HistoricalChristian.Faith

Augustine of Hippo on the Old Testament Canon

Dates: c. 397 (On Christian Doctrine 2.8.13) · 354–430 · Wikipedia · the African councils he stood behind
Verdict on the deuterocanon: YES — the full longer canon, on the breadth of its reception. Augustine, bishop of Hippo and the theological hand behind the African synods of Hippo and Carthage, sets out his own canon in On Christian Doctrine (c. 397) and names Tobias, Judith, the two books of Maccabees, and the two of Ezra flatly among the Scriptures, with Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus reckoned among the prophetical books. He does not rank them a tier below the rest, as Athanasius and Jerome did; he weighs a book by the breadth of its reception across the catholic churches — and on that test the deuterocanon stands inside the canon. A generation later, in The City of God, he frankly grants that the Maccabees are held canonical "not by the Jews, but by the Church."

Claims & evidence

The canon-list: a forty-four-book Old Testament with the deuterocanon inside it (c. 397)

In Book II of On Christian Doctrine, instructing the reader how to handle Scripture, Augustine runs out the whole Old Testament. He files Tobias, Judith, the two Maccabees, and the two of Ezra among the historical books, and sets Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus among the prophetical — the longer Septuagint canon, with no second rank:¹

There are other books which seem to follow no regular order, and are connected neither with the order of the preceding books nor with one another, such as Job, and Tobias, and Esther, and Judith, and the two books of Maccabees, and the two of Ezra… Next are the Prophets, in which there is one book of the Psalms of David; and three books of Solomon, viz., Proverbs, Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes. For two books, one called Wisdom and the other Ecclesiasticus, are ascribed to Solomon from a certain resemblance of style… Still they are to be reckoned among the prophetical books, since they have attained recognition as being authoritative… The authority of the Old Testament is contained within the limits of these forty-four books.

— On Christian Doctrine II.8.13, source. The list matches the canon the African councils promulgated, book for book — which is no coincidence, since Augustine was the driving theological figure at those synods.

The criterion: prefer what is received by all the catholic churches

What carries the disputed books into Augustine's canon is not a Hebrew enumeration but a rule of reception: the more widely and anciently a book is received, the higher its authority. He states the standard immediately before the list:²

Now, in regard to the canonical Scriptures, he must follow the judgment of the greater number of catholic churches… he will judge according to the following standard: to prefer those that are received by all the catholic churches to those which some do not receive. Among those, again, which are not received by all, he will prefer such as have the sanction of the greater number and those of greater authority, to such as are held by the smaller number and those of less authority.

— On Christian Doctrine II.8.12, source. This is the opposite test from Jerome's "Hebraica veritas": where Jerome measured the canon against the Hebrew the Jews kept, Augustine measures it against the breadth of the church's use. The two criteria yield the two canons, and the disagreement between these contemporaries is the fault line that runs to Trent and the Reformation.

The Maccabees: "held as canonical, not by the Jews, but by the Church" (c. 425)

Late in life, in The City of God, Augustine confronts the very objection the Reformers would later press — that the Maccabees are not in the Hebrew Scriptures — and answers it head-on. He concedes the historical point and turns it into a doctrine of churchly reception:³

the reckoning of their dates is 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, on account of the extreme and wonderful sufferings of certain martyrs, who, before Christ had come in the flesh, contended for the law of God even unto death, and endured most grievous and horrible evils.

— The City of God XVIII.36, source. The admission is candid: Augustine knows the Maccabees stand outside the Jewish reckoning. His canon rests not on that reckoning but on the church's reception — the same criterion stated in On Christian Doctrine, now applied to the single most contested book.

The canon confirmed in practice: Sirach, Wisdom, and 2 Maccabees cited as "Scripture"

Augustine does not merely list the disputed books — he quotes them, in works spanning decades, with the same formulae he reserves for the rest of the Bible: "the words of Scripture," "Holy Scripture says." The stated canon of On Christian Doctrine is the canon he actually preaches and argues from. Three citations make the point across three genres — apologetic, doctrinal, and pastoral.

