HistoricalChristian.Faith

Does Melito's inquiry to Palestine refute the deuterocanon as apostolic tradition?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: weak — as an argument from the act of inquiry. That Melito had to travel East c. 175 to "learn accurately" the books does show the OT canon's precise extent was not yet a fixed, universally-possessed apostolic list; it does not refute the deuterocanon as apostolic tradition, because (a) the inference equivocates — an explicit canon-enumeration developed over centuries on every account, which says nothing about whether the books' content and authority were apostolically received; (b) Melito inquired into the Hebrew/Jewish reckoning "at the place where these things were preached," so a Hebrew-sized answer reports the synagogue's count, not a Christian verdict; and (c) the inquiry cuts both ways — it equally shows the second-century Jewish canon was itself unsettled, so the list under-determines the Protestant canon too (and it is not the Protestant canon: it drops Esther). The genuinely strong residue — that the Hebrew-conscious Fathers from Melito on ranked the disputed books below a Hebrew-sized canon — is the separate list argument, weighed (contested) on its own page. · back to timeline

Related arguments: the primitive church's witness — see also did the early church reject the deuterocanon as Scripture, making its later inclusion an accretion? (contested), the companion argument from the patristic canon-lists that this page's inquiry argument leans on; does the New Testament's never quoting the deuterocanon prove it is not canonical? (weak); and does the absence of a recorded canon dispute between Jesus and the Jews prove a settled, shared Hebrew canon? (weak): all four press the witness of the earliest church that the disputed books were no Scripture.

The claim

"Melito of Sardis inquired of the church in Palestine concerning the Old Testament canon around AD 175. He discovered that the canon did not include the Apocryphal books. How can it be that he would inquire in Palestine if in fact the canon of the Old Testament including the Apocrypha was a matter of Apostolic tradition, as Trent had claimed?"

— James White, in the form he presses in his 2014 Great Debate with Gary Michuta. The companion proponent Steve Christie states the list's content flatly: "Melito did not include any of the Deuterocanonical books in his Old Testament list, but only the books from the Hebrew Bible (except for Esther)."¹ The interpretation served: the earliest surviving Christian OT list is Hebrew-sized, and the bishop who made it had to inquire for it — so the deuterocanon cannot have been the settled apostolic deposit the Council of Trent (Fourth Session, 1546) later declared, when it received all the books "with equal affection of piety and reverence" as part of what "the Apostles received… the Holy Ghost dictating."²

Who advances it

The argument is a debate-floor staple of Reformed canon apologetics. James White presses the inquiry form — why would a careful bishop have to ask if the answer were apostolic tradition? — while Steve Christie (Why Protestant Bibles Are Smaller) presses the content form — the list is the Hebrew Bible minus Esther. Both rest on the same datum this timeline already records at length on Melito's detail page: his letter to Onesimus, preserved by Eusebius, carries the earliest extant Christian Old-Testament list, and it omits Tobit, Judith, Sirach, Baruch, and 1–2 Maccabees. The distinctive contribution here is the inquiry move — the appeal not to the list's content (handled on the companion page) but to the bare fact that Melito had to inquire.³ The sharpest published reply is Gary Michuta's (Why Catholic Bibles Are Bigger), advanced against White in the same debate.⁴

The evidence for

Steelmanned, White's point is narrow and real. Strip the rhetoric and the strong form is not "the canon was closed and Melito proves it" but: there was no settled, universally-possessed apostolic enumeration of the Old Testament c. 175 — otherwise a learned bishop in Asia Minor would not have needed to travel "to the East… to the place where these things were preached" and "learn accurately" the books; and the answer a careful inquirer brought back was Hebrew-sized, with none of the disputed books. That is a genuine datum, and it coheres with everything this timeline records of the Hebrew-conscious stream from Melito to Jerome. As a check on the strong claim that the full 46-book canon was clear, articulated apostolic tradition from the start, the inquiry tells. Christie's content-point is likewise true and should be conceded plainly: the list is Hebrew-sized, and the deuterocanon is absent.³

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The factual core is sound: Melito's list is the earliest Christian one, it is Hebrew-sized, and Melito reached it by inquiry rather than by relaying a received Christian convention. No Catholic need deny any of this, and Michuta does not. The honest residue is that the precise bounds of the Old Testament were not a fixed, universally-known apostolic list in the second century — a point both sides' best scholarship grants.

What is overstated. As a refutation of the deuterocanon's apostolicity, the inquiry argument overreaches at three joints.

1. It equivocates on "apostolic tradition." Trent's claim is about the books' reception and authority — that they were handed down and venerated in the Church — not that every bishop already possessed an explicit, apostolically-dictated canon-list he could never need to research. That the enumeration of Scripture was worked out gradually is common ground on every account: the same is true of the New Testament canon, whose precise list no second-century bishop possessed either, yet whose books no one calls non-apostolic on that ground. So "he had to inquire, therefore not apostolic tradition" trades on two senses of "apostolic tradition" — a circulated list versus a received deposit — and the conclusion follows only in the first sense, which is not the sense Trent asserted. Melito's inquiry shows the canon-list was still being articulated; it does not show the books' content was a late import.

