HistoricalChristian.Faith

John of Damascus on the Old Testament Canon

Dates: c. 730 AD (the Old-Testament catalogue is in An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, Book IV, ch. 17, "Concerning Scripture" — the third part of the Fount of Knowledge, composed in the 730s; John of Damascus c. 675/676–749) · Wikipedia
Verdict on the deuterocanon: NO — graded, in the Athanasius/Epiphanius pattern. The last of the Greek Fathers closes the patristic East where Athanasius and Epiphanius had left it: the Old Testament is the Hebrew-sized twenty-two books (twenty-seven when the five doubled books are separated), laid out in four "pentateuchs" plus two. Tobit, Judith, and the Maccabees are simply absent; the Wisdom of Solomon and the Wisdom of Sirach he names and praises — "virtuous and noble" — but rules out: "they are not counted nor were they placed in the ark." A near-verbatim Eastern restatement of the graded "No," set down roughly two centuries before the vocalization of the Masoretic Text. But the witness is double: the same Exposition that holds the Wisdom of Solomon back from the count cites it, two chapters earlier (IV.15), as "the divine Scripture" — so the strict Hebrew canon-list and a working use of the deuterocanon as Scripture sit side by side in one volume, the Origen/Eusebius distinction carried into the eighth century.

Claims & evidence

The canon: "two and twenty books… one for each letter of the Hebrew tongue"

In the chapter "Concerning Scripture" John fixes the count by the Hebrew alphabet, then runs the books out in the four-"pentateuch" arrangement his Eastern predecessors had used — the Law, the historical "Hagiographa," the poetical books, and the Prophets, with Ezra and Esther left over:¹

Observe, further, that there are two and twenty books of the Old Testament, one for each letter of the Hebrew tongue. For there are twenty-two letters of which five are double, and so they come to be twenty-seven… And thus the number of the books in this way is twenty-two… Five of them are of the Law, viz. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. This which is the code of the Law, constitutes the first Pentateuch. Then comes another Pentateuch, the so-called Grapheia, or as they are called by some, the Hagiographa, which are the following: Jesus the Son of Nave, Judges along with Ruth, first and second Kings, which are one book, third and fourth Kings, which are one book, and the two books of the Paraleipomena which are one book. This is the second Pentateuch. The third Pentateuch is the books in verse, viz. Job, Psalms, Proverbs of Solomon, Ecclesiastes of Solomon and the Song of Songs of Solomon. The fourth Pentateuch is the Prophetical books, viz the twelve prophets constituting one book, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel. Then come the two books of Esdra made into one, and Esther.

Measured against the disputed books the verdict on the canon proper is plain: no Tobit, no Judith, no Maccabees, and the two Wisdom books held back for separate treatment (below). These twenty-two are the protocanonical Hebrew books, with Ruth folded into Judges, the paired books of Kings and Chronicles each counted as one, and Ezra ("the two books of Esdra") counted as one — the same Hebrew-letter reckoning given by Athanasius, Cyril, the pseudo-Athanasian Synopsis, and Epiphanius before him. John's arrangement matches Epiphanius's almost exactly — the "four pentateuchs plus two" frame, the twenty-two/twenty-seven double count, the five "double" letters — so closely that the chapter reads as a compend of the earlier Eastern catalogues, which is what the Exposition by design is.

The Wisdom books: "virtuous and noble, but are not counted nor were they placed in the ark"

John does not pass the two great Wisdom books over in silence. As Epiphanius had, he names them, praises them, and then sets them outside the count — the page's clearest statement of a graded "No":¹

There are also the Panaretus, that is the Wisdom of Solomon, and the Wisdom of Jesus, which was published in Hebrew by the father of Sirach, and afterwards translated into Greek by his grandson, Jesus, the Son of Sirach. These are virtuous and noble, but are not counted nor were they placed in the ark.

