HistoricalChristian.Faith

Innocent I on the Old Testament Canon

Dates: c. 405 AD (Consulenti tibi, Ep. 6 to Exuperius of Toulouse, dated 20 February 405; Innocent was bishop of Rome 401–417) · Wikipedia
Verdict on the deuterocanon: YES — the full Western deuterocanon received among the canonical books, with no second tier. Answering a query from Exuperius, bishop of Toulouse, Innocent I appends a canon-list that runs out the longer Septuagint Old Testament: Tobit, Judith, and the two books of Maccabees named outright among "the historical books," and Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) carried in "the five books of Solomon." Coming from a sitting bishop of Rome a decade after the African councils, it is the clearest papal-level reception of the deuterocanon before Florence and Trent — and it stands on the Augustinian, reception-based side of the contemporary fault line, against the Hebrew-sized canon of Jerome and Rufinus.

Claims & evidence

The canon-list appended for Exuperius: the deuterocanon among the books

Exuperius of Toulouse had written to Rome asking, among other disciplinary questions, which books "really are received in the canon." Innocent answers with a brief catalogue. Its Old-Testament portion reads:

Five books of Moses, that is, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, and Joshua the son of Nun, and Judges, and the four books of Kings together with Ruth, sixteen books of the Prophets, five books of Solomon, and the Psalms. Also of the historical books, one book of Job, one of Tobit, one of Esther, one of Judith, two of Maccabees, two of Ezra, two of Chronicles.

— Innocent I, Ep. 6 to Exuperius, ch. 7, trans. B. F. Westcott.¹ Measured against the disputed books the verdict is plainly YES: Tobit, Judith, and the two books of Maccabees are listed by name among "the historical books," and the "five books of Solomon" are Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, and the two deuterocanonical Wisdom books — the Wisdom of Solomon and Ecclesiasticus (Sirach).² Innocent files these books among the canon, with none of the "read but not canonical" qualification that Athanasius, Jerome, and Rufinus attached to the very same titles. This is the Western, Septuagint-based canon the African councils had just enacted, now restated by the bishop of Rome.

The same letter's New-Testament list, and the rejected pseudo-apostolic books

The catalogue continues into a New Testament identical to the present twenty-seven books, and then — in the sharpest Western papal language before the Decretum Gelasianum — names and condemns the pseudo-apostolic gospels and acts circulating "under the name of Matthias … or of Peter and John … or of Andrew … or of Thomas." That side of the letter, bearing on the New-Testament boundary, is treated on the companion New Testament canon page. The two senses of "apocrypha" must not be run together: the books Innocent condemns there are forged New-Testament writings, while the Old-Testament deuterocanon he here includes.

Notes

• YES, with no second tier. Where the Hebrew-minded Fathers ranked Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, and the Maccabees a step below the canon — "read" but "not in the canon" (Athanasius), "Ecclesiastical" not "Canonical" (Rufinus), read "for the strengthening of the people, but not for confirming… dogmas" (Jerome) — Innocent simply lists them among the received books. His is the Augustinian posture: weigh a book by the church's reception, not by the Hebrew reckoning.
• A papal-level reception, not a creating decree. Innocent received and restated the canon the late-fourth-century West already held; the African councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) had drawn the same line a few years earlier. The letter is a witness to that reception from the see of Rome, not the first promulgation of the canon (the claim sometimes attached to the Roman synod of 382 is weighed on the Council of Rome argument page).
• Baruch is not separately named. Innocent's "sixteen books of the Prophets" may, like the Eastern lists, reckon Baruch and the Epistle of Jeremiah inside the book of Jeremiah, but he does not name Baruch on its own; the explicit deuterocanonical inclusions here are Tobit, Judith, the two Maccabees, Wisdom, and Sirach.
• Translation provenance. The English and the underlying Latin are from B. F. Westcott's A General Survey of the History of the Canon of the New Testament (5th ed., 1881, pp. 570f.), which prints Innocent's letter in full; the canon-list is ch. 7 of the epistle.

Sources