HistoricalChristian.Faith

What did the "ecclesial / ecclesiastical" (read-but-not-canonical) category mean — a rank below the canon, or a catechetical subset within it?

Type: methodological argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: sound — that the "ecclesiastical" tier the Fathers name (Athanasius's "appointed… to be read," Rufinus's ecclesiastici, Jerome's "read… not for confirming doctrine") is a genuine, graded middle rank — read in church and edifying, even quoted as Scripture, yet ranked below the doctrine-proving canon and named, in the Fathers' own words, "not canonical" — is the plain sense of the texts and the working consensus of canon-list scholarship. The Protestant reading (John Meade): the tier is a real sub-canonical category, which is why a third name had to be coined for it. Correct on the structure. The Catholic reading (Gary Michuta): "ecclesiastical" does not mean "uninspired," since the same Fathers cite these books as Scripture, and the tier's function is catechetical (formation for newcomers) — also correct, and a needed corrective against collapsing the tier into the Reformation's rejected Apocrypha. What overreaches is Michuta's further step — that the ecclesiastical books are therefore a pedagogical subset within the canon — which runs straight against the Fathers' explicit "not in the Canon" and their pairing of these books with the admittedly non-canonical Shepherd and Didache. The category means exactly what its third name says: a worship-and-instruction rank between the canon and the apocrypha, below the first and above the third — neither inside the canon (against Michuta's strong claim) nor a bare uninspired residue (against the flattest Protestant inference).

Related arguments: reading the patristic witness — see also does the Fathers' word "canon" mean the modern definition? (sound); does quoting a book "as Scripture" prove a Father held it canonical? (plausible); did the early church build doctrine only on the undisputed books? (contested); did the early church accept the Apocrypha out of ignorance of Hebrew? (weak); is the canon "discovered, not decided," so patristic use was honest error? (contested); did "not canonical" encode a substantive authority judgment, not a mere filing category? (contested); had the word "apocrypha" drifted to "inspired-but-hidden" by Trent? (weak); are the "twenty-two / twenty-four" book-counts alphabet-numerology, not canon boundaries? (weak). Bears too on the Related arguments — Athanasius's three tiers group (is Festal Letter 39 a Protestant-canon witness? · function, not inspiration?).

The claim

Several of the Hebrew-minded Fathers do not run a two-bucket scheme — inspired canon vs. rejected apocrypha — but a three-tier one, with a named middle category for books that are read in church yet kept off the canon list. Athanasius (Festal Letter 39, 367) calls them books "not… included in the Canon, but appointed by the Fathers to be read by those who newly join us, and who wish for instruction in the word of godliness." Rufinus (c. 404) gives the rank its enduring Latin name: books "our fathers call not 'Canonical' but 'Ecclesiastical'… all of which they would have read in the Churches, but not appealed to for the confirmation of doctrine." Jerome says the same of the same books: the church reads them "for the strengthening of the people, (but) not for confirming the authority of ecclesiastical dogmas." The question weighed here is what that middle category means — and two rival readings are pressed:

• Protestant reading (John Meade): a sub-canonical rank. The very existence of a third, named category between canon and apocrypha proves the Fathers distinguished canonical from non-canonical books and deliberately put the deuterocanon in the latter. "Ecclesiastical" is edifying-but-not-canonical: read in church, useful for life and manners, but consciously kept out of the rule by which doctrine is established.
• Catholic reading (Gary Michuta): a catechetical subset, not a tier beneath. "Ecclesiastical" does not mean "outside the canon" in the modern sense, because the same Fathers quote these books as Scripture to settle doctrine. Michuta proposes the ecclesiastical books were those intended for those new in the faith — catechetical / formation reading — a distinction of audience and use, not of inspiration or canonicity, and so a pedagogical subset within the canon rather than a rank below it.

The dispute is not over whether a middle tier exists — both sides grant it — but over what it is a tier of: a rank ranked below the canon (Meade), or a sub-grouping inside Scripture sorted by who reads it (Michuta).¹

Who advances it

The Protestant reading is John Meade's, who frames the patristic data as three categories — Apocrypha, Ecclesiastical, Canon — and treats the middle as a real sub-canonical rank; it is the working model of the standard reference on the lists, Edmon Gallagher and John Meade's The Biblical Canon Lists from Early Christianity. The Catholic reading is Gary Michuta's, argued in Why Catholic Bibles Are Bigger and The Case for the Deuterocanon and in his "Did Athanasius Reject the Deuterocanon?" videos: that for the Fathers there were three categories where moderns see two, that "ecclesiastical" books were used to teach doctrine "especially to recent converts," and that this audience-function shows the books were held as sacred Scripture, not relegated beneath it. Both are modern proponents of long-standing readings; the disagreement is genuine and turns on the same patristic sentences.¹

The evidence

The Fathers name the tier by contrast with the canon — that is decisive for the structure. The label itself is built as a negation of "canonical." Rufinus: "not 'Canonical' but 'Ecclesiastical.'" Athanasius: "not included in the Canon, but appointed… to be read." Jerome: read, "but not for confirming the authority of ecclesiastical dogmas." In each case the middle tier is defined precisely by what it is denied — a place in the canon and the doctrine-proving authority that goes with it. A category whose own name and definition mark it off from the canon is, structurally, a rank below the canon, not a province inside it. And the company the Fathers keep it in confirms this: Athanasius files the Shepherd of Hermas and the Teaching (Didache) of the Apostles in the very same "read" tier, and Rufinus puts the Shepherd and the Two Ways / Judgment of Peter there too — books no one, then or now, calls canonical. Whatever the tier is, it is the tier that also holds admittedly non-canonical writings, which is hard to square with its being a subset of the canon.²

