HistoricalChristian.Faith

The Council of Trent on the Old Testament Canon

Dates: 8 April 1546 (Session 4 of the Council of Trent, the nineteenth ecumenical council, under Pope Paul III; the Decree Concerning the Canonical Scriptures) · Wikipedia
Verdict on the deuterocanon: YES — the dogmatic close of the question, the disputed books defined as "sacred and canonical" under anathema, the Counter-Reformation anchor. Answering the Reformation directly, Trent "receives and venerates with an equal affection of piety and reverence" all the books of both Testaments and prints the list — Tobias, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), Baruch, and the two books of Maccabees among them — then anathematizes anyone who does not receive "the said books entire with all their parts." It is the reception-based canon of the African councils, Augustine, Innocent I, and Florence, now fixed as binding dogma — the Roman answer to Luther's demotion of these same books twelve years earlier.

Claims & evidence

The decree: the deuterocanon "received and venerated" among the canonical books

Meeting in its fourth session as the council convened to answer the Reformation, Trent set the canon of Scripture at the head of its doctrinal work — before justification, before the sacraments — precisely because the Reformers had reopened it. The decree declares the church's reception of both Testaments and then, "lest a doubt may arise in any one's mind," prints the list:

(the Synod) following the examples of the orthodox Fathers, receives and venerates with an equal affection of piety, and reverence, all the books both of the Old and of the New Testament—seeing that one God is the author of both… They are as set down here below: of the Old Testament: the five books of Moses, to wit, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy; Josue, Judges, Ruth, four books of Kings, two of Paralipomenon, the first book of Esdras, and the second which is entitled Nehemias; Tobias, Judith, Esther, Job, the Davidical Psalter, consisting of a hundred and fifty psalms; the Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Canticle of Canticles, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Isaias, Jeremias, with Baruch; Ezechiel, Daniel; the twelve minor prophets… two books of the Machabees, the first and the second.

— Council of Trent, Session 4, Decree Concerning the Canonical Scriptures (1546), trans. J. Waterworth.¹ Measured against the disputed books the verdict is plainly YES: Tobias, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), Baruch, and the two books of Maccabees stand in the one list of books the council "receives and venerates," threaded among Genesis, the Psalter, and Isaiah with no mark of a lesser rank — the same receptive grammar (suscipit ac veneratur) the Council of Florence had used in 1442, now repeated over the same books.²

What Florence professed, Trent defined — under anathema

What sets Trent apart from every earlier YES on this timeline is not the contents of its list but the force attached to it. The African councils were regional; Innocent I and the Damasine list were receptions, not definitions; even Florence's list sat inside a reunion profession that carried no penalty. Trent closes the canon as binding dogma, with an anathema:

But if any one receive not, as sacred and canonical, the said books entire with all their parts, as they have been used to be read in the Catholic Church, and as they are contained in the old Latin vulgate edition… let him be anathema.

— Council of Trent, Session 4 (1546).³ Two features of the anathema bind the canon tightly to the Latin tradition. First, the books are received "entire with all their parts" — a deliberate reach to cover the deuterocanonical additions as well as the disputed books: the Greek portions of Daniel (Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, the Song of the Three Children) and the additions to Esther, which Jerome had marked off with an obelus. Second, the standard of "all their parts" is the books "as they are contained in the old Latin vulgate edition," which the same session's companion decree declared "authentic" for public use.⁴ So the Catholic side answers the Protestant charge that the deuterocanon was "added at Trent" by pointing back up the timeline: Trent did not add these books, it defined a reception that runs from the Septuagint through Augustine to Florence — but it is fair to say Trent was the first to make that reception a test of communion.

What Trent left out: the trimming of the wider Latin appendix

The Tridentine canon is narrower than the medieval Latin Bibles in one direction even as it fixes the deuterocanon in the other. The Vulgate manuscripts and many earlier lists had carried, beyond the seven disputed books, three further texts that Trent's enumeration silently drops: 3 and 4 Esdras (the books Trent calls simply "the first book of Esdras, and the second which is entitled Nehemias" being the protocanonical Ezra and Nehemiah, not these) and the Prayer of Manasses.⁵ After Trent, the Clementine Vulgate of 1592 honored the omission by relegating exactly these three — the Prayer of Manasseh and 3 and 4 Esdras — to an appendix after the New Testament, "lest they utterly perish," explicitly outside the canon the council had defined. So Trent both raised the seven deuterocanonical books to defined dogma and lowered these three out of the canon they had ambiguously shared in the medieval Vulgate — the boundary that Catholic and Eastern Orthodox canons would differ over thereafter.⁶

Notes

• YES — the strongest form of YES on the timeline. Where Athanasius, Rufinus, and Jerome ranked these books a tier below the canon, and where Florence merely "accepted and venerated" them inside a reunion bull, Trent defines them as "sacred and canonical" with an anathema against denial. It is the reception-criterion of Augustine — weigh a book by the church's use, not the Hebrew reckoning — carried to its dogmatic conclusion.
• An answer to Luther. The decree's placement is itself a response: Trent opened its doctrinal work with the canon because Luther's 1534 Bible had gathered the same books into a separate "Apocrypha… not held equal to the Holy Scriptures." Trent's "entire with all their parts" and its binding of the canon to the Vulgate close the door Luther (following Jerome) had reopened.
• One dissenting cardinal, just before. The definition was not a formality: on the very eve of Trent, Cardinal Cajetan had restated the old Hieronymian view, ranking the deuterocanon for edification below the protocanon, and at the council itself there was a minority that wished to keep Jerome's two-tier distinction. Trent's majority overruled it, which is why the decree carries an anathema rather than a mere list.⁷
• Why the proof-texts mattered. The canon decree was not abstract: two of the books Trent defined carry texts the Reformation contested — 2 Maccabees 12:43–45 (offering and prayer for the dead) and Tobit 12:9 (almsgiving "delivers from death"). Fixing those books as canonical fixed their proof-texts as Scripture, which is why the canon question and the doctrinal disputes over purgatory and merit ran together. These are weighed in the Arguments section of the timeline.
• How later Protestant scholarship read the decree. The Anglican canon-historian B. F. Westcott judged that Trent "gave a new aspect to the whole question of the Canon," a decree "ratified by fifty-three prelates, among whom there was not one German, not one scholar distinguished for historical learning" fitted to weigh "the voice of antiquity" — a verdict later apologists (James White among them) quote as an authority against the definition. It registers, from a hostile witness, the very fact this page grants: that Trent's force, not its list, was the innovation. The "fifty-three prelates" line adds a genetic knock at the competence of the deciding body, not a point about the books' prior standing — and turns on whose "antiquity" governs, which is the reception dispute itself, not its resolution. Weighed on the first-universal-binding-definition and late-novelty argument pages.⁸
• Translation provenance. The English is J. Waterworth's, The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent (London: Dolman, 1848), the standard nineteenth-century English edition of the conciliar acts, reproduced from pp. 17–21.

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