In The City of God, weighing the punishments common to this life, he adduces Sirach under the plain heading "the words of Scripture":⁴

the words of Scripture, "An heavy yoke is upon the sons of Adam, from the day that they go out of their mother's womb till the day that they return to the mother of all things,"…

— The City of God XXI.14 (quoting Sirach 40:1), source.

In On the Trinity, defining wisdom as the worship of God, he grounds the point in Wisdom with "Holy Scripture says":⁵

It is in respect to this wisdom, therefore, which is the worship of God, that Holy Scripture says, "The multitude of the wise is the welfare of the world."

— On the Trinity XIV.1.1 (quoting Wisdom 6:24), source.

And in On Rebuke and Grace, arguing that even the righteous will need mercy at the judgment, he quotes the mother of the Maccabees — the very book he elsewhere grants the Jews do not keep — as authoritative testimony:⁶

…some will be judged with mercy, others without mercy. On which account also the mother of the Maccabees says to her son, "That in that mercy I may receive thee with thy brethren."

— On Rebuke and Grace 41 (quoting 2 Maccabees 7:29), source. Together these three confirm that the longer canon of On Christian Doctrine was no mere theoretical list: Augustine read, quoted, and argued from the deuterocanon as Scripture to the end of his life.

Notes

• The theological hand behind the councils. Augustine was a priest at Hippo in 393 and bishop by 397, the driving figure of the North-African synods whose canon-lists match his own book for book. His witness and the conciliar lists are two forms of one verdict: the reception-criterion stated by a theologian, and the same canon enacted by a council.
• Augustine against Jerome. The two greatest Latin Fathers of the age took opposite sides. Jerome, translating iuxta Hebraeos, set Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, and the Maccabees "among the apocrypha"; Augustine, weighing reception, kept them in the canon. Their exchange of letters over the translation of Scripture is the personal face of a disagreement that the Western church never fully resolved until Trent took Augustine's side and the Reformation took Jerome's. Did Augustine simply not know the Hebrew canon? A modern apologetic move (James White) makes his longer canon an artifact of ignorance — that he kept the disputed books only because he wrongly thought they stood in the Hebrew table. His own late words tell against it: he flags Wisdom and Sirach as "not written in the canon of the Jews" (City of God XVII.20) and the Maccabees as "held as canonical, not by the Jews, but by the Church" (XVIII.36), keeping them on reception with his eyes open — weighed on the argument page. A companion move (CARM, and White again) discounts Augustine's witness on competence — he "was no Biblical expert" and "could not read Hebrew," unlike the Hebraist Jerome, so where they disagree Jerome's "No" should win and the African councils' "Yes" should be set aside as merely his and merely regional. But Augustine's canon ran on the breadth of churchly reception — the criterion he states above — not the Hebrew table, so Hebrew philology is not the competence the question turned on; and the longer canon was no one man's product, standing in Western use before and beyond him (Cyprian, the Cheltenham List, his own bishop Ambrose, Rome, Innocent I) — weighed on the "no biblical expert" argument page. A third move (Archibald Alexander, The Canon of the Old and New Testaments Ascertained, 1826) reclaims Augustine for the shorter canon by his own words — that he "retracted" his opinion of Ecclesiasticus and reported a custom of reading the apocrypha "from a lower place," "not as Holy Scripture." Both props miss: the Retractations (II.4) correct only the authorship of the Wisdom of Solomon ("I made a mistake as to the authorship"), not its canonical standing, and the "lower place" custom is the canonical-versus-"ecclesiastical" distinction of Jerome and Rufinus, not anything Augustine says — weighed on the "retracted and ranked lower" argument page, which also grants the one true kernel: Augustine's reception-criterion grades authority by breadth, a hierarchy within the canon (so the "no second rank" above means no separate apocryphal tier in his list, not that every book carries identical weight on his reception-scale).
• The same witness, several doctrines. Augustine also retells the origin of the very Greek Bible that carried these books — see his page on the Origin of the Septuagint — and one of the disputed books he keeps, 2 Maccabees, supplies the classic proof-text for prayer for the dead, a practice he defends on his purgatory page. His canon and his doctrine pull in the same direction: the longer Old Testament, received from the Greek church, carries the practices the Reformation would contest along with the books.

Sources