HistoricalChristian.Faith

The Council of Rome on the Biblical Canon

Dates: 382 (the Roman synod under Pope Damasus I; the canon-list ascribed to it — the "Damasine list" — survives only in the later Decretum Gelasianum) · Wikipedia
Summary: A real synod met at Rome in 382 under Damasus, and a canon-list running out the present twenty-seven-book New Testament and the longer Septuagint Old Testament is traditionally ascribed to it. But that list — the "Damasine list" — is transmitted in no fourth-century document; it survives only as a chapter of the Decretum Gelasianum, which critical scholarship dates to the sixth century and which this timeline places c. 500. So Rome (382) is best read not as the moment the canon was decreed, but as the probable Western reception of the canon a decade before Hippo put it into conciliar form — a witness whose date is secure and whose canon-act is contested.

Claims & evidence

The "Damasine list" — the all-27 New Testament and the longer Old Testament

The canon-list ascribed to the Roman synod of 382 stands as the second chapter of the Decretum Gelasianum. After the Old Testament — given in the longer Septuagint form, with Wisdom, Sirach, Tobit, Judith, and the two books of Maccabees set among the books — it runs out the New Testament in full:¹

Likewise the order of the Scriptures of the New Testament, which the holy and catholic Roman church supports and venerates: Four books of the Gospels: according to Matthew, according to Mark, according to Luke, according to John. Likewise the Acts of the Apostles. The letters of the apostle Paul in number fourteen: to the Romans, to the Corinthians two letters, to the Ephesians, to the Thessalonians two letters, to the Galatians, to the Philippians, to the Colossians, to Timothy two letters, to Titus, to Philemon, to the Hebrews. Likewise the Apocalypse of John. Likewise the canonical letters in number seven: of the apostle Peter two letters, of the apostle James one letter, of the apostle John one letter, of the other John the elder two letters, of the apostle Jude the Zealot one letter. Here ends the canon of the New Testament.

The New-Testament total is the present twenty-seven — the four Gospels, Acts, fourteen Pauline letters (Hebrews folded in, as Origen, Cyril, and Athanasius also reckon it), seven Catholic Epistles, and the Apocalypse. In content it is the Western canon as the late fourth century received it, the same list Hippo would promulgate in 393 — and, on the Old-Testament side, the longer Septuagint canon the African councils would also affirm against the twenty-two-book Hebrew reckoning Athanasius and Jerome preferred.

A real synod — but a contested canon-act

That a synod met at Rome in 382 under Damasus is not in doubt: convened in the aftermath of the Council of Constantinople (381) and occupied chiefly with the Antiochene/Meletian schism, it is the synod to which Jerome — newly arrived in Rome that year, soon Damasus's secretary — twice refers in passing. Damasus's interest in Scripture is equally real: it was he who, in these very years, commissioned Jerome's revision of the Latin Gospels, the first installment of the Vulgate.² What is contested is whether that synod promulgated the canon-list now ascribed to it. The list appears in no independent fourth-century text; it is preserved only inside the Decretum Gelasianum, which Ernst von Dobschütz showed to be a single pseudonymous compilation of the first half of the sixth century — its opening chapter quotes a work Augustine wrote in 416, so the document as a unit cannot be a decree of 382. The attribution of its canon-chapters to a Damasan council is itself modern, first proposed by Faustino Arévalo in 1794 and edited by C. H. Turner as "The Roman Council under Damasus"; the Catholic patrologist W. A. Jurgens defends them as "authentic parts of the Acts of the Council of Rome of 382," but the textual-critical mainstream, following von Dobschütz, treats the whole Decretum as sixth-century. Tellingly, Jerome — present at Rome, the Latin Church's foremost authority on the canon, and the very writer the list depends on (it names Lamentations by his Hebrew title "Cinoth") — nowhere mentions a Roman conciliar canon, and in his own prefaces ranks Judith, Tobit, and the Maccabees below the canon. The strength and weakness of the "Rome fixed the canon in 382" claim are weighed at the argument The Council of Rome (382) and the "Damasine list" (assessment: weak).³

Notes

• Why this block is hedged. Unlike Athanasius (367), the African councils (393–419), and Innocent I (405) — whose canon-lists are securely fixed to their authors and dates — Rome's depends on a single later document and a modern attribution. It is placed on the timeline at its claimed year, 382, but framed as the probable Western reception of the canon, not its decree. The full adjudication is at the argument.
• The same document, two faces. The Decretum Gelasianum that carries this canon-list (its second chapter) also carries the long catalogue of rejected apocrypha (its fifth chapter) that appears on this timeline as the rejection-lists witness (c. 500–810). The two are chapters of one sixth-century work — which is precisely why a canon-act dated to 382 cannot be read off it without argument.
• A canon read backward onto a council. The Rome-382 claim is the close cousin of the legend that Nicaea settled the canon and of the mislabelling of Hippo's canon 36 as Nicene: a boundary already received, retrospectively pinned to a council that left no such act in its own records — the same pattern the Nicene-canon arguments document.

Sources