HistoricalChristian.Faith

The Cheltenham List on the Old Testament Canon

Dates: c. 360 AD (the catalogue is usually dated c. 359–365; it survives appended to the Liber generationis in a tenth-century Latin manuscript Theodor Mommsen found at Cheltenham, England, with a fuller copy at St Gall — hence "Cheltenham List," "Mommsen Catalogue," or "Index Cheltonianus") · Wikipedia
Verdict on the deuterocanon: YES. This anonymous Latin canon-catalogue — probably North African, written a generation before the African councils put the same canon into conciliar form — enumerates the deuterocanonical books straight among the Old Testament Scriptures: 1–2 Maccabees, Tobit, and Judith each appear with their own line-count (stichometry), and the catalogue's "books of Solomon," reckoned at 6,500 lines, almost certainly fold in Wisdom and Sirach as well. The whole Old-Testament list is then sealed with the "twenty-four elders" rationale of Revelation. It is one of the earliest Western witnesses to the longer Old Testament, roughly a decade before Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) made that canon conciliar and Innocent I and Augustine carried it forward.

Claims & evidence

The Old-Testament list, with the deuterocanon counted in

The catalogue is essentially a stichometric document: it names each book and records its length in standard sixteen-syllable lines, the bookseller's unit of the day. Its Old-Testament roll runs the protocanonical books and, set among them without distinction, the disputed Greek books — the two books of Maccabees, Tobit, and Judith, each with its own line-count:¹

Here begins a list of the canonical books of the Old Testament —

Genesis 3700 lines, Exodus 3000 lines, Numbers 3000 lines, Leviticus 2300 lines, Deuteronomy 2700 lines, Joshua son of Nave 1750 lines, Judges 1750 lines … Ruth 250 lines, Kings book I 2300 lines, Kings book II 2200 lines, Kings book III 2550 lines, Kings book IIII 2250 lines … Chronicles book I 2040 lines, book II 2100 lines, Maccabees book I 2300 lines, book II 1800 lines, Job 1700 lines, Tobit 900 lines, Esther 700 lines, Judith 1100 lines, The 151 Psalms of David 5000 lines, The books of Solomon 6500 lines, The Major Prophets 15,370 lines, 4 in number — Isaiah 3580 lines, Jeremiah 4450 lines, Daniel 1350 lines, Ezekiel 3340 lines, The Twelve Minor Prophets 3800 lines…

But as it was said in the Apocalypse of John, "I saw 24 elders casting their crowns before the throne," our predecessors prove these books to be canonical, and that the elders signify this.

Maccabees, Tobit, and Judith are not relegated to a second tier or marked off as "ecclesiastical" reading — they are interleaved among Chronicles, Job, and Esther under the single heading "the canonical books of the Old Testament." That is a flat inclusion of three deuterocanonical books in the Western Latin canon by about A.D. 360.

The "books of Solomon" at 6,500 lines — Wisdom and Sirach folded in

The list does not itemize the Solomonic books; it lumps them as "The books of Solomon" and assigns the bundle 6,500 lines. That figure is the tell. The three Solomonic books of the Hebrew canon — Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs — do not run to anything like 6,500 lines; a total that large most plausibly includes the Wisdom of Solomon and Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), the two further "Solomonic" deuterocanonical books the Latin Bible carried under his name.² So beyond the three books named outright (Maccabees, Tobit, Judith), the stichometry implies two more deuterocanonical works are silently inside the count — the same longer reckoning the African councils would spell out explicitly.

The canon sealed by the "twenty-four elders"

What closes the Old-Testament portion is not a number borrowed from the Hebrew letters or the alphabet, but a typological proof from the New Testament. The compiler appeals to the Apocalypse — "I saw 24 elders casting their crowns before the throne" (Rev. 4:10) — and reads the elders as figures of the canonical books: "our predecessors prove these books to be canonical, and that the elders signify this."¹ The twenty-four-elders argument is an old apologetic device (Victorinus of Pettau and others read the elders as the books of Scripture), and here it serves to ratify this broader list. Notably the catalogue's own enumeration does not tidily total twenty-four — it omits Ezra–Nehemiah and Lamentations while adding Maccabees, Tobit, and Judith — so the elders supply a theological seal rather than an exact arithmetic; the boundary the compiler is sealing is the longer, deuterocanon-bearing one.

Notes

• A Western witness ahead of the councils. The catalogue's weight on this timeline is its date and its place. If it stands c. 359–365 and is North African, it puts a deuterocanon-bearing Old-Testament list in the Latin West a generation before Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) ruled on the canon — evidence that the broader canon the African councils enacted was already the working list of African churchmen, not a late conciliar novelty. It runs alongside Innocent I's letter to Exsuperius and Augustine's defense of the fuller canon as part of the Western consensus the Reformation would later contest.
• Dating it. The list is bound to the Liber generationis ("Book of Generation"), whose king-and-consul tables run down to the consulship of Valentinian and Valens in 365 — so the compendium reached its present form around then, though the book-list itself may be a little earlier (it is commonly cited as "c. 359"). Mommsen first published it from the Cheltenham manuscript in Hermes 21 (1886); a second, fuller copy turned up at St Gall. More recent scholarship (Rouse and McNelis) reads the whole compendium as an intact North-African reference book, possibly Donatist in origin — which, if right, only underlines its African provenance.
• The "una sola" marginal note belongs to the New Testament, not the Old. Against the New-Testament items the Cheltenham copyist twice scribbles "una sola" ("one only") — after the three epistles ascribed to John and the two ascribed to Peter, apparently demurring that only 1 John and 1 Peter are canonical. It is a copyist's quibble about the New-Testament Catholic Epistles and says nothing about the Old-Testament deuterocanon, which the list enumerates without any such reservation. (The catalogue's New-Testament list has its own oddities — four gospels in the order Matthew, Mark, John, Luke; Hebrews, James, and Jude absent — but those bear on the New-Testament canon, not the question here.)
• What it does and doesn't settle. The Cheltenham List shows what a mid-fourth-century Latin churchman counted as Old-Testament Scripture; it does not, on its own, decide which canon is right. Its value is as a dated, pre-conciliar data point for the longer Western canon — one more witness that the deuterocanon was being read and listed as canonical in the West well before any council made it so.

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