HistoricalChristian.Faith

Athenagoras of Athens on the Old Testament Canon

Dates: c. 177 AD (A Plea for the Christians / Legatio pro Christianis, addressed to the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, c. 176–177; Athenagoras a Christian philosopher of Athens, active in the later second century) · Wikipedia
Summary: Defending Christians against the charge of atheism, Athenagoras calls the Hebrew prophets as his witnesses to the one God. He names "Moses or… Isaiah and Jeremiah, and the other prophets" who, "lifted in ecstasy… by the impulses of the Divine Spirit, uttered the things with which they were inspired," and then strings together a chain of their utterances — and the first of them, "The Lord is our God; no other can be compared with Him," is the deuterocanonical Baruch (Baruch 3:35–36), set among the inspired words of the prophets beside three sayings of Isaiah. He does not name Baruch — he attributes the whole chain generically to "the prophets," and Baruch travelled in the Greek tradition bound with Jeremiah, whom he does name — so this is a witness to the disputed books in use as prophecy, not an explicit canon-list.

Claims & evidence

He sets Baruch among the prophets' inspired utterances, beside Isaiah

But, since the voices of the prophets confirm our arguments—for I think that you also, with your great zeal for knowledge, and your great attainments in learning, cannot be ignorant of the writings either of Moses or of Isaiah and Jeremiah, and the other prophets, who, lifted in ecstasy above the natural operations of their minds by the impulses of the Divine Spirit, uttered the things with which they were inspired, the Spirit making use of them as a flute-player breathes into a flute;—what, then, do these men say? "The Lord is our God; no other can be compared with Him." And again: "I am God, the first and the last, and besides Me there is no God." In like manner: "Before Me there was no other God, and after Me there shall be none; I am God, and there is none besides Me." And as to His greatness: "Heaven is My throne, and the earth is the footstool of My feet: what house will ye build for Me, or what is the place of My rest?"

— A Plea for the Christians 9.¹ The first of the four utterances — "The Lord is our God; no other can be compared with Him" — is not from any protocanonical prophet but from the deuterocanonical Baruch (Baruch 3:35–36, "This is our God… there shall none other be accounted of in comparison of him"); the three that follow are Isaiah (Isaiah 44:6; 43:10–11; 66:1).² Athenagoras files the Baruch line indistinguishably among the others, as one of the things the prophets "uttered… by the impulses of the Divine Spirit" — adducing a disputed book as inspired prophecy in the very act of grounding Christian monotheism on the prophets.

Notes

• Quoted as prophecy, not named. Athenagoras does not attribute the line to "Baruch": he gathers all four utterances under the generic heading of "the prophets," naming only Moses, Isaiah, and Jeremiah as the writers he expects his learned readers to know. The fit is natural, because Baruch was reckoned in the Greek and Old-Latin tradition an appendix to Jeremiah and was routinely cited under the prophet's name — the same fold-in by which Irenaeus a few years later quotes Baruch as "Jeremiah the prophet," and by which Cyril, Athanasius, and Epiphanius later kept Baruch inside a "canonical" Jeremiah. So the absence of a name is not a downgrade; it is exactly how a second-century writer would handle a book he took to be part of Jeremiah.
• Strength, and its limits. This is firmer than a woven moral maxim of the sort Clement, the Didache, and Polycarp braid in without a citation formula: Athenagoras expressly classes the Baruch line among the words the prophets spoke "by the impulses of the Divine Spirit." But it falls short of an explicit canon-verdict on two counts — he renders no Old-Testament list, and he never names the source book, so the witness is to use as prophecy, a notch below Irenaeus's express "Jeremiah the prophet… saying" formula for the same book.
• Bearing on the argument. Athenagoras stands on the "using" side of the divide weighed in the argument "Did the early church reject the deuterocanon…?" (assessed contested): a second-century apologist citing a disputed book as the inspired voice of the prophets, in a formal defence addressed to the emperors — evidence against the flat claim that the primitive church did not reckon these books Scripture, the same years the first Hebrew-sized Christian lists were being drawn.
• Place on the timeline. At c. 177 Athenagoras is a contemporary of Melito of Sardis (c. 170), whose list is the first to leave the deuterocanon out, and of the Muratorian Fragment (c. 170); he stands just before Irenaeus (c. 180) — the same generation reaching opposite results, Melito enumerating a narrower canon while Athenagoras and Irenaeus quote the wider Greek text as prophecy.

Sources