carthage in 419 — each enact the rule "that besides the Canonical Scriptures nothing be read in church under the name of divine Scripture," and then list the books. The New Testament is exactly the present twenty-seven (Carthage still setting Hebrews a half-step apart from Paul's thirteen), and the Old Testament is the longer Septuagint canon — Tobit, Judith, two books of Maccabees, and the Wisdom books listed flatly among the Scriptures, where Athanasius a generation earlier had ranked them a tier below. These are regional councils ratifying a reception already settled, not ecumenical decrees that created it — the Western counterpart of Athanasius's Eastern list, and the seed of the later Old-Testament dispute over the deuterocanon.

Claims & evidence

Hippo (393), canon 36 — the first conciliar canon-list

The acts of the Synod of Hippo of 393 are mostly lost, but its canons survive in the Breviarium Hipponense, the abstract read back into the record and adopted at Carthage in 397. Its thirty-sixth canon is the earliest list of the biblical books promulgated by a church council. After the governing rule it runs out the Old and New Testaments together:¹

Item, that besides the Canonical Scriptures nothing be read in church under the name of divine Scripture.

But the Canonical Scriptures are as follows: Genesis. Exodus. Leviticus. Numbers. Deuteronomy. Joshua the Son of Nun. The Judges. Ruth. The Kings, iv. books. The Chronicles, ij. books. Job. The Psalter. The Five books of Solomon. The Twelve Books of the Prophets. Isaiah. Jeremiah. Ezechiel. Daniel. Tobit. Judith. Esther. Ezra, ij. books. Macchabees, ij. books.

The New Testament. The Gospels, iv. books. The Acts of the Apostles, j. book. The Epistles of Paul, xiv. The Epistles of Peter, the Apostle, ij. The Epistles of John the Apostle, iij. The Epistles of James the Apostle, j. The Epistle of Jude the Apostle, j. The Revelation of John, j. book.

The New-Testament total is the full twenty-seven — the four Gospels, Acts, fourteen Pauline letters (Hebrews here folded into the count, as Origen, Cyril, and Athanasius also reckon it), the seven Catholic Epistles, and the Apocalypse, the book the Greek churches had longest doubted and Cyril of Jerusalem had still omitted in 350. The boundary Athanasius had drawn in the East in 367 is now ratified in the West by a council.

Carthage (397), and the reaffirmation of 419

Four years later the Third Council of Carthage re-enacted the Hippo canon, in a list that differs only in detail — most tellingly in keeping Hebrews a half-step apart, "thirteen Epistles of the Apostle Paul" and then "one epistle of the same [writer] to the Hebrews," the lingering Western hesitation over its authorship that Athanasius's "fourteen of Paul" had dissolved:²

It was also determined that besides the Canonical Scriptures nothing be read in the Church under the title of divine Scriptures. The Canonical Scriptures are these: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua the son of Nun, Judges, Ruth, four books of Kings, two books of Paraleipomena, Job, the Psalter, five books of Solomon, the books of the twelve prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezechiel, Daniel, Tobit, Judith, Esther, two books of Esdras, two books of the Maccabees. Of the New Testament: four books of the Gospels, one book of the Acts of the Apostles, thirteen Epistles of the Apostle Paul, one epistle of the same [writer] to the Hebrews, two Epistles of the Apostle Peter, three of John, one of James, one of Jude, one book of the Apocalypse of John.

The same canon was read into the record once more at the council of Carthage of 419 (the assembly whose collected canons became the Code of Canons of the African Church), where the list appears as canon 24 with a closing note that "this be made known also to our brother and fellow-priest Boniface" — Boniface I, bishop of Rome 418–422 — and that the "Church beyond the sea" be consulted to confirm it, the African bishops referring their settled list to Rome rather than receiving it thence.²

The theological hand behind the lists: Augustine

The driving figure of the African synods was Augustine, a priest at Hippo in 393 and bishop by 397. His own enumeration of the canon, set down in On Christian Doctrine (2.8.13, c. 397), matches the conciliar lists book for book, including the deuterocanon, and states the criterion the councils enact — to "prefer those that are received by all the catholic churches to those which some do not receive," weighing a book by the breadth and antiquity of its reception. The councils are the conciliar form of the reception-criterion the Fathers had been applying all along.³

Notes

• Ratification, not creation. Hippo and Carthage are regional African synods, not ecumenical councils, and their canon is introduced as a rule for what may be "read in church" — a confirmation of a reception already in hand, the Western echo of Athanasius's Eastern list of 367, not the moment the canon was invented. They no more decreed the New Testament into being than Nicaea had; the very note appended in 419, deferring the list to Rome and "the Church beyond the sea" for confirmation, shows a boundary being acknowledged, not legislated. This is the same point Eusebius's and Athanasius's testimony makes against the Nicene-canon legend.
• The Old Testament here is the longer canon. Where Athanasius (367) had set Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, Tobit, and Esther in a second rank — "read" but "not in the canon" — the African lists place Tobit, Judith, the two books of Maccabees, and the Wisdom books (the "five books of Solomon") flatly among the canonical Scriptures. This is the seed of the later Old-Testament dispute: the Septuagint-based African/Augustinian canon against the twenty-two-book Hebrew canon Jerome and Athanasius preferred, the fault line that runs to the deuterocanon's contested status at the Reformation and Trent. (That dispute is the subject of a separate Old-Testament-canon thread, not weighed here.)
• The list a later codex would mislabel "of Nicaea." It is precisely this African list — Hippo's canon 36, reaffirmed at Carthage — that a lone eighth/ninth-century manuscript (Vallicelliana B.58) heads "Chapter XXIV of the Council of Nicaea," the slip on which a modern argument tries to make Nicaea the source of the wider canon. The list under that rubric is the securely-dated African canon, not a Nicene one, as weighed at The Council of Hippo's canon 36 under a "Nicaea" heading.

Sources