HistoricalChristian.Faith

The Council of Rome on the Old Testament Canon

Dates: 382 AD (the Roman synod under Pope Damasus I; the canon-list ascribed to it — the "Damasine list" — survives only in the later Decretum Gelasianum) · Wikipedia · New Testament canon page
Verdict on the deuterocanon: YES — but on a single sixth-century document. The canon-list ascribed to the Roman synod of 382 gives the longer Septuagint Old Testament, filing Tobit, Judith, and the two books of Maccabees among "the Histories" and Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) among the Solomonic books — the first Latin list to run out the full deuterocanon as Scripture, the same canon the African councils would soon enact. But that list survives in no fourth-century text: it is preserved only as a chapter of the Decretum Gelasianum, which critical scholarship dates to the sixth century and which this timeline places c. 500. So Rome (382) returns a real "Yes" to the disputed books — but its date is secure where its canon-act is contested.

The Damasine list — the deuterocanon among the books

The canon-list ascribed to the Roman synod of 382 stands as the second chapter of the Decretum Gelasianum. Its Old-Testament catalogue is the longer Septuagint reckoning, with the disputed books set among the protocanonical ones rather than ranked below them:¹

Three books of Solomon: proverbs one book, ecclesiastes one book, song of songs one book. The same [Solomon's]: of Wisdom one book, ecclesiasticus one book… Likewise the order of the histories: Job one book, Tobit one book, Esdras two books, Esther one book, Judith one book, Maccabees two books.

So Wisdom and Sirach stand with the Solomonic writings, and Tobit, Judith, and 1–2 Maccabees among "the Histories" — the whole deuterocanon received without qualification. In content this is the Western canon as the late fourth century read it, the same longer Old Testament the African councils (Hippo 393, Carthage 397 and 419) would put into conciliar form and that Florence and Trent would later dogmatize against the twenty-two-book Hebrew reckoning Athanasius and Jerome preferred.²

A real synod — but a contested canon-act

That a synod met at Rome in 382 under Damasus is not in doubt: convened in the aftermath of the Council of Constantinople (381) and occupied chiefly with the Antiochene/Meletian schism, it is the synod to which Jerome — newly arrived in Rome that year, soon Damasus's secretary — twice refers in passing. What is contested is whether that synod promulgated the canon-list now ascribed to it. The list appears in no independent fourth-century text; it survives only inside the Decretum Gelasianum, which Ernst von Dobschütz showed to be a single pseudonymous compilation of the first half of the sixth century — its opening chapter quotes a work Augustine wrote in 416, so the document as a unit cannot be a decree of 382. The attribution of its canon-chapters to a Damasan council is itself modern (Faustino Arévalo, 1794; edited by C. H. Turner as "The Roman Council under Damasus"), and Jerome — present at Rome, the Latin Church's foremost authority on the canon, and the very writer the list depends on — nowhere mentions a Roman conciliar canon and in his own prefaces ranks Judith, Tobit, and the Maccabees below the canon.³

The full adversarial weighing of the "Rome fixed the canon in 382" claim — Arévalo, Turner, and Jurgens for the authenticity of the canon-chapters; von Dobschütz, Burkitt, Hahneman, and Metzger against the 382 promulgation — is set out on the dedicated argument page, shared with the New-Testament canon timeline: The Council of Rome (382) and the "Damasine list" — did Damasus promulgate the canon? (assessed weak for the strong "fixed at Rome in 382" framing; the modest reading — that Damasus's Rome received the deuterocanon as Scripture, as the rest of the late-fourth-century West did — is plausible). It is not re-argued here.⁴

Notes

• Why the "Yes" is hedged. Unlike Athanasius (367) before it and the African councils (393–419), Innocent I (405), and Florence and Trent after it — whose canon-lists are securely fixed to their authors and dates — Rome's depends on a single later document and a modern attribution. It is placed on this timeline at its claimed year, 382, but framed as the probable Western reception of the deuterocanon, not its decree.
• The same witness, two doctrines. This page treats Rome's verdict on the disputed Old-Testament books; the parallel New Testament canon page treats the same synod's all-twenty-seven New-Testament list. Both rest on the one Damasine list, and both carry the same sixth-century-document caveat.
• A canon read backward onto a council. The Rome-382 claim is the close cousin of the legend that Nicaea settled the canon: a boundary already received, retrospectively pinned to a council that left no such act in its own records.
• Doubting the document is not doubting the reception. The case against a 382 canon-decree is strong, but it is a case about this document — it does not show the Western church had not received these books. The same longer Old Testament is attested, on threads owing nothing to the Damasine list, by the African councils (Hippo 393, Carthage 397/419), by Innocent I of Rome in 405, and by Jerome's own Vulgate for the next thousand years. So demoting Rome 382 weakens one alleged proof of a formal decree without rescuing the claim that "the church did not hold these books before Trent."

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