HistoricalChristian.Faith

The African councils of Hippo and Carthage on the Old Testament 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 · New Testament canon page
Verdict on the deuterocanon: YES — the first conciliar affirmation of the longer Old Testament. A generation after Athanasius's Festal Letter ranked Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, and Sirach a tier below the canon, the North-African synods gathered around Augustine and Aurelius of Carthage — Hippo in 393, Carthage in 397, reaffirmed at Carthage in 419 — list those books flatly among the canonical Scriptures. Tobit, Judith, the two books of Maccabees, and the deuterocanonical Wisdom books (folded into "the five books of Solomon") stand without qualification in the canon-list a church council promulgates for the first time. This is the Western counterpart to Athanasius's Eastern list — but where his "No" graded the disputed books down, the African "Yes" levels them up, and so plants the seed of the later Old-Testament dispute that runs to Florence, Trent, and the Reformation.

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, its Old-Testament catalogue runs out the longer Septuagint reckoning, with the disputed books set among the protocanonical ones rather than ranked below them: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.

So Tobit, Judith, and the two books of Maccabees are named outright in the canon, and the two great deuterocanonical Wisdom books — the Wisdom of Solomon and Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) — are carried in the entry "the five books of Solomon" (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Wisdom, and Sirach). The boundary Athanasius had drawn in the East in 367, ranking exactly these books "not… in the Canon, but appointed by the Fathers to be read," is here erased: a council places them in it.²

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. Its Old Testament keeps the whole deuterocanon in place:³

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.

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 refer their settled list to Rome rather than receive it thence: a boundary being acknowledged, not legislated.³

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 weight at Hippo is not inferred but recorded: by his own Retractations, it was there — "in presence of the bishops, who gave me orders to that effect, and who were holding a plenary Council of the whole of Africa at Hippo-Regius" — that he, "as presbyter," delivered the address On Faith and the Creed, a singular charge for a priest before the assembled episcopate.⁵ His own enumeration of the canon, set down in On Christian Doctrine (2.8.13, c. 397), matches the conciliar lists book for book — "Tobias, and Esther, and Judith, and the two books of Maccabees" all named among the Scriptures — 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.⁴

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 Rome's Damasine list and the Septuagint the church had always read in worship, not the moment the canon was invented. The note appended in 419, deferring the list to Rome and "the Church beyond the sea" for confirmation, shows a boundary being acknowledged.
• The fault line opens here. Where Athanasius (367) had set Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, and Tobit in a second rank — "read" but "not in the canon" — and Jerome (c. 390) would soon set them "among the apocrypha," the African lists place Tobit, Judith, the two books of Maccabees, and the Wisdom books 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.
• The same witness, two doctrines. This page treats the African councils' verdict on the disputed Old-Testament books; the parallel New Testament canon page treats the same synods' ratification of the twenty-seven-book New Testament (with Carthage still setting Hebrews a half-step apart from Paul's thirteen). Both rest on the one canon-list of Hippo 393, re-enacted at Carthage.
• 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," part of the cluster of legends (with the Nicaea-counted-Judith report and the Damasine list) that retrospectively pin a settled canon to a council that left no such act in its own records.

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