2. Melito inquired into the Jewish enumeration, which under-determines a Christian verdict. He went "to the place where these things were preached and done" — to the Hebrew source — and "learned accurately" the count he found there. As this timeline argues on his detail page and on the companion list page, his catalogue reads most naturally as a description of the Hebrew reckoning, not a prescription of a distinctively Christian canon. So a Hebrew-sized answer is exactly what consulting the Hebrew enumeration would yield — it reports how the Jews counted their Scriptures, not a dogmatic Christian exclusion of books the church's own working Bible, the Greek Septuagint, carried. Michuta's reading of Melito's Eclogae sharpens the point: Melito frames the extracts he drew from these books as made "concerning the Savior and the whole of our faith" — an apologetic, Christological purpose that gives a positive reason to seek the specifically Jewish list (the books an opponent would concede) rather than to report the church's broader canon. That inference about purpose is plausible rather than proven, but it pulls the same way as the descriptive reading.⁵

3. The inquiry cuts both ways — Michuta's symmetric counter. White treats the inquiry as proof the deuterocanon was no settled tradition; but the very same inquiry, pressed consistently, shows the second-century Jewish canon was itself not yet a closed, universally-fixed list. If the Hebrew canon were already settled and known to every Jew, why would Melito travel all the way to Palestine for an answer — Sardis itself had one of the largest and longest-established Jewish communities of the Greco-Roman world, civically recognized there already in the first century BC (though the monumental synagogue later excavated in the city is a third-/fourth-century structure, not one of Melito's own day)? Michuta's stronger inference, that the 2nd-century Jewish canon was still fluid, is independently well-supported by mainstream canon scholarship (Sundberg, Lim, McDonald) and does blunt White's assumption that a careful inquiry would necessarily return a clean Hebrew-Protestant canon. Two cautions keep this from over-reaching in the Catholic direction in turn: Michuta's specific mechanism — that Melito travelled because the local Jews were ignorant — is speculative, since "to the place where these things were preached" reads at least as well as a journey for provenance and authority than for want of a local answer, and the Sardis synagogue's mere existence establishes nothing about its certainty on the canon. The defensible half of Michuta's counter is the conclusion (the Jewish canon was unsettled), not the synagogue inference that carries him to it.⁶

And the list is not the Protestant canon either. Michuta's third move tells against the content form (Christie's): Melito's list "does not line up with the Protestant canon at all" — it omits Esther and, on Michuta's reading, includes "Wisdom" as the deuterocanonical Book of Wisdom — so it is neither the Masoretic table nor the Protestant 39. The Esther omission is undisputed and stands whatever else is decided. The "Wisdom" claim, though, leans on the less-probable reading: "the Proverbs of Solomon, Wisdom also" most likely names one book under two titles, since Proverbs was anciently called "the all-virtuous Wisdom" (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. iv.22.9, of Hegesippus, Irenaeus, and "the whole choir of the ancients") — the reading F. F. Bruce and the bible-researcher catalogue follow, and which Michuta himself quotes Bruce on while passing over Bruce's church-history evidence for it. Even granting Michuta's minority reading, it adds exactly one deuterocanonical book; Tobit, Judith, Sirach, Baruch, and the Maccabees stay absent. So Michuta's narrow conclusion — "not identical to the Protestant canon" — is true (Esther alone secures it), but it does not make Melito's list a Catholic-leaning witness; it shows the list under-determines both sixteenth-century tables, which is just the point cutting against White's use of it as well.⁷

Assessment

Weak — as an argument from the act of inquiry. Melito's having to inquire c. 175 is a real datum against the strong claim that the full canon was articulated, universally-possessed apostolic tradition from the start; it does not refute the deuterocanon as apostolic tradition in Trent's sense, because the inference equivocates between a circulated canon-list (which all sides grant developed over centuries, the New Testament included) and a received apostolic deposit, and because Melito was consulting the Hebrew enumeration, whose Hebrew-sized answer reports the synagogue's count rather than a Christian dogmatic verdict. Pressed consistently the inquiry is symmetrical: it tells equally against a settled second-century Jewish canon, and the resulting list is the Protestant canon's no more than the Catholic's — it drops Esther, and its one apparent deuterocanonical entry ("Wisdom") most probably names Proverbs. Michuta's rebuttal carries the better of the exchange, though its synagogue-ignorance mechanism is itself speculative and its "includes the Book of Wisdom" reading is the less-probable one. The genuinely strong material — that the learned, Hebrew-conscious Fathers from Melito to Jerome ranked the disputed books below a Hebrew-sized canon — is the list argument, not the inquiry argument, and is weighed (contested) on the companion page; nothing here disturbs it. (White's and Christie's overreach is the move from "Melito had to inquire / his list is Hebrew-sized minus Esther" to "the deuterocanon is therefore no apostolic tradition" — a Hebrew-canon datum doing more work than it can bear, in the same family as the apostolic-silence arguments on the non-quotation and no-recorded-dispute pages.)

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