HistoricalChristian.Faith

Did Augustine accept the deuterocanon only because he mistakenly thought it stood in the Hebrew canon?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: weak — for the interpretation it serves (that Augustine's longer canon is an artifact of ignorance of the Hebrew table rather than a considered verdict, so his witness should be discounted, even read for the Protestant side). The factual premise is the trouble: in his own late works Augustine states plainly that Wisdom, Sirach, and the Maccabees are not in "the canon of the Jews," and keeps them anyway on the church's reception. He knew the very fact the argument says he didn't, and chose the longer canon with his eyes open. What survives is the narrower, true observation that Augustine could not read Hebrew and prized the Septuagint as inspired — but that locates the Augustine–Jerome dispute in their criteria, it does not reduce Augustine's canon to a mistake · advanced by James R. White

Related arguments: Augustine's canon witness — see also should Augustine's witness be discounted because he was "no biblical expert" and could not read Hebrew, unlike Jerome?

The claim

In his 2014 debate with the Catholic apologist Gary Michuta, the Reformed apologist James White grants that Augustine accepted the disputed books, then turns him into a witness for the Protestant side by a counterfactual about Augustine's state of mind:¹

Augustine, however, disagreed. Augustine could not read Hebrew, and the manuscripts that he had contained these books but interestingly enough he is actually a witness for my side this evening. Why? Because though he accepted the Apocryphal books, he did so because he thought they were part of the Hebrew canon. If he had known what the Hebrew canon was, he would have taken a different position than that which he took, but he was unaware of those particular facts.

— James White, The Great Debate IX: Is the Apocrypha Scripture? (White vs. Michuta), at 55:38. In writing he puts the mechanism the same way: Augustine "defended the Deutero-canonicals … because they were in the Greek Septuagint and he thought that represented the Hebrew canon."¹ The whole weight of the move is psychological and counterfactual: Augustine's longer Old Testament is the by-product of a non-Hebraist's mistake about what the Jewish canon contained, so it does not really count as a vote for the deuterocanon — and had he known the Hebrew table, he would have sided with Jerome.

Who advances it

The claim is James White's, pressed both in the Michuta debate and on his Alpha & Omega Ministries blog ("The Canon According to Augustine").¹ It belongs to an older Protestant family of readings that recruit Augustine for the narrower canon by distinguishing the senses in which he called books "canonical" — the line of the Elizabethan divine William Whitaker, revived by modern confessional writers. Notably, even within that camp the specific "he thought they were in the Hebrew canon" mechanism is judged a misstatement: the same writers who share White's textual instincts grant that Augustine did know the Jewish canon and distinguished it deliberately, so the disagreement with Rome turns on the authority of the disputed books, not on Augustine's ignorance of their absence from the Hebrew table.² It is the companion of the sibling charge that Augustine's vote should be discounted because, unlike the Hebraist Jerome, he was "no biblical expert."

The evidence for

The premises that are true. Two of the planks under White's claim are sound. Augustine could not read Hebrew, and worked from the Old Latin and the Greek; and he held the Septuagint not merely useful but inspired — in The City of God he argues that "the same Spirit who was in the prophets when they spoke these things was also in the seventy men when they translated them," so that the Greek carries prophetic authority in its own right.³ A theologian who reveres the Greek Bible as Spirit-given, and cannot check it against the Hebrew, will naturally receive whatever that Bible contains. So far the picture White paints is real, and it is the genuine strength the argument trades on: Augustine's canon does rest on the authority he assigns the Septuagint.

Adversarial assessment

What holds. Augustine was no Hebraist and did treat the Septuagint as inspired; his longer canon is bound up with that high view of the Greek. To that extent the argument names something true about why his canon took the shape it did.

Where it breaks: Augustine says, in his own voice, that the disputed books are not in the Jewish canon. The argument's load-bearing premise is that Augustine thought the deuterocanon stood in the Hebrew canon — that "if he had known what the Hebrew canon was," he would have changed his mind. But Augustine tells us, in the very works the argument reaches for, that he knew exactly what the Hebrew canon was and that these books fell outside it.

