Saturday, September 30, 2023

Athanasius use of Some Books of the Apocrypha as Authoritative Scripture in On the Judgment of Dionysius (c. AD 354)

 In a recent volume on the biblical canon, we read that

 

for St. Athanasius, Scripture is used for dogmatic purposes by citing Old Testament outside of the Jewish sense of “canon” (whether taken as Philo’s Pentateuch only, or his sundry references to a possibly wider canon among approved Jewish monastic Therapeutae in Egypt). For example, in his On the judgment of Dionysius (written around AD 354), St. Athanasius cites the following as Scripture:

 

(1.) 1 Ezra 4:40

(2.) 1 Maccabees 6:22

(3.) Wisdom 7:25 (2x); 7:26; 14:22-28; 15:3

(4.) Sirach 50:28 (Martin Jugie, A Complete History of the Biblical Canon in the Christian East and West, Volume 1: Greek, Latin, and Slavic Biblical Canon from the New Testament Until AD 1500, translated, edited and expanded by Christiaan Kappes [N.P.: Patristic Pillars, 2022], 41)

 

The endnote for the following references "Register: Kanonische Schriften," in Athanasius Von Alexandrien: De Dententia Dionysii (trans. Uta Heil; Patristische Texte Und Studien 52; Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 1999), 323-24. Here are the images of the two pages: