HistoricalChristian.Faith

Jerome's Preface to Judith — did the Council of Nicaea count Judith among the Scriptures?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: weak — Jerome's remark that Judith "is found by the Nicene Council to have been counted among the number of the Sacred Scriptures" is read by Rudolph Cornely as proof that the council of 325 enumerated the sacred books in a decree, deuterocanon and all. This is the strongest of his three props — a real and early text, not an obscure phrase or a lone late codex — but it will not carry a promulgated canon-list. Jerome's hedged "is found to have been counted" attests at most that the council used or appealed to Judith as Scripture in its deliberations; he never cites a Nicene catalogue, the council's own twenty canons say nothing of Scripture, and Jerome himself — in the same prefaces — rules Judith out of the canon, which he could not do had he understood Nicaea to have decreed it in. The modest reading (Nicaea cited Judith in argument) is plausible; the decree-reading is weak · earliest form: Jerome, Preface to Judith (c. 405)

Related arguments: the scholarly case for a Nicene canon-action — see also the Vallicellian "Nicaea" heading on Hippo's canon 36 · Cassiodorus's Institutiones I.14 (Cornely's weakest prop). See also the popular Nicene-canon legend — the popular form of the same claim (Dan Brown's decided-at-Nicaea legend and the altar-ordeal miracle), both unsupported. This page weighs the narrower, genuinely scholarly question those pages set aside: whether the council, in passing, took up or recognized a particular disputed book.

This argument isolates the one early text ever adduced for a real Nicene action on the canon — Jerome's Preface to Judith — as marshaled by the Catholic introduction-scholar Rudolph Cornely.

The claim

"But since the Nicene Council is considered to have counted this book among the number of sacred Scriptures, I have acquiesced to your request."

— Jerome, Preface to Judith (c. 405), in Andrew S. Jacobs's translation; another common rendering reads "because this book is found by the Nicene Council to have been counted among the number of the Sacred Scriptures."¹ In the preface Jerome explains that he had been reluctant to translate Judith — among the Hebrews it stands "among the Hagiographa," a book "of less" authority "toward confirming those which have come into contention" — and that he set the work aside, but took it up at his correspondents' urging because of what he reports the Nicene synod to have done with it. On this single sentence Rudolph Cornely (S.J.) builds the case that the Council of Nicaea (325) did, in fact, take up the canon: that it enumerated the sacred books "in a decree" and counted at least one deuterocanonical book — Judith — among them. The interpretation is the sober, scholarly cousin of the popular legend that Nicaea fixed the whole Bible — not a voted "new Bible," but a genuine conciliar enumeration of Scripture in 325.

Who advances it

The proponent. Rudolph Cornely (1830–1908), the Jesuit author of the standard nineteenth-century Catholic Introductio to Scripture, cites Jerome's words as "clear" testimony that the synod of Nicaea enumerated the sacred books and received a deuterocanonical work into the count. This Judith-preface is the first and strongest of three props Cornely marshals for a Nicene canon-action; the other two — an obscure phrase in Cassiodorus that groups "the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon" with the Fathers who "fitted the sacred books to the mysteries by their divisions," and an eighth/ninth-century codex (Vallicelliana B.58) that prefaces the Council of Hippo's canon-36 with the heading "Chapter XXIV of the Council of Nicaea" — are weaker, and are weighed on their own pages.²

The adversaries. Against Cornely stand the Catholic introduction-scholar A. E. Breen and the conciliar historian Karl Joseph von Hefele, who read the same sentence as evidence, at most, of a viva voce use of Judith in the council's deliberations — a book quoted or appealed to as Scripture in argument — not of a promulgated canon-list. Breen offers the instructive parallel of the Council of Ephesus (431), which implicitly acknowledged the epistle to the Hebrews by resting Cyril's anathemas on it, without ever decreeing a New Testament canon.³

The evidence for

What the claim has going for it. Three things, and they are not nothing.

1. An early and well-placed witness. Jerome wrote c. 405, only eighty years after Nicaea, and was the Latin Church's foremost master of the canon and of the difference between the Hebrew veritas and the wider Greek Bible. When such a man reports that the council "counted" Judith among the Scriptures, the report carries weight.

2. He stakes a decision on it. Jerome does not mention the council in passing: he gives its action as his reason for overcoming his own reluctance to render a book he otherwise ranked below the canon. He treats the Nicene precedent as real and binding enough to change what he does.

