HistoricalChristian.Faith

The Synod of Jerusalem (1672) on the Old Testament Canon

Dates: c. 1672 (the Synod of Jerusalem — also called the Synod of Bethlehem, convened at the Church of the Nativity by Dositheus II, Patriarch of Jerusalem, and dated 16 March 1672; its decrees are the Confession of Dositheus, signed by the patriarch and some sixty-eight Eastern bishops and ecclesiastics) · Wikipedia
Verdict on the deuterocanon: YES — the Eastern Orthodox counterpart to Trent. The Confession of Dositheus names the Wisdom of Solomon, Judith, Tobit, Bel and the Dragon, Susanna, the Maccabees, and Sirach as "genuine parts of Scripture," rebuking Cyril Lucaris for calling them Apocrypha, and grounds their canonicity in the unbroken delivery of the Catholic Church — "the denial of these is the rejection of those." Where the Westminster Confession (1647) had just leveled the same books down to "human writings," the Eastern Church — answering a Calvinizing confession published under its own former Patriarch of Constantinople's name — leveled them back up into Scripture, the East's most authoritative modern ruling on the canon.

Background: answering the "Calvinist Patriarch"

The Synod was convened to repudiate the Eastern Confession of the Christian Faith (Geneva, 1629/1633) circulated under the name of Cyril Lucaris, Patriarch of Constantinople — a document so thoroughly Reformed that it adopted the Calvinist canon, demoting the deuterocanon to "Apocrypha" on the authority of the Synod of Laodicea's list.¹ Dositheus's council disowned that confession as alien to Orthodoxy and answered its eighteen chapters point by point. The third of its decrees (numbered as the answer to "Question 3" in the appended catechism) takes up the canon, and makes the Eastern reception of the disputed books explicit for the first time at the conciliar level — the same office Trent had performed for the West a century and a quarter earlier, but now against a Protestant rather than in anticipation of one.

Claims & evidence

The disputed books named "genuine parts of Scripture"

Decree 3 of the Confession lists by name the very books Lucaris had set aside, and refuses his label for them:

Following the rule of the Catholic Church, we call Sacred Scripture all those which Cyril collected from the Synod of Laodicea, and enumerated, adding thereto those which he foolishly, and ignorantly, or rather maliciously called Apocrypha; to wit, "The Wisdom of Solomon," "Judith," "Tobit," "The History of the Dragon" [Bel and the Dragon], "The History of Susanna," "The Maccabees," and "The Wisdom of Sirach." For we judge these also to be with the other genuine Books of Divine Scripture genuine parts of Scripture.

— Confession of Dositheus, Decree 3 (Synod of Jerusalem, 1672).² The catalogue is the working Eastern list — Wisdom, Judith, Tobit, the Greek Daniel-additions (Bel and the Dragon, Susanna), 1–2 Maccabees, and Sirach — declared not a lower tier but "genuine parts of Scripture," on a level "with the other genuine Books of Divine Scripture."

The ground is the Church's delivery, not the Hebrew table

The Confession does not argue the books into the canon from the Hebrew reckoning the Fathers had weighed; it grounds them in the unbroken delivering tradition of the church, exactly Augustine's reception-criterion pressed to a hard edge:

For ancient custom, or rather the Catholic Church, which hath delivered to us as genuine the Sacred Gospels and the other Books of Scripture, hath undoubtedly delivered these also as parts of Scripture, and the denial of these is the rejection of those. And if, perhaps, it seemeth that not always have all of these been considered on the same level as the rest, yet nevertheless these also have been counted and reckoned with the rest of Scripture, both by Synods and by many of the most ancient and eminent Theologians of the Catholic Church. All of these we also judge to be Canonical Books, and confess them to be Sacred Scripture.

— Confession of Dositheus, Decree 3.² Two moves carry the weight. First, the books stand or fall with the Gospels, because the same church handed both down: "the denial of these is the rejection of those" makes rejecting the deuterocanon a strike at the credibility of the whole received Bible. Second, the Confession candidly concedes the unevenness the timeline above documents — "not always have all of these been considered on the same level" — and absorbs it rather than denying it: the graded reckoning of Origen, Athanasius, and Jerome is acknowledged, then overruled by the breadth of synodal and patristic use. It is the same reception-over-Hebrew logic that carried Augustine, the African councils, and Trent to "Yes," now made the formal Eastern position.

Notes

• YES — the Eastern counterpart to Trent. The Synod of Jerusalem is to the Eastern Orthodox canon what Trent (1546) is to the Roman: the most authoritative modern conciliar affirmation of the deuterocanon. The two reach the same verdict by the same route — reception by the church overrules the narrower Hebrew table — though Jerusalem answers a Protestant confession already in hand, while Trent legislated against the Reformation as it broke.
• The mirror of Westminster. The two latest witnesses on the timeline are near-contemporary and exactly opposed: Westminster (1647) ranks the Apocrypha with "other human writings"; Jerusalem (1672), a generation later, ranks the same books with the Gospels. Both are reactions to the same sixteenth-century rupture, settling the canon on opposite principles — inspiration measured by the Hebrew canon (Westminster) versus the delivering tradition of the church (Jerusalem).
• The later Orthodox qualification. The Eastern affirmation has never been quite as airtight as Trent's anathema. Some later Orthodox theologians (and the catechism of Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow) again distinguish the disputed books as anaginoskomena — "things that are read," profitable and appointed for reading but ranked below the protocanonical books — so the East preserves, within its "Yes," a memory of the graded reckoning the Confession itself conceded. The 1672 decree remains the high-water mark of the Eastern affirmation.³
• Why it mattered doctrinally. Receiving the Maccabees as Scripture keeps in the Eastern canon the classic proof-text for prayer and offerings for the dead (2 Maccabees 12:43–45), and receiving Tobit keeps its "almsgiving saves from death" (Tobit 12:9) — the contested texts weighed in the Arguments on the summary timeline. The Eastern tradition of praying for the departed rests easily on a canon that includes them.
• Provenance. The decrees are quoted from the Confession of Dositheus in the standard English translation (J. N. W. B. Robertson, 1899), reproduced in Philip Schaff's Creeds of Christendom and elsewhere; the synod sat at Bethlehem in March 1672 under Patriarch Dositheus II of Jerusalem.

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