HistoricalChristian.Faith

Did Athanasius reject the deuterocanon — is his Festal Letter 39 a witness for the Protestant Old Testament canon?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: contested — the verdict turns on which half of the claim is in view. The narrow form is sound: Athanasius's thirty-ninth Festal Letter (367) does place the freestanding deuterocanon (Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, Tobit, the Maccabees) below the canon proper, so he is a genuine fourth-century Eastern witness against their canonical status. But the fuller claim proponents draw from it — that he held "the Protestant canon" and treated these books as the Reformation's Apocrypha — is overstated. It collapses his three tiers into the modern two: his middle rank is not "apocrypha" but books "appointed by the Fathers to be read… for instruction," prescribed for catechumens and sharply set against the heretical forgeries; his canon is not the Protestant thirty-nine (he drops Esther and keeps Baruch and the Epistle inside Jeremiah); and across his own polemical and pastoral works he cites Wisdom, Sirach, and Tobit in his own voice under Scripture formulae to settle doctrine. So "Athanasius excluded the deuterocanon from the canon list" holds; "Athanasius = the Protestant canon" does not · the witness in full: Athanasius of Alexandria

Related arguments: Athanasius's three tiers — see also What divides his "canon" and "read" tiers — function, not inspiration?

See also: this is the single-Father, named-proponent test of the wider thesis weighed on the "did the early church reject the deuterocanon?" argument page (contested), where Athanasius stands as one of seven Hebrew-canon-conscious Fathers; the pattern by which his formal list and his working citation diverge is the same list-versus-usage strain traced there and on the witness pages of Gregory the Great and John of Damascus.

Here the sub-claim is that one named Father, Athanasius of Alexandria, is an early witness for the Protestant Old-Testament canon and against the deuterocanon.

The claim

The argument runs from a single, famous document — the thirty-ninth Festal (Easter) Letter Athanasius issued in 367, the same letter that gives the first surviving list of the twenty-seven-book New Testament:

1. Athanasius opens his Old-Testament catalogue by fixing the count at "twenty-two books… the number of the letters among the Hebrews," and names a Hebrew-sized list with no Tobit, Judith, Sirach, Wisdom of Solomon, or Maccabees.
2. He then expressly files Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, and Tobit in a lower rank — "not… included in the Canon" — and denounces a third class, the "apocryphal" forgeries of heretics.
3. Therefore Athanasius rejected the deuterocanon and stands, a century and a half before Trent, as an early witness for the canon the Reformation would recover.¹

Premises (1) and (2) are true and worth conceding plainly: the Festal Letter really does set the freestanding disputed books below the canon. The question is what the conclusion may load onto that — whether it makes Athanasius a witness for the Protestant canon, treating these books as Protestants treat the Apocrypha, or only a witness that the most learned fourth-century East ranked them in a tier the wider church still read and used as Scripture.

Who advances it

The proponents. Athanasius is a fixture of the Protestant canon case, cited in two strengths.

• Archibald Alexander (1851) makes the flat form: quoting a list under Athanasius's name, he concludes that "Athanasius takes no notice of these books." But his proof-text is the Synopsis Scripturae Sacrae — a work modern scholarship regards as pseudo-Athanasian and dates a century or more later, carried on this timeline as a separate c. 550 witness. So his "Athanasius" rests on a book no longer his, and (as shown below) one that itself preserves Athanasius's middle "read" tier rather than the silence Alexander reads into it.
• James White (2014) puts the careful form: Athanasius "rejected all the freestanding apocryphal books, only accepting the Greek additions to the canonical books that he had possibly not even [been] aware… were in fact additions." The "freestanding vs. additions" distinction is exactly right and is conceded here — it is the Baruch-inside-Jeremiah, Susanna-inside-Daniel point.
• Steve Christie (2019) states it as data: Athanasius "affirmed… all the books of the Hebrew Bible except for Esther, while rejecting all of the Deuterocanonical books except for Baruch" — accurate as a description of the list, though it stops at the list.
• Gavin Ortlund (2023) frames it most carefully of all, as an Eastern "22-book Hebrew canon" tradition (Cyril, Athanasius, Gregory of Nazianzus… John of Damascus) with "little exceptions" — Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah folded into Jeremiah, Susanna into Daniel, Esther sometimes dropped — under which "the vast majority of the Deuterocanonical books are excluded."¹