This is the precise middle posture the Eastern Fathers had refined: not canon, not heretical forgery, but worth reading. The image of the ark is inherited straight from Epiphanius, who said the Wisdom books "were not kept in the chest, that is, in the ark of the covenant"; the rank is the one Athanasius had given the deuterocanon ("appointed by the Fathers to be read"). "Panaretus" (Panaretos, "all-virtuous") is the old Greek title for the Wisdom of Solomon, and John's note on the book's history — a Hebrew original by the elder Sirach, rendered into Greek by his grandson — tracks the prologue Ben Sira's grandson actually attached to the Greek translation. Naming, praising, and excluding in one breath, John keeps the canonical-versus-edifying line his predecessors had drawn.

Yet Wisdom cited as "the divine Scripture": the souls of the just (IV.15)

The list is only half the witness. Two chapters before the canon-catalogue, defending the honour paid to the saints and their relics — IV.15, "Concerning the honour due to the Saints and their remains" — John argues that the holy dead are alive in God and so may rightly be venerated, and he grounds the point on a deuterocanonical proof-text introduced by the bare formula he reserves for the protocanon:²

The divine Scripture likewise says that the souls of the just are in God's hand and death cannot lay hold of them.

The words are the Wisdom of Solomon 3:1 — "But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and there shall no torment touch them" — and John adduces them not as edifying counsel but as probative authority in a doctrinal argument, under the unqualified label "the divine Scripture," the same he gives the protocanon. The tension with IV.17 is the whole interest of the witness: the very work whose canon-list holds Wisdom back from the ark cites Wisdom, in its own pages, as God's Scripture. It is the Origen/Eusebius pattern carried into the eighth century — a Hebrew-sized canon set down by a man whose working Bible, in argument, still ran to the longer Greek text. The "canonical"-versus-"read-in-the-churches" line his Eastern predecessors drew, John does not so much resolve as embody.

Notes

• NO to canonicity, not to worth — the closing Eastern witness. John is a clean witness against the canonical standing of Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, and the Maccabees: the canon is the Hebrew twenty-two. Yet he singles out the two Wisdom books as "virtuous and noble" and keeps them on the shelf of the useful-but-not-counted. Standing at the end of the Greek patristic age (he is conventionally reckoned its last great representative), he hands on the graded posture of Athanasius and Epiphanius essentially unchanged — evidence that the fourth-century Eastern settlement still held in the eighth.
• How close to Epiphanius? Very. The four-"pentateuch"-plus-two frame, the twenty-two-by-the-Hebrew-letters count with twenty-seven when the five doubled books are split, and the "ark" image for the excluded Wisdom books all come from Epiphanius's On Weights and Measures. The Exposition of the Orthodox Faith is explicitly a work of compilation, gathering the Fathers' settled teaching; on the canon, John's source is patently the Epiphanian catalogue.
• Two centuries before the Masoretic vocalization. John writes c. 730 — before the Tiberian Masoretes fixed the pointed Hebrew text (9th–10th c.). His "two and twenty books, one for each letter of the Hebrew tongue" is thus a witness, from inside the Greek-speaking church, that the shape of the Hebrew canon was already a fixed datum the East reckoned by, even while it read its Scriptures from the Septuagint.
• The list-versus-citation tension. John's witness is double, and the two halves sit only a couple of chapters apart in the one work: IV.17 excludes the Wisdom of Solomon from the twenty-two, IV.15 quotes it as "the divine Scripture." This is not a contradiction John flags or feels — it is the settled patristic distinction between the strict (Hebrew) canon and the wider body of inspired-and-read Scripture, the same doubleness found in Origen and Eusebius. It is exactly the datapoint weighed in the argument on whether the early church "rejected" the deuterocanon.
• One soft seam. Unlike Cyril and Epiphanius, John's chapter as printed does not spell out the usual folding of Baruch and the Epistle of Jeremiah into the book of Jeremiah; he lists "Jeremiah" bare among the four prophets. The deuterocanonical material he addresses by name is the two Wisdom books, and those he excludes.

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