According to Athanasius, the
only books that are authentically theoponeustoi, “Inspired by God,” are
those which either belong to the group of kanonizomena, those which have
been canonized and which thus pose no problem (the “twenty-two books of the Old
Testament” and the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, listed at §§ 17-18),
or to that of “the anagignoskomena, the books ‘appointed to be read’,”
that is, the apocryphal/deuterocanonical books of the Greek Old Testament (the
Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Esther, Judith, Tobit, to which the patriarch added
the Teachings of the Apostles (most probably, the Didache) and
the Shepherd of Hermas (§ 20). (Pierluigi Piovanelli, “Rewriting: The Path
from Apocryphal to Heretical,” in Religious Conflict From Early Christianity
to the Rise of Islam, ed. Wendy Mayer and Bronwen Neil [Arbeiten zur. Kirchengeschichte
121; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013], 97-98)
In fact, since the book of
Baruch and Letter of Jeremiah (attached to the book of Jeremiah), and 1 Ezra
(attached to Ezra-Nehemiah) are counted in the number of canonical writings (§
17), Athanasius accepts here the majority of deuterocanonical and pseudepigraphal
books that one could read (to judge by the Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus,
and Codex Alexandrinus) in the great unical manuscripts of the fourth and fifth
century. However, he makes no mention—with serious consequences—of the four books
of the Maccabees (copied in Codices Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus, but absent
from not only Codex Vaticanus, but also the ancient Ethiopic version of the
Bible) and the Psalms of Solomon (whose presence is mentioned in the
index to Codex Alexandrinus), nor the Paralipomena of Jeremiah (copied
following the books Jeremiah-Baruch in the older manuscripts of the Ethiopic
Bible). (Ibid., 98 n. 31)
The Shepherd of Hermas,
copied in Codex Sinaiticus, was also among the scriptural texts translated from
Greek into Ethiopic in the Axumite period . . . while the Didache (if
that is indeed it), cited here by Athanasius, survives only in a Greek
manuscript from Jerusalem copied in 1056, that also contains the Epistle of
Barnabas (included likewise in Codex Sinaiticus) and 1-2 Clement
(also copied in Codex Alexandrinus). The latter were neither mentioned by the
patriarch, nor, apparently, translated into Ethiopic. (Ibid., 98 n. 32)
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