HistoricalChristian.Faith

The Claromontanus Catalogue on the Old Testament Canon

Dates: c. 400 AD (the catalogue is widely judged an older Latin/Alexandrian list, c. 300–400, copied into the manuscript; the manuscript that preserves it — Codex Claromontanus, the Greek-Latin bilingual of Paul's epistles known as Codex D — is itself 5th/6th century, the list inserted between Philemon and Hebrews at folio 468r) · Wikipedia
Verdict on the deuterocanon: YES. The stichometric catalogue (the Catalogus Claromontanus) lists the disputed books straight among the Old Testament Scriptures, each with its line-count: Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon (Sapientia), Sirach (the “Wisdom of Jesus,” Sapientia Iesu), and the books of Maccabees — it enumerates the first, second, and fourth. A Western/Latin "longer canon" witness contemporary with the African councils, the Roman synod, and Innocent I, and a near-twin of the stichometric Cheltenham List. (The catalogue's celebrated marks — horizontal dashes/obeli beside several books — fall almost entirely on disputed New Testament titles; the Old-Testament deuterocanon stands in the list undisturbed but for a single dash by Judith, on which see the Notes.)

Claims & evidence

The deuterocanon stands in the Old-Testament list, each book with its stichometry

The catalogue is a stichometric list — a table of the books of Scripture with the number of stichoi (standard lines) in each, a scribe's measure for checking a copy's completeness and pricing the work. Its Old-Testament section runs from Genesis to Tobias, and the disputed books are simply books on it, interleaved with the protocanonical ones and given line-counts like the rest:¹

Genesis versus ĀĀĀĀD — Exodus versus ĀĀĀDCC — Leviticum versus ĀĀDCCC — Numeri versus ĀĀĀDCL — Deuteronomium ver. ĀĀĀCCC — Iesu Nauue ver. ĀĀ — Iudicum ver. ĀĀ — Rud ver. CCL — Regnorum primus liber ĀĀD — Regnorum secundus lib. ĀĀ — Regnorum tertius lib. ĀĀDC — Regnorum qvartus lib. ĀĀCCCC — Psalmi Davitici ver. D — Proverbia ver. ĀDC — Aeclesiastes DC — Cantica Canticorum CCC — Sapientia vers. Ā — Sapientia ihu ver. ĀĀD — Ossee ver. DXXX — Amos ver. CCCCX — Micheas ver. CCCX — Ioel ver. XC — Abdias ver. LXX — Ionas ver. CL — Naum ver. CXL — Ambacum ver. CLX — Sophonias ver. CLX — Aggeus vers. CX — Zacharias ver. DCLX — Malachiel ver. CC — Eseias ver. ĀĀĀDC — Ieremias ver. ĀĀĀĀLXX — Ezechiel ver. ĀĀĀDC — Daniel ver. ĀDC — Maccabeorum lib. primus ĀĀCCC — Maccabeorum lib secundus ĀĀCCC — Maccabeorum lib. quartus Ā — Iudit ver. ĀCCC — Hesdra ĀD — Ester ver. Ā — Iob ver. ĀDC — Tobias ver. Ā

(The figures are Roman numerals written with an overbar for thousands — Ā = 1,000 — so Sapientia vers. Ā credits the Wisdom of Solomon 1,000 lines, Sapientia ihu [Iesu, the Wisdom of Jesus son of Sirach] 2,500, the first and second Maccabees 2,300 apiece, the fourth 1,000, Judith 1,300, and Tobias 1,000.) Set against the disputed list the verdict is plain: Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, and the Maccabees are all here, counted into the Old Testament with the rest. The one Greek book the catalogue lacks is the third book of Maccabees — it has 1, 2, and 4 Maccabees but skips 3, a quirk that shows it is registering a genuine Greek/Alexandrian table of contents, not a tidied one.¹

The catalogue is older than the manuscript that carries it

The list is bound into Codex Claromontanus, the bilingual Greek-Latin manuscript of the Pauline epistles (designated D) written in the fifth or sixth century, where it sits oddly between Philemon and Hebrews, on the leaf numbered folio 468.² But the catalogue is plainly a foreign body in that codex — an older canon-list the sixth-century scribe simply copied in. Its archaic features (the Old-Latin book-names, the Alexandrian shape, the New-Testament list that still counts the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Acts of Paul, and the Apocalypse of Peter) point its composition back to roughly 300–400, an exemplar a century or two earlier than the manuscript: "the catalog of the 6th-century Codex Claromontanus was probably copying a 3rd- or 4th-century source."² That is why it earns a place on the timeline at c. 400, alongside the African councils and not in the sixth century of its surviving copy.

A Western "longer canon" witness, in step with the African councils

The Claromontanus catalogue belongs to the same Latin-West stream as the conciliar lists at the turn of the fifth century. Where Cyril and the Eastern fathers counted twenty-two Hebrew books and set the apocrypha aside, the Western lists of this era — the canon of Hippo and Carthage under Augustine's hand, the Roman synod's list, the letter of Innocent I to Exsuperius — receive Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, and the Maccabees as Scripture. Claromontanus is the bare-table-of-contents version of that consensus: no argument, no boundary-drawing, just a scribe's inventory in which the deuterocanonical books are line-counted Scripture like Genesis and Isaiah. It is the closest cousin of the Cheltenham (Mommsen) List of 359/365, another Latin stichometric catalogue that likewise carries the longer Old Testament.

Notes

• The marks fall on the New Testament, not the Old. Claromontanus is famous for the horizontal strokes (obeli) standing beside several titles — commonly read as flags of doubtful or secondary status. In the New Testament these mark exactly the contested extras (Barnabas, the Shepherd, the Acts of Paul, the Apocalypse of Peter, and — debated — 1 Peter). On the Old-Testament side only one book carries a dash: Judith. The deuterocanon as a whole stands in the list unmarked, and Tobit, Wisdom, Sirach, and the Maccabees draw no obelus at all — so the catalogue's own marking system, far from excluding the longer Old Testament, endorses nearly all of it.
• The obeli are disputed — and may be a later hand. The traditional reading (from Tischendorf onward) is that the dashes mark four extracanonical New-Testament works as secondary; Metzger took the stroke beside 1 Peter instead for a paragraph-mark separating Peter's epistles from Paul's. More recent work (Kelsie Rodenbiker, 2021) argues the obeli — including the one by Judith — were added by a later hand than the one that wrote the list, so they may register a reader's later doubts rather than the original cataloguer's judgment. On any of these readings the Old-Testament deuterocanon is in the catalogue; what is uncertain is only what a single secondary dash beside Judith was meant to signal.
• Why a Pauline manuscript carries an Old-Testament list at all. The catalogue is a self-contained canon inventory — whole Old and New Testaments — that the Claromontanus scribe inserted into a copy of Paul; the leaf interrupts the Pauline corpus between Philemon and Hebrews. Its value here is the Old-Testament half: an independent, roughly-c.-400 register of what one Western/Alexandrian tradition reckoned the Old Testament to be, deuterocanon included, surviving only because a later scribe copied it whole into Codex D.

Sources