HistoricalChristian.Faith

Sulpicius Severus on the Old Testament Canon

Dates: c. 363–425 AD (Sulpicius Severus — a Gallic aristocrat and lawyer of Aquitaine who, after his wife's death, embraced the ascetic life and became the friend, disciple, and biographer of Martin of Tours. His Sacred History (Chronica), a two-book epitome of biblical and church history from creation to his own day, was completed about AD 403) · Wikipedia
Verdict on the deuterocanon: YES (Judith) — narrated within his epitome of "the sacred Scriptures," though he flags its chronological difficulty; leaves no canon-list. Sulpicius draws up no catalogue of the Old Testament books, so he renders no formal canon-verdict. But his Sacred History is by his own definition a condensed retelling of "those things which are set forth in the sacred Scriptures," and into that survey — beside Esther and the post-exilic books — he folds the deuterocanonical Judith, narrating "the doings of Judith" as a stretch of the same sacred history. The witness is the softer, historical kind, like Clement of Rome with "the blessed Judith" and Aphrahat with the Maccabean martyrs — and graded further by the fact that Sulpicius openly flags the book's chronological difficulty even while including it. He treats Judith as genuine but historically puzzling sacred history.

Claims & evidence

The whole work defined as an epitome of "the sacred Scriptures"

The opening of the Sacred History states its program: a condensed retelling of the contents of Scripture itself, from creation down to Sulpicius's own day. The frame matters for the canon question because it fixes what counts as the work's subject-matter — the books the church read as Scripture:¹

I address myself to give a condensed account of those things which are set forth in the sacred Scriptures from the beginning of the world, and to tell of them, with distinction of dates and according to their importance, down to a period within our own remembrance.

He adds that he has "comprised in two short books things which elsewhere filled many volumes," "studying brevity" and omitting "hardly any of the facts," and that his aim is that "one who is already familiar with the original should recognize here what he has read there" — the "fountain-head" being the Scriptures he epitomizes. Whatever he narrates as part of this survey he is treating as part of that sacred history.

Judith folded into the survey: "the doings of Judith"

At the close of his second book, having run through the post-exilic history (Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther), Sulpicius turns to Judith. He introduces her story as a fitting appendix to the same series of sacred events — not as an outside or merely edifying tale, but as the next stretch of the history he is compiling:²

To this series of events it will be right that I should append an account of the doings of Judith; for she is related to have lived after the captivity, but the sacred history has not revealed who was king of the Persians in her day.

The phrase "the sacred history has not revealed" treats Judith's narrative as itself part of the sacred record — the same body of text he set out to epitomize — while frankly conceding that it does not fix the Persian king of her day. Sulpicius then labours to place her: he reasons that the "Nebuchadnezzar" the book names was really the Persian Ochus, marshalling the eunuch Bagoas (named in both the profane historians and the book of Judith) to support the identification. He goes on to recount how Holofernes led an army against the Jews and how Judith killed him — treating the narrative as genuine history to be harmonized with the secular chronology, not as fiction to be discounted.

Notes

• A graded, historical-kind witness. Sulpicius does not preface Judith with "it is written" or call it "Scripture" in so many words; he simply incorporates it into a work he defines as a retelling of "the sacred Scriptures." That places him with the softer "using" witnesses — Clement of Rome, Aphrahat, and Tertullian's "a Judith, daughter of Merari" among the saints — rather than with the explicit-formula citers like Cyprian or Ambrose.
• The chronological caveat cuts both ways. That Sulpicius flags Judith's historical difficulty — "the sacred history has not revealed who was king of the Persians in her day" — might look like distancing, but it is the opposite: he expends real effort reconciling the book's "Nebuchadnezzar" with the Persian king-list (settling on Ochus, with Bagoas as the clincher), which is the labour one spends on a text taken to be true history, not on a discarded one. The caveat grades the force of the witness without negating it.
• Judith only. Unlike the Greek and Latin Fathers who range across Sirach, Wisdom, Baruch, Tobit, and the Maccabees, Sulpicius's relevant testimony here is to Judith alone — the one deuterocanonical narrative his epitome had occasion to incorporate. He is a single-book datapoint, not a broad one.
• List versus usage. Sulpicius belongs with the Fathers who treat a disputed book as sacred history while drawing up no narrowing list — the same gap weighed across the timeline. A Gallic, turn-of-the-fifth-century Western voice, contemporary with Augustine and the African councils on the one side and Jerome's Hebraica veritas on the other, his practice falls on the "using" side — the datapoint weighed in the Arguments on whether the early church reckoned these books Scripture.

Sources