3. The claim is genuinely old. Whatever its truth, the notion that Nicaea said something about Judith's standing was already current in the early fifth century — it is not a late Byzantine or Enlightenment invention, unlike the altar-ordeal form of the broader legend.

Adversarial assessment

What holds. There is a real text here. Unlike Cornely's other two props — the "obscure words" of Cassiodorus and a heading surviving in a single late codex — Jerome's sentence genuinely connects Nicaea with the standing of Judith, and it is early. That something was said at the council touching this book is a fair inference from it.

What fails — the leap from that to a promulgated Nicene canon-decree.

1. The phrasing is a received report, not a citation. Jerome writes that the book "is read / is found to have been counted" (legitur) by the council — the grammar of "it is said," not of a man quoting a canon he has before him. Nowhere in his vast writing on the canon does he cite or reproduce a Nicene catalogue of Scripture. A second-hand "it is reported that the synod counted it" is a thin foundation for an enacted list.

2. At most it attests a use, not a decree. The natural sense is that the council, in its deliberations, quoted or appealed to Judith as Scripture — the ordinary conciliar handling of a book, which leaves behind no canon-list. A synod's use of a book is not a synod's decree fixing the canon: Ephesus (431) rested Cyril's anathemas on Hebrews without ever promulgating a New Testament canon, and no one infers from that an Ephesine canon-decree. So with Nicaea and Judith.

3. Jerome himself rules Judith out of the canon — in the same body of prefaces. This is decisive. In his "helmeted" preface (the Prologus Galeatus to Samuel and Kings) Jerome lists "Wisdom … the book of Jesus, the Son of Sirach, and Judith, and Tobias, and the Shepherd" as "not in the canon," to be "placed amongst the Apocryphal writings"; and in his preface to the Books of Solomon he writes that "the Church reads Judith, Tobit, and the books of Maccabees, but does not admit them among the canonical Scriptures." A man who reports a Nicene decree counting Judith canonical, yet in the very same prefaces excludes Judith from the canon, cannot have taken the council to have promulgated a binding canon-list — for then he would be openly defying a general synod. The contradiction dissolves only on the lighter reading: Nicaea used Judith as Scripture in argument; Jerome relays that as the occasion of his translating it, while still keeping it out of the strict canon. Cornely's decree-reading cannot absorb this; the viva voce reading explains it exactly.⁴

4. The council's own acts are silent. The twenty surviving canons of Nicaea and the synodal letter concern the Arian and Melitian schisms, the lapsed, the date of Easter, and clerical discipline — not one touches the canon of Scripture, still less an enumeration including the deuterocanon. An enacted canon-list that left no trace in the council's own acts is hard to credit.⁵

5. No other Nicene father reflects such a decree — Athanasius least of all. Athanasius, who was at Nicaea, in his Festal Letter 39 (367) expressly places Judith among the books "not indeed included in the Canon, but appointed by the Fathers to be read" — the opposite of a canonical ruling — and other fourth-century canon-lists (Hilary, Gregory of Nazianzus, the Laodicean list) omit Judith likewise. Had the council decreed Judith canonical, the council's own leading men would not be cataloguing against it forty years later. Hefele accordingly treats the very idea of a Nicene canon-decree as a later misattribution, explaining — on Cornely's cognate Hippo evidence — that because the Nicene canons always stood at the head of the early conciliar corpus, later material was repeatedly mislabelled "of Nicaea."⁶

6. Even sympathetic readers concede the limit. A modern Catholic treatment that takes Jerome's remark seriously still grants that it "does not prove that the First Nicaea dealt with the canon, but it does show that the claim that it did was around in St. Jerome's day" — which is precisely the boundary the evidence sets.⁷

Assessment

Weak. The interpretation Cornely builds on the Judith-preface — that Nicaea enacted or enumerated a canon of Scripture, deuterocanon included — does not hold on its best available case. It is the strongest of his three props, because it rests on a real and early text rather than an obscure phrase or a lone late codex; but Jerome's hedged "is found to have been counted" attests at most that the council used or appealed to Judith as Scripture in its deliberations, not that it published a canon-list — and Jerome himself, who in the same prefaces rules Judith out of the canon, cannot have read it as a binding decree. The council's silent acts and the canon-lists of the other Nicene fathers, Athanasius among them, leave no trace of such an enactment. What the text will bear — that Nicaea cited Judith as Scripture in argument — is a plausible and modest claim; the decree-reading Cornely needs is weak. (The popular form of the claim — that Nicaea fixed the whole Bible — is weaker still: unsupported.)

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