But Michuta's premise is right: "not canonical" is not "uninspired." The "canon" these Fathers exclude the books from is the narrower, technical rule — the closed list from which doctrine is proved — not the modern blanket category "inspired Scripture." We know this because the same men who list the books below the canon turn around and cite them as Scripture in their own voice to settle doctrine: Athanasius grounds his account of idolatry on the Wisdom of Solomon ("Scripture taught us beforehand"), chains Sirach as "the words spoken by the Spirit," and sets Tobit under "it is written"; Rufinus, who coined ecclesiastici, elsewhere introduces Sirach with the plainest formula — "thus the Scripture says (ita enim Scriptura dicit)" — and leans on it to settle a point of moral doctrine. A man does not rank a book below the canon because he thinks it uninspired and then quote it as the voice of the Spirit. So the line the middle tier draws is one of authority and use — read for edification, not deployed to clinch dogma — not the modern inspired/uninspired binary. To that extent Michuta is correct, and the flattest Protestant inference (ecclesiastical = the Reformation's merely-human Apocrypha) overreads in the opposite direction: the Fathers would read these books in worship and quote them as Scripture, which they would never do with what they actually called apocrypha.³

The catechetical-audience description is well-grounded — as a description of the tier's function, not its rank. Athanasius defines the read tier by its readership in so many words: "read by those who newly join us, and who wish for instruction." A century and a half earlier Origen had described the same practice from the other side, sorting church reading into "milk" for beginners (he names Esther, Judith, Tobit, and Wisdom) and "solid food" for the mature. So Michuta's "intended for those new in the faith" is not a guess; it recovers a documented churchly use that runs straight into Athanasius's wording. The point this establishes, though, is the tier's purpose (catechesis), which is fully compatible with its being a rank below the canon — indeed Athanasius states both in one breath: the books are not in the canon and are appointed for the instruction of newcomers. Function does not dissolve rank.⁴

Adversarial assessment

What holds on each side. Meade is right that the tier is a real, named sub-canonical rank: the Fathers coined a third word for it precisely because it was neither canon nor apocrypha, and they defined it by exclusion from the canon. Michuta is right that "non-canonical" here does not mean "uninspired" or "merely human," and that the tier's function is catechetical — both corrections are needed against a crude two-bucket reading that would make these books the Reformation's Apocrypha tout court. Read together, the two true halves yield one coherent picture, and it is the mainstream one: a graded middle rank, read and edifying and quotable, but below the doctrine-proving canon.

Where Michuta overreaches. The further claim — that the ecclesiastical books are a pedagogical subset within the canon — outruns the texts at two joints. First, it contradicts the Fathers' own words: Athanasius says the books are "not included in the Canon"; Rufinus says they are "not 'Canonical'"; Jerome that they do not "confirm the authority of ecclesiastical dogmas." One cannot hold that "ecclesiastical" leaves the books inside the canon when the men who use the term define it by denying them the canon. Second, the company falsifies it: the same tier holds the Shepherd and the Didache, which Michuta does not claim are canonical — so the tier cannot be a sub-division of the canon without dragging those books in too. The catechetical-audience fact, true as it is, marks the tier's use, not its standing; "for newcomers" no more puts a book inside the canon than "milk" does in Origen.

Where the flat Protestant inference overreaches. Equally, the move from "the Fathers named a non-canonical tier" to "the Fathers held the deuterocanon to be uninspired human writing like the Reformation Apocrypha" overshoots. The Fathers read these books in worship and cited them as the voice of the Spirit; their "non-canonical" is a verdict about probative authority for dogma, reached inside a graded view of Scripture, not the modern inspired/uninspired cut. Meade's careful form does not make this leap — Gallagher and Meade explicitly note the Fathers' "dual standard," listing the Hebrew canon while quoting the wider Greek books — which is exactly why the sound reading is the graded one, not the flattened one. (The companion danger — inferring full canonicity from the citations alone — is weighed on the citation-formula argument.)

Assessment

Sound. The meaning of the "ecclesiastical" category is not really in doubt once both proponents' true points are kept and their overstatements dropped. It is a genuine third rank — the Fathers coined a name for it because it fit neither of the outer two — defined by exclusion from the doctrine-proving canon yet honored with public reading and, in practice, with citation as Scripture. So Meade's structural reading is right (a real sub-canonical rank, below the canon) and Michuta's premise is right (not "uninspired," and catechetical in function); these are not rivals but the two halves of the consensus account. What does not hold is Michuta's strong inference that the tier sits within the canon — the Fathers' own "not in the Canon" and their filing of the non-canonical Shepherd and Didache in the same tier rule it out — nor the flattest Protestant inference that the tier is the Reformation's merely-human Apocrypha. The category means a worship-and-instruction rank between canon and apocrypha: below the first in authority, above the third in reception. That graded middle is the very thing the broader canon dispute is about, and it is what the deuterocanon's actual standing in these Fathers was — weighed for the Fathers as a class on the early-church-rejected page.

Sources