Septuagint and Canon: Hengel, part 3

This post is a part of a series on Martin Hengel's book The Septuagint as Christian Scripture (see previously here).

Chapter 3: The Later Consolidation of the Christian 'Septuagint Canon' (pp. 57–74)

This chapter focuses more on the canon than does ch. 2. Hengel does a good job here showing the rather scarce nature of explicit use of the deuterocanonical books in Christianity of the first two centuries. I'm not sure he does a very good job trying to explain the ultimate acceptance of this literature within Christianity, but he does offer a discussion of some of the crucial factors to be considered.

Here's a summary of his chapter.

Hengel first surveys the major codices, and finds a few books constituting a core accepted in these codices though not included in the Hebrew Bible: Tobit, Judith, 1 Esdras, Wisdom, Sirach. But (next), the early canon lists stick pretty closely to the Jewish canon. Hengel then finds indications of a "second class" status for the "extra" books: they are cited relatively infrequently, and no one in the Greek church wrote a commentary on them until the late Middle Ages. "The Apostolic Fathers--except for Clement of Rome (see below, pp. 121–2)--and the Apologists, from Justin to Theophilus of Antioch, ignored these documents almost entirely" (p. 66). The same for Irenaeus and Tertullian, but Clement of Alexandria made use of Tobit, Wisdom, and Sirach (pp. 115–17). "In view of the grand scope of the totality of his work, even Origen made rather limited use of writings such as Esther, Tobit, Judith, and the books of Maccabees" (p. 67).

It remains to ask why, beginning with the third century, 'Apocryphal books' (as they were later called) such as Esther, Judith, Tobit, Baruch, Wisdom, Sirach and the books of Maccabees were accepted at all--even though rather grudgingly--while other somewhat theologically interesting documents [i.e., 1 Enoch and other pseudepigrapha] were finally completely rejected. (pp. 70–71) 

Hengel partially answers this question--the part about why they rejected the pseudepigrapha--by mentioning the reliance of Gnostics on secret writings attributed to the patriarchs preceding Moses. A way of rejecting such heretical writings would be to insist that Moses was the earliest author of Scripture. The deuterocanonical literature (Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach--the latter two attributed to Solomon) derived, according to their assumed date, from the "biblical period" as defined by Josephus (i.e., Moses to Artaxerxes, C. Ap. 1.37–43). Not so the Maccabees, excluded by Vaticanus and Athanasius. But they formed the "historical bridge" between the testaments, perhaps leading to their final inclusion. Also important was the martyr theology of the Maccabean books.