Jerome Omits Esther?

I was struck by a strange statement from Lee Martin McDonald in his The Biblical Canon: Its Origin, Transmission, and Authority (Hendrickson, 2007), the recent third edition of his book that previously went under the title The Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon (1^st ed. 1988; 2^nd ed. 1995).

McDonald writes:

Jerome omits the book of Esther from the canonical collection but includes it, along with Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Judith, Tobit, Didache, and Shepherd of Hermas, in the edifying category that could be read in the churches. (p. 205)

Where does McDonald get such an idea? He has just cited Jerome’s Prologus Galeatus (i.e. the Preface to the Books of Samuel and Kings), so presumably he is drawing on the canon list found therein. Yet, Jerome very clearly includes Esther as the last book of the third section of the canon. (Jerome follows the Jewish division of the OT into three sections of Law, Prophets, and Writings.) He lists all of the books of this section, concluding with nonus Hester = “ninth, Esther”. Nothing could be clearer.

The section of the Prol. Gal. that McDonald actually quotes is the one just after Jerome’s presentation of the (in his view) authentic OT canon. There, Jerome says the following:

Whatever falls outside these must be set apart among the Apocrypha. Therefore Wisdom, which is commonly entitled Solomon’s, with the book of Jesus the son of Sirach, Judith, Tobias, and the Shepherd are not in the canon. I have found the first book of Maccabees in Hebrew; the second is in Greek, as may be proved from the language itself.¹

Immediately after quoting this paragraph, McDonald offers the summary statement that I have cited at the beginning of this post. How does he fail to perceive the difference between his own list of “apocryphal” books and that of Jerome? McDonald has inexplicably added Esther and the Didache to Jerome’s “apocrypha”.

Well, let me try to explicate the reason. Perhaps McDonald confounded Jerome with someone like Athanasius, who actually did omit Esther from his list of canonical books. In fact, in his 39th Festal Letter, Athanasius lists the books of the OT, then the NT, and then edifying books not included in the canon. This last list runs as follows:

The Wisdom of Solomon, and the Wisdom of Sirach, and Esther, and Judith, and Tobit, and that which is called the Teaching [= Didachē] of the Apostles, and the Shepherd.

This list is remarkably similar to the one that McDonald attributes to Jerome. In fact, it is identical.

But why does McDonald confuse Athanasius with Jerome? The answer is that he is reliant on F.F. Bruce’s discussion,² and has simply misread Bruce’s argument. (See my previous post about McDonald’s habit of accessing ancient sources only secondarily.) Bruce quotes the passage from Jerome’s Prol. Gal. that lists the apocryphal books (i.e., Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, Tobit, Shepherd), and then writes in his The Canon of Scripture (IVP, 1988):

It is strange to find the Shepherd listed among the Old Testament Apocrypha. But Jerome’s use od the term ‘Apocrypha’ calls for comment. Athanasius had distinguished three categories of books: canonical, edifying (but not canonical) and apocryphal. The ‘edifying’ books (the Wisdom of Solomon, and of Ben Sira, Esther, Judith and Tobit, with the Didachē and the Shepherd from the New Testament age) might be read in church; the ‘apocryphal books were to be avoided altogether. This threefold distinction was maintained, among the Latin fathers, by Rufinus of Aquileia (c. 345–410), who referred to the second category as ‘ecclesiastical’ books. But those ‘ecclesiastical’ books are designated ‘apocryphal’ by Jerome. (90–91).

When McDonald read these words in the context of Jerome’s views on canon, he failed to realize that the list of edifying books actually derived from Athanasius, not Jerome. Of course, this would not have happened if McDonald had worked from the original sources.

For other complaints about McDonald’s book, see here and here. McDonald himself has said that he is unhappy with the book (see here). He attributes some of the erros to an incompetent editor, and says a revised edition was due in March. I doubt that an editor was responsible for the mistake discussed here, especially since the exact same mistake appears in the second edition of McDonald’s book, The Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon (Hendrickson, 1995), p. 113. He had twelve years to correct it.

As a final note of complaint (at least, for this post), I cannot locate the statement by Bruce which McDonald attributes to him as follows: “[Bruce] claims that Origen practiced a double standard by including apocryphal books in the canon because the Jews included them” (McDonald, Biblical Canon, 202 n. 34). This is certainly a ridiculous assertion, for the Jews did not include the apocrypha in their canon, and Origen knew that better than anyone (see, e.g., his Letter to Africanus). McDonald cites Bruce’s Canon of Scripture, pp. 76–77, which includes nothing close to the words McDonald says should be there. I have no hypothesis for how this error arose. I am baffled.

The bottom line is that it is disappointing to see such a poor handling of the evidence in a book that will no doubt become widely used among students, who have not the resources or information (or skepticism) necessary to check the sources for themselves.

[1] This translation is taken directly from McDonald, who himself got it from F.F. Bruce. Regarding McDonald’s reliance on Bruce, see below.

[2] After quoting the Prol. Gal., McDonald actually cites it as “Prologue to Daniel, Bruce, Canon of Scripture, 90”. Of course, the citation is to the Prol. Gal., not the Prologue to Daniel. Here, the mistake seems to have arisen from McDonald’s misreading of his own footnotes in his second edition of his book, then called The Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon (Hendrickson, 1995), p. 113. Alternatively, he may have misread Bruce’s footnotes.