HistoricalChristian.Faith

Hippolytus of Rome on the Old Testament Canon

Dates: c. 205 AD (Hippolytus of Rome, c. 170–235; presbyter and the most learned theologian of the early-third-century Roman church, later reckoned a martyr; his Against Noetus and Expository Treatise Against the Jews belong to the first decades of the third century) · Wikipedia
Summary: Hippolytus puts two of the disputed books to work as prophetic Scripture. He introduces a long passage of the Wisdom of Solomon as “the prophecy of Solomon, which speaketh of Christ,” reading Wisdom 2 as a foretelling of the plot against the righteous one; and he expounds Baruch 3:35–37 (“This is our God… afterward did He show Himself upon earth”) as a true word of God fulfilled in the incarnation. Neither is a canon-list; both are working uses of the deuterocanon as inspired prophecy by a leading Western teacher a generation after Clement of Alexandria.

Claims & evidence

He calls the Wisdom of Solomon “the prophecy of Solomon, which speaketh of Christ” (Wisdom 2:1, 12–20)

I produce now the prophecy of Solomon, which speaketh of Christ, and announces clearly and perspicuously things concerning the Jews; and those which not only are befalling them at the present time, but those, too, which shall befall them in the future age, on account of the contumacy and audacity which they exhibited toward the Prince of Life; for the prophet says, “The ungodly said, reasoning with themselves, but not aright,” that is, about Christ, “Let us lie in wait for the righteous, because he is not for our turn, and he is clean contrary to our doings and words, and upbraideth us with our offending the law, and professeth to have knowledge of God; and he calleth himself the Child of God.”

— The Expository Treatise Against the Jews, §9.¹ The quoted lines are the deuterocanonical Wisdom of Solomon 2:1 and 2:12–20 — the very passage on the plot against “the righteous” who “calleth himself the Child of God” that the Fathers read as foretelling the Passion. Hippolytus does not merely weave the words in: he frames the whole as “the prophecy of Solomon, which speaketh of Christ” and calls its author “the prophet,” treating Wisdom as a Solomonic messianic prophecy on a par with the canonical prophets he marshals against his Jewish interlocutor.

He expounds Baruch 3:35–37 as a true word of God fulfilled in the incarnation (“Thus it is written”)

But they make use also of other testimonies, and say, Thus it is written: “This is our God, and there shall none other be accounted of in comparison of Him. He hath found out all the way of knowledge, and hath given it unto Jacob His servant (son), and to Israel His beloved. Afterward did He show Himself upon earth, and conversed with men.”

— Against the Heresy of One Noetus, §2.² The cited words are the deuterocanonical Baruch 3:35–37 (carried in the Greek and Latin tradition as an appendix to Jeremiah). The “Thus it is written” formula is here on the lips of the Noetian opponents who adduce the passage — but Hippolytus does not dispute its standing as Scripture; he accepts the citation and turns it to his own christological reading, expounding it of Christ at length in §5:

But what is meant, says he, in the other passage: “This is God, and there shall none other be accounted of in comparison of Him?” That said he rightly. For in comparison of the Father who shall be accounted of? But he says: “This is our God; there shall none other be accounted of in comparison of Him. He hath found out all the way of knowledge, and hath given it unto Jacob His servant, and to Israel His beloved.” He saith well… Having received, then, all knowledge from the Father, the perfect Israel, the true Jacob, afterward did show Himself upon earth, and conversed with men.

— Against the Heresy of One Noetus, §5.² So Baruch is treated as a genuine prophecy of God’s appearing “upon earth” in the incarnation: Hippolytus and his opponent agree the passage is Scripture, and the dispute between them is only over whom it speaks of, not whether it is to be reckoned with.

Notes

• Prophecy, not a canon-list. Like the witnesses before him, Hippolytus renders no Old-Testament catalogue; he simply cites the disputed books in the course of argument — Wisdom as the “prophecy of Solomon” against the Jews, Baruch as a prophecy of the incarnation against Noetus. This is a witness to use at the prophetic register, the same kind of practical reception that Clement of Alexandria had shown a few years earlier with the explicit “Scripture” formula.
• The Wisdom-as-Solomonic-prophecy reading. What is notable in Hippolytus is the form of the Wisdom citation: he does not call it merely an edifying maxim but “the prophecy of Solomon, which speaketh of Christ,” ascribing the Book of Wisdom to Solomon and ranking it as messianic prophecy — firmer language even than Irenaeus’s “Daniel the prophet” / “Jeremiah the prophet” for Susanna and Baruch, and squarely on the “using” side of the divide.
• The Baruch caveat. The “Thus it is written” that introduces Baruch in Against Noetus §2 is spoken by the Noetians, not by Hippolytus in his own voice; the bare quotation alone would be weaker on that account. But Hippolytus’s reply in §5 (“That said he rightly… He saith well”) shows he grants the passage’s scriptural authority and contests only its interpretation — so the citation still counts as a shared assumption that Baruch is Scripture, not a point at issue.
• Bearing on the argument. Hippolytus stands on the “using” side of the divide weighed in the argument “Did the early church reject the deuterocanon…?” (assessed contested): a leading teacher of the Roman church, c. 205, reading Wisdom as the prophecy of Solomon concerning Christ and Baruch as a prophecy of the incarnation — further weight against the flat claim that the primitive church did not reckon these books Scripture, well before the Western conciliar lists.
• Place on the timeline. At c. 205 Hippolytus falls between Clement of Alexandria (c. 200) and Origen (c. 240) — the Western counterpart, in the same decades, to the Alexandrian use of the disputed books as Scripture, just before Origen would return the timeline to a Hebrew-sized canon while keeping the Greek in church use.

Sources