The adversary. Gary Michuta, in two videos titled "Did Athanasius Reject the Deuterocanon?", answers no in the sense proponents want: he argues that Athanasius's "canon" is a narrower, measured category than modern "inspired Scripture"; that the middle, "read" tier is emphatically not the Protestant Apocrypha, since Athanasius distinguishes it from the heretical forgeries and prescribes it for instruction; and that across his controversial works Athanasius cites the very tier-two books as Scripture to settle doctrine — so his exclusion is from a list, not from Scripture.²

What holds — the exclusion from the canon is real

The argument's core is sound and should be granted without flinching. Athanasius's catalogue fixes the Old Testament at the Hebrew twenty-two and contains no Tobit, no Judith, no Sirach, no Wisdom of Solomon, no Maccabees — the same count Origen gave and Cyril recited. He then names the disputed books in so many words and sets them below the canon: "other books… not indeed included in the Canon, but appointed by the Fathers to be read… The Wisdom of Solomon, and the Wisdom of Sirach, and Esther, and Judith, and Tobit…. But the former, my brethren, are included in the Canon, the latter being [merely] read." As a claim about the canonical status of the freestanding deuterocanon in the most influential fourth-century Eastern voice, the argument is well-grounded and unrefuted: Athanasius did not reckon these books canonical, and he is rightly enrolled among the Hebrew-canon-conscious Fathers (Melito, Origen, Cyril, Athanasius, Epiphanius, Jerome, Rufinus). That much even his Catholic adversary concedes.³

What overstates — three tiers are not two

The flat conclusion — that Athanasius held "the Protestant canon" and treated these books as the Reformation's Apocrypha — outruns the evidence at three joints.

1. His middle tier is not the Protestant "Apocrypha." The modern Protestant scheme has two boxes: canonical-and-inspired, or apocryphal-and-rejected. Athanasius has three. Between the canon and the heretical "apocrypha… an invention of heretics" he sets a positively-commended middle rank: the disputed books are "appointed by the Fathers to be read by those who newly join us, and who wish for instruction in the word of godliness." That is not how Protestants classify Tobit and Sirach; it is a class the Reformation does not have. To read Athanasius's exclusion-from-the-canon as agreement with the Protestant rejection is to erase the very tier his letter exists to define — and to merge his "read for instruction" books with the "invention of heretics" he names in the same breath, a category he keeps rigorously apart.⁴

2. He cites the tier-two books as Scripture in his own voice, to settle doctrine. The list is one thing; the working hand another. In Against the Heathen Athanasius grounds his whole account of the origin of idolatry on the Wisdom of Solomon (14:12–21), introducing it as "Scripture taught us beforehand long ago, when it said…" In the second Oration against the Arians he marshals Wisdom 9:2 under an express formula — "and in the book of Wisdom it is written" — inside a chain of texts "divine Scripture recognises," beside the Psalms, Revelation, and Paul; and draws on Wisdom 13:5 among texts of which he says "hearing the Scriptures we believe." In the encyclical To the Bishops of Egypt and Libya he answers a heretic "in the words spoken by the Spirit," chaining the Psalter with Sirach 15:9. And in the Defence before Constantius he sets Tobit 4:18 under "it is written." Three of the four freestanding deuterocanonical books his Festal Letter ranks below the canon — Wisdom, Sirach, and Tobit — he nonetheless quotes in his own words as Scripture, in doctrinal controversy, addressed to bishops and an emperor, not to catechumens. Whatever "canon" meant to him, it plainly was not coextensive with "what may be cited as inspired Scripture."⁵

3. His canon is not, in any case, the Protestant canon. Two details break the equation in both directions. He drops a protocanonical Hebrew book — Esther, demoted to the second, "read" rank alongside Tobit and Judith — so his twenty-two are not the Jewish thirty-nine renumbered; and he keeps two Greek deuterocanonical works inside the canon, reckoning his single book of Jeremiah as "Jeremiah with Baruch, Lamentations, and the epistle, one book." A canon that excludes Esther and includes Baruch and the Epistle of Jeremiah is neither the Hebrew table nor the Protestant thirty-nine. The proponents who say "the Hebrew Bible except Esther… rejecting all the Deuterocanon except Baruch" (Christie) and "Esther sometimes excluded… Baruch… included as part of Jeremiah" (Ortlund) name these very exceptions accurately — which is just to say the careful proponents already grant that "Athanasius = Protestant canon" needs two asterisks his list itself supplies.⁶

