HistoricalChristian.Faith

Lactantius on the Old Testament Canon

Dates: c. 310 AD (Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius, c. 250 – c. 325; a Latin rhetorician of North African origin, pupil of Arnobius, summoned by Diocletian to teach rhetoric at Nicomedia, later tutor to Constantine’s son Crispus — the “Christian Cicero,” whose Divine Institutes were composed c. 303–311 during and after the Great Persecution) · Wikipedia
Summary: The first Latin writer to attempt a systematic apologetic for Christianity adduces a deuterocanonical text as the very testimony of “Solomon” to the divine Word. Building his case for the eternal Word made flesh, Lactantius sets Sirach 24:3–4 — Wisdom’s self-declaration, “I came forth out of the mouth of the Most High before all creatures” — immediately beside John 1:1, treating the wisdom-book as a prophetic witness to Christ on equal footing with the Gospel. He draws up no canon-list, so he renders no canon-verdict; but his practice stands on the “using” side of the divide — a Western, Constantinian-era datapoint, between Dionysius and Nicaea, of the disputed books read as inspired Scripture.

Claims & evidence

He cites Sirach (24:3–4), as “Solomon,” for the Word of God — beside John 1

Solomon also shows that it is the Word of God, and no other, by whose hands these works of the world were made. “I,” He says, “came forth out of the mouth of the Most High before all creatures: I caused the light that fails not to arise in the heavens, and covered the whole earth with a cloud.” … John also thus taught: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

— The Divine Institutes, Book IV (“Of True Wisdom and Religion”), ch. 8, in the Ante-Nicene Fathers translation, source.¹ The quoted words — “I came forth out of the mouth of the Most High… and covered the whole earth with a cloud” — are Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) 24:3–4 (the self-speech of personified Wisdom), not the book of Proverbs: the distinctive phrase “out of the mouth of the Most High” and the covering of the earth “as a cloud” belong to Sirach 24 alone. Arguing that the Word by whom the world was made became incarnate, Lactantius adduces the deuterocanonical text as a direct testimony of the pre-existent Word and reads it straight into John 1:1 — the wisdom-book’s “I came forth out of the mouth of the Most High” glossing the Gospel’s “In the beginning was the Word.” The Sirach verse is handled exactly as the Johannine one beside it, both adduced as the voice of inspired prophecy concerning Christ.

Notes

• The “Solomon” mis-ascription — a feature, not a slip against the deuterocanon. Lactantius credits the words to “Solomon,” but they are Sirach, written by Jesus ben Sira (c. 180 BC), not Solomon. The error is the very mark of how the Greek wisdom literature circulated: Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) travelled among the “books of Solomon” — grouped with Proverbs, Wisdom, and Ecclesiastes — and was routinely cited under the Solomonic name. Far from weakening the witness, the mis-ascription confirms it: Lactantius reaches for the deuterocanonical text precisely because he reckons it inspired Solomonic testimony, on a level with the canonical wisdom books, fit to stand beside John’s Gospel as prophecy of the Word.
• A christological, not merely edifying, use. This is stronger than a woven moral maxim of the Clement of Rome / Polycarp type. Lactantius does not adduce Sirach for ethics but for doctrine — the eternity and creative agency of the Word — and pairs it with John 1 as a prophecy of Christ, in the manner of Hippolytus’s reading of Wisdom as “the prophecy of Solomon which speaketh of Christ.” The deuterocanonical verse carries probative weight in the argument, not decorative.
• Use, not a canon-list. Like Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus, Tertullian, Cyprian, and Dionysius, Lactantius nowhere enumerates the Old-Testament books, so he renders no canon-verdict. He bears on the canon question as a witness to early-fourth-century Western practice, on the eve of Nicaea — the datapoint weighed in the argument “Did the early church reject the deuterocanon…?” (assessed contested), against the flat claim that the primitive church did not reckon these books Scripture.

Sources