HistoricalChristian.Faith

Alexander of Alexandria on the Old Testament Canon

Dates: c. 321 AD (Alexander of Alexandria, also Alexander I; bishop — Pope and Patriarch — of Alexandria from 313 until his death on 17 April 326/328; the prelate who first condemned Arius and presided over the Alexandrian synod that deposed him (c. 318–321), and whose deacon and chosen successor was Athanasius. The encyclical letter to Alexander of Byzantium in which the citations below occur is dated c. 319–324; distinct from Clement and Athanasius of Alexandria) · Wikipedia
Summary: The bishop who opened the Arian controversy weaves the deuterocanonical Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) into the very texture of his christological argument. Pressing the inscrutability of the eternal generation of the Word, he chains together — in a single breath, governed by the warning “not listening to this saying” and the cap “that passage” — Sirach 3:21, the Apostle Paul (1 Corinthians 2:9), Genesis 15:5, Sirach 1:2, and Isaiah 53:8. He does not introduce the Sirach lines with the bare formula “Scripture says” (as Methodius does for Wisdom); he uses them — as authority for the limits of inquiry and as one of a string of scriptural testimonies — on the same footing as Paul, Moses, and the prophet. He compiles no canon-list, so he renders no canon-verdict; the witness is to early-fourth-century Alexandrian practice, a softer datapoint than an explicit Scripture-formula but a real one, set between Eusebius and the Council of Nicaea.

Claims & evidence

He chains Sirach 3:21 and 1:2 with Paul, Genesis, and Isaiah as scriptural testimony

In his great encyclical against Arius — the letter to Alexander, bishop of Byzantium (Constantinople) — Alexander argues that the manner of the Son’s eternal generation lies beyond human inquiry. To fence off the speculation, he marshals a chain of texts:

Wherefore I do not think that he is to be reckoned among the pious who presumes to inquire into anything beyond these things, not listening to this saying: Seek not out the things that are too hard for you, neither search the things that are above your strength. For if the knowledge of many other things that are incomparably inferior to this, are hidden from human comprehension, such as in the apostle Paul, Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God has prepared for them that love Him. As also God said to Abraham, that he could not number the stars; and that passage, Who can number the sand of the sea, and the drops of rain… How shall any one be able to investigate too curiously the subsistence of the divine Word, unless he be smitten with frenzy? Concerning which the Spirit of prophecy says, Who shall declare his generation?

— Epistles on the Arian Heresy and the Deposition of Arius, Epistle I (to Alexander of Constantinople), §5, in the Ante-Nicene Fathers translation, source.¹ Two of the chained texts are deuterocanonical. “Seek not out the things that are too hard for you, neither search the things that are above your strength” is Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) 3:21, adduced as binding authority (“not listening to this saying”) for the impiety of over-curious inquiry. “Who can number the sand of the sea, and the drops of rain” is Sirach 1:2, set as “that passage” in series with Paul’s “Eye has not seen” (1 Corinthians 2:9) and God’s word to Abraham that he could not number the stars (Genesis 15:5) — a graded ladder of things hidden from human comprehension — and capped by the prophet’s “Who shall declare his generation?” (Isaiah 53:8). The Sirach lines are not labelled or distinguished from the canonical texts they stand among; they do the same evidentiary work in the same argument.

Notes

• Use by juxtaposition, not by a Scripture-formula. Alexander does not preface the Sirach quotations with “the Scripture says” or “it is written” — the explicit canonical labels that Cyprian, Dionysius, and Methodius attach to disputed books. His witness is correspondingly softer: it rests on the seamless juxtaposition of Sirach with Paul, Moses, and Isaiah inside one doctrinal argument, and on the authority-language he does use of Sirach 3:21 (“this saying” one is impious “not listening to”). It shows what books an early-fourth-century bishop reached for as scriptural testimony, not what he would have answered had someone handed him a canon-list.
• An Alexandrian witness on the eve of Nicaea. Alexander is the bishop who began the Arian controversy and the mentor of Athanasius — whose Festal Letter 39 (367) would later place the deuterocanon among the books “not… included in the Canon, but appointed by the Fathers to be read.” That the master uses Sirach without qualification while the pupil would rank it below the canon is itself a measure of the era’s unsettled boundary, the same tension visible in his contemporary Eusebius, who transmits the Hebrew-sized lists yet cites the disputed books as Scripture.
• Use, not a canon-list. Like Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus, Tertullian, Cyprian, Dionysius, Methodius, and Lactantius, Alexander nowhere enumerates the Old-Testament books, so he renders no canon-verdict. He bears on the canon question as a witness to early-fourth-century Alexandrian practice — the datapoint weighed in the argument “Did the early church reject the deuterocanon…?” (assessed contested), against the flat claim that the primitive church did not reckon these books Scripture — with the caveat above that his use is by juxtaposition rather than an explicit formula.

Sources