1. Wisdom and Sirach: "not written in the canon of the Jews." In The City of God XVII.20 — a late work, c. 425 — Augustine quotes Wisdom 2 and Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) as prophecy of Christ, then immediately qualifies their probative force precisely because the Jews do not receive them: "the things which are not written in the canon of the Jews cannot be quoted against their contradictions with so great validity." He then contrasts "those three books which it is evident are Solomon's and held canonical by the Jews" — Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song. The distinction between books inside and outside the Jewish canon is not something Augustine missed; it is something he draws himself, by name, while keeping the outside books in use.⁴

2. The Maccabees: "held as canonical, not by the Jews, but by the Church." A chapter later, in XVIII.36, Augustine confronts the exact objection the Reformers would press — that the Maccabees are absent from the Hebrew Scriptures — and answers it head-on: their dates "are found, not in the Holy Scriptures which are called canonical, but in others, among which are also the books of the Maccabees. These are held as canonical, not by the Jews, but by the Church." Far from assuming the Maccabees stood in the Hebrew canon, Augustine openly concedes they do not, and rests their canonicity on churchly reception instead.⁵

3. He knew Jerome's Hebrew program intimately — and resisted it. Augustine did not learn of the Hebrew canon at second hand. He corresponded for years with Jerome, the age's foremost Hebraist, and urged him not to translate the Old Testament afresh "out of the Hebrew," fearing the divergence from the Septuagint the churches read would breed scandal — citing the uproar at Oea when Jerome's new rendering of a single word in Jonah (the "gourd") split a congregation. A man pleading with Jerome to keep to the Greek because it differs from the Hebrew is not a man ignorant that the two canons differ.³

The criterion was never Hebrew enumeration. Even granting, for argument's sake, that Augustine had somehow misjudged the contents of the Hebrew table, the counterfactual still would not follow, because the test by which Augustine fixed his canon was not the Hebrew table at all. In On Christian Doctrine II.8.12 he tells the reader to "prefer those that are received by all the catholic churches to those which some do not receive" — the breadth of churchly reception, not the Jewish enumeration, is the rule. On that rule the deuterocanon stands inside the canon whether or not the Jews kept it; "had he known the Hebrew canon" changes nothing about a criterion that does not run on the Hebrew canon.⁶ This is why the companion charge that Augustine "could not read Hebrew" misfires as well: Hebrew philology is decisive for Jerome's Hebraica veritas, but beside the point of a reception-criterion that asks what the churches received, not what stands in the Hebrew.

And there was no late reversal. The Protestant tradition sometimes adds that Augustine drifted toward Jerome's narrower view in old age. His own late works tell against it: The City of God (XVII.20; XVIII.36, both c. 425) still cites Wisdom, Sirach, and the Maccabees as prophecy and Scripture while frankly noting their absence from the Jewish canon, and On Rebuke and Grace (c. 426) quotes the mother of the Maccabees as authoritative testimony. To the end he held the longer canon, knowingly.²

Assessment

Weak. The argument's true core — that Augustine read no Hebrew and held the Septuagint inspired — is real and worth keeping; it explains why his canon followed the Greek Bible. But the conclusion built on it, that his longer canon is an artifact of ignorance of the Hebrew table which a better-informed Augustine would have abandoned, does not hold, because it rests on a factual premise Augustine himself contradicts. In his own late words he states that Wisdom and Sirach are "not written in the canon of the Jews" and that the Maccabees are "held as canonical, not by the Jews, but by the Church" — he knew the disputed books stood outside the Hebrew canon and kept them on the church's reception, the criterion he laid down in On Christian Doctrine, which never measured the canon by the Hebrew table in the first place. So White's counterfactual fails twice over: Augustine had the very knowledge the argument says he lacked, and his test would have yielded the same canon even if he hadn't. What is left is not a witness recruited for the Protestant side but the real Augustine–Jerome fault line this timeline traces — a disagreement over the criterion (churchly reception versus the Hebrew measure), in which Augustine's longer canon is a considered verdict, not a mistake. (White's overstatement is his alone among the proponents; the underlying reception-versus-Hebrew question is weighed across this timeline and on the Romans 3:2 and patristic canon-lists argument pages.) The picture of an Augustine indifferent to the Jewish-kept Bible also runs against his own apologetic practice: in the Expositions on the Psalms he calls the Jews the church's "librarians," resting the case that Christ was prophesied on "all the very writings wherein Christ hath been prophesied" being kept intact by the Jews themselves — a man who appeals to the Jewish-kept Scriptures as his unimpeachable witness is not one who was unaware of them.⁷

Sources