COUNCILS
COUNCILS
Also, there were six Church councils that may have produced canon lists:
The Nicene Council (325 AD)[1] occurred, with 318 Bishops attending. But with respect to the canon, we only know of a determination from Jerome, writing much later, and he only indicates that they voted to include Judith—and most agree he was mistaken.
The Council at Laodicea (363 AD) occurred, with 22-32 Bishops attending, but whether they actually voted on a canon is disputed. If they did, it was the same as Cyril of Jerusalem (who had written his list earlier in 350 AD): the Septuagint versions of the Hebrew Books (and thus, Susanna), plus Baruch and the Epistle of Jeremiah.[2]
The Council of Rome (382 AD) occurred, with 70 Bishops attending, but any vote on a canon is also disputed; if it did occur, they accepted all the Apocrypha: 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, Judith, Tobit, and Susanna.[3]
I personally assign zero weight to those three, although I added them to the chronologies for your own consideration. For me, they are simply too disputed to bother with, particularly since all the evidence for them consists of single scraps of paper written long afterwards. If it matters, from what I can tell, the authenticity of the Council of Rome gets more support than the Council of Laodicea (which gets support from Gallagher and Meade), but both get very little. The Nicene Council gets almost no support (I saw it argued “for” just one time, and I am not sure how knowledgeable the arguer actually was). However, the writings claiming the votes show at least what the writer was thinking at that later time—but for Rome and Laodicea, those writings come from outside of my time frame, so I ignore them.
However, Jerome was writing in 405 AD and might have induced some readers before 450 AD to believe that the Nicene Council had so voted. Perhaps that would have a supplemental, reinforcing influence, given that the votes of the African Councils also accepted Judith (before Jerome was writing). However, I am also not sure how many would have even read what Jerome wrote about Nicea/Judith before 450 AD. It is in his “prologue,” which is basically a cover letter; I am sure his translation of Judith went out to the world, but I have never seen anything indicating whether the prologue was also being copied and distributed (if you read it, it would seem to be a waste of time, effort, and ink to bother with—but who knows).[4] In any event, I never found any Father discussing it.
What Jerome’s mistake was is debated—I personally think he just meant one of the more recent African Councils and mistakenly said, “Nicene.” Two of the African Councils (see below) had occurred recently and voted on the canon, and they both accepted Judith. Note that (somewhat contemporaneously) Bishops also ask Jerome to translate Tobit, and he gives into the demand without citing the Nicene Council (but still with his typical whining about it, which is how we know that it happened).[5]
The Council of Hippo in 393 voted to accept all the Apocrypha.[6] Seventy Bishops are thought to have attended.
The Council of Carthage in 397 voted to accept all the Apocrypha. Between 44 and 48 Bishops attended.
The Council of Carthage in 419 reaffirmed the canons of both Hippo and Carthage, i.e., to accept all the Apocrypha. This Council was attended by 217 Bishops, which is a stunning number of voters to consider when we are determining the dominant position—numerically, they are far more than all the early Church Fathers whose writings we still have, and well over ten times as numerous as individual named Fathers who wrote lists (which might be as few as ten, depending on who wrote Christian lists, etc.).[7]
For our purposes, the point of these last three councils is not that they are binding on anyone (that discussion is a red herring) but that they are massive data and evidence to consider regarding what the Church was actually doing at that time. A vast swath of the Church was accepting all of the Apocrypha—and doing so despite the writings of Jerome, Rufinus, Athanasius, etc.
Still, a vast swath of Christendom outside of North Africa was not in attendance at those councils, so it is not the end of the inquiry either. With no other canon list after 400 AD except that of Pope Innocent[8] (who affirmed the decisions of the Council of Hippo and the first Council of Carthage), the answer to whether the rest of the Church accepted any of the Apocrypha comes from the citation evidence.
Another aspect to note is that no early Council (disputed or not) ever once voted for any form of “third category” of Ecclesiastical Books to be read but not used to confirm doctrine, etc.
[1] It occurs before this time period, but I list it here because I believe Jerome was mistaken—i.e., his mention of it is evidence relating to Jerome; it is not evidence relating to Nicea.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Laodicea. Nearly everyone (ancient and modern) is mistaken in what they call the Septuagint Daniel (and Susanna): they think of it as the Septuagint because it is in Greek, but what they are talking about is the Theodotion version. There is no real debate about what anyone meant after 150 AD (when the Theodotion replaces the Septuagint version), it is a lack of precision. E.g., the Orthodox Study Bible (Intro, p. vi, 2008 ed.) claims to have the original Bible—but they are wrong, they too have the Theodotion Daniel, and not the Septuagint.
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Rome.
[4] https://tertullian.org/fathers/jerome_preface_judith_e.htm
[5] Gallagher wrote a paper speculating on Jerome’s motivations for making the translations of Judith and Tobit www.academia.edu/14345165/_Why_Did_Jerome_Translate_Tobit_and_Judith_Harvard_Theological_Review_108_2015_356_75). There is one thing that touches on our present inquiry, which is the importance of making fair comparisons: Gallagher says that, “Jerome cites Wisdom of Solomon and Sirach much more often than the other four deuterocanonical books, so that if one were to guess two noncanonical books to be candidates for translation by Jerome, it would certainly be these two.” But once again, that is an apples-to-oranges comparison. Tobit and Judith are historical works, and we would expect few citations compared to wisdom/poetic Books. www.Biblindex.org uses different data than Gallagher’s paper (which cites to a German language book that I will not be reading anytime soon) but lists ten times as many citations across all authors for Sirach and Wisdom combined than for Tobit and Judith combined, and 76 to 10 for Jerome (vs. 154 to 12 using Gallagher’s data); Jerome makes 2267 citations to Psalms, 163 to Job, 245 to Proverbs, 146 to Songs, 75 to Ecclesiastes (all Poetic/Wisdom Books, like Sirach and Wisdom), and just nine citations to 1 Chronicles (a historical Book like Tobit and Judith, but far longer than both of them combined); Jerome also cites other historical Books (Ruth 8, Nehemiah 8, Esther 12) as rarely as he cites 1 Chronicles, Tobit, and Judith. So, I would not blindly accept the claim of a “lack of citation;” to the contrary, it seems to be in line with all Fathers and par for the course with historical works. I am not sure this point matters much to Gallagher’s overall theory, but my point in mentioning it here is that, once again, we see the need to look for fair comparisons. We have seen many times that authors do not always look for them, so it is we, the readers, who must do so.
[6] With counsel lists, some argue about Baruch, since there had been some separation between it and the label “Jeremiah” via Origen, etc. I view that as a perfectly proper pedantic point, but there is no evidence for a sentiment for excluding it among relevant Fathers/Bishops in Africa (in fact, other than Jerome, I found no evidence for that view at all). So, if there was debate about Baruch, it would seem to relate to the definition of the label “Jeremiah” and not to excluding it, and apparently the label “Jeremiah” won. E.g., I would note that Theodoret’s commentary on Baruch is a generation later (448 AD) and Baruch is still part of Jeremiah to him.
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synod_of_Hippo and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Councils_of_Carthage