Answering the proponents

1. Archibald Alexander rests "Athanasius" on a book that is not Athanasius's. Alexander's evidence that "Athanasius takes no notice of these books" is a quotation from the Synopsis Scripturae Sacrae ("All the Scriptures of us Christians are divinely inspired… reduced into a Canon"). But the Synopsis is now generally judged pseudo-Athanasian and considerably later — this timeline carries it as a separate witness, c. 550. Worse for the flat reading, the Synopsis does not pass over the deuterocanon in silence: like the genuine Festal Letter, it sets out a second rank of books "not… canonical, but only read" and files Wisdom, Sirach, Esther, Judith, and Tobit there. So the one document Alexander leans on, even if it were Athanasius's, would prove the three-tier reading, not the two-tier one.⁷

2. James White and Gavin Ortlund state the careful form, and it largely stands. White's "freestanding apocryphal books… only accepting the Greek additions to the canonical books" and Ortlund's "22-book Hebrew canon… with little exceptions" are both accurate descriptions of the list, and they are conceded here in full: the freestanding books are excluded, the additions (Baruch, the Epistle, Susanna) ride inside Jeremiah and Daniel. Two qualifications keep even the careful form from delivering the Protestant conclusion. First, White's surmise that Athanasius was "possibly not even aware" the additions were additions is a conjecture, not a datum — and it cuts against the picture of a canon-watcher who elsewhere distinguishes the Hebrew enumeration with care; better to say he received them inside the canonical books as his manuscripts carried them. Second, and decisively, describing the list is not yet describing Athanasius's doctrine of these books: the careful proponents rightly report what he catalogued, but the catalogue coexists with his own-voice citation of Wisdom, Sirach, and Tobit as Scripture (point 2 above), which the list-only description leaves out.⁸

3. Gary Michuta's counter-case is sound on its central point and overstated on its edge. Michuta is right that the middle tier is not the Protestant Apocrypha, that Athanasius's "canon" is not simply the modern "inspired," and that Athanasius cites tier-two books as Scripture in controversy — all three are borne out above. Where the Catholic case can overreach is in the opposite direction, reading the citations as proof that Athanasius reckoned these books fully canonical after all: that goes too far the other way. He says, in plain words, that they are "not… included in the Canon," and he never lists them among the books "accredited as Divine… let no man add to these." The honest result is neither "Athanasius held the Protestant canon" nor "Athanasius held the Tridentine canon," but the graded standing his own letter describes and his own pen complicates: excluded from the canon proper, prescribed for instruction, and cited as Scripture all the same — the same list-versus-usage tension that runs through the Hebrew-minded Fathers as a class.⁹

One guard-rail in the other direction. The lines most often quoted to show Athanasius himself calling the deuterocanon "holy Scripture" — Wisdom 1:11, Tobit 12:7, and Sirach 30:4 — are not in fact his own words but sit inside documents by others (a synodal encyclical and a letter of Alexander of Thessalonica) that he merely compiled into his Defence against the Arians. They should be set aside in weighing his practice. Doing so does not rescue the flat reading, because his genuine own-voice citations (Wisdom 9:2 and 14, Wisdom 13:5, Sirach 15:9, Tobit 4:18) make the same point on firmer ground; but it keeps the rebuttal honest, and the detail is laid out on his witness page.¹⁰

Assessment

Contested. The headline question "did Athanasius reject the deuterocanon?" splits cleanly by sense, and the verdict follows the sense. As a claim about canonical status — that Athanasius's Festal Letter places the freestanding deuterocanon below the twenty-two-book canon, making him a genuine fourth-century Eastern witness against its canonicity — the argument is sound, and the careful proponents (White, Christie, Ortlund) state it accurately. As the fuller claim that he held "the Protestant canon" and treated these books as the Reformation's Apocrypha, it is overstated: it collapses his three tiers into two, mistaking a class of books "appointed by the Fathers to be read… for instruction" — prescribed for catechumens, sharply distinguished from the heretical forgeries — for the Protestant rejected-Apocrypha; his canon is not even the Protestant thirty-nine, dropping Esther and keeping Baruch and the Epistle inside Jeremiah; and he cites Wisdom, Sirach, and Tobit in his own voice, under Scripture formulae, to settle doctrine before bishops and an emperor. The flat form rests, in its oldest version (Alexander), on a work no longer reckoned Athanasius's at all. The honest finding is the graded one his letter states and his usage complicates — excluded from the canon, yet read, prescribed, and quoted as Scripture — which is the same divided picture weighed for the Fathers as a class on the "early church rejected the deuterocanon" page (contested). Strong as a witness against the books' canonicity; overstated as a witness for the Protestant canon; no clear winner on the headline framing.

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