Augustine is wrong about the apocrypha

One of the earliest well-documented disputes on the topic of the apocrypha occurred between Jerome and Augustine in the 4^th century ad. Jerome held that because God revealed the Hebrew Scriptures in Hebrew, the Old Testament should be translated from the inspired Hebrew text. Augustine’s opinion was that the church used the Greek Septuagint and because the church is authoritative, the Septuagint has received authority from the church and trumps the Hebrew text. Jerome’s view has been called hebraica veritas (the Latin sense being “the truth comes from the Hebrew text”) while Augustine’s view has been called Septuaginta auctoritas (the Latin sense being “the authority comes from the Septuagint”).¹

The Septuagint of Augustine’s day had additional books that were not in the Hebrew original. These additional texts are called apocrypha, from Greek apokruphos (ἀπόκρυφος), meaning “hidden,” and deuterocanonical because they were added as a second canon according to some traditions. Those additions are listed:

• Prayer of Manasseh

• 1 Esdras

• Tobit

• Judith

• Additions to Esther

• 1 Maccabees

• 2 Maccabees

• 3 Maccabees

• 4 Maccabees

• Psalm 151

• Wisdom or Wisdom of Solomon

• Sirach or Ecclesiasticus

• Baruch

• Letter of Jeremiah

• Additions to Daniel

• Psalms of Solomon

In defense of his view that the Septuagint has authority granted to it from the church, Augustine writes:

…the Church has adopted the Septuagint as if it were the only translation. Indeed, Greek-speaking Christians use it so generally that many of them do not even know that the others exist. From the Septuagint a Latin translation has been made, and this is the one which the Latin churches use. This is still the case despite the fact that in our own day the priest Jerome, a great scholar and master of all three tongues, has made a translation into Latin, not from Greek but directly from the original Hebrew… At any rate, if in reading the Scriptures we keep an eye, as we ought, only to what the Spirit of God spoke by the lips of men, we will conclude, in the case of something in the Hebrew which is missing in the Septuagint, that the Spirit elected to say this by the lips of the original Prophets and not by the lips of their translators. Conversely, in the case of something present in the Septuagint and missing in the original, we will conclude that the Spirit chose to say this particular thing by the lips of the Seventy rather than by the lips of the original Prophets, thus making it clear that all of them were inspired.²

In this passage, Augustine also builds his case on the claim that the Septuagint is the product of a miracle,³ which would refer to the legend that seventy-two translators⁴ translated the Pentateuch in separate rooms and came to the same conclusion. The legend is found in the Babylonian Talmud,⁵ the Letter of Aristeas,⁶ Josephus,⁷ and Philo⁸ and the alleged miracle only relates to the Pentateuch, not the entire Greek Old Testament. Most accounts do not claim that the translations matched. The Talmud says “and they all agreed to one daʿat.⁹ This word daʿat (דַּעַת) can mean “knowledge” or “understanding,” which could mean much less than a word-for-word likeness across translators to include a general agreement in meaning, which could naturally flow from the same Hebrew source text, which would exclude any alleged writings that would be in addition to the 39-book canon of the Hebrew Scriptures. The Letter of Aristeas says of the translators: “So they finished [the translation], making everything harmonious with each other through comparison,”¹⁰ thus claiming that they did work with each other. Josephus also rejects the miracle, writing that at the end of the process, “they commanded that if anyone saw something strange written into the Law or anything missing, that he would review it again, and making it clear, set it right.”¹¹ Eusebius includes an abridged version of Aristeas, but skips over the miracle controversy.¹² Of significant Hellenistic sources, only Philo of Alexandria clearly holds the view that the translators produced the same text in isolation,¹³ but even then, he is speaking of the Pentateuch and not the entirety of the Old Testament (much less the Septuagint additions!). Regardless of the origin of the Septuagint, the original could still face corruption through the centuries by the time it reached Augustine.

Besides the legend of the seventy-two, Augustine depends on two other misconceptions: first that the church is authoritative to establish a canon and second that the church gave authority to the Septuagint. As already seen, the responsibility and authority to establish canon is God Himself, not the church. Indeed, how could the church establish an Old Testament canon if the church did not even exist in the Old Testament? Augustine fell into the attitude of clericalism on this point and the problems with this attitude and the defense of conservativism have already been discussed.

The second misconception is that the church gave authority to the Septuagint. The church had no real authority to give, but that point aside, the earliest church writings did not share Augustine’s view of the Septuagint. This is easily demonstrated when it is remembered that the New Testament itself is the earliest church document and the New Testament did not quote exclusively from the Septuagint. There are some cases when the New Testament does use the Septuagint, but this is similar to how a modern pastor might use the NASB. It is not that the translation is inspired, but rather that the translation did well enough on a particular passage that there is no need to retranslate. For example, the LXX misunderstood Hosea 11:1 to refer to national Israel’s exodus from Egypt rather than the coming Messiah from Egypt (cf. Num. 24:7b–9) and so it changed “And out of Egypt I called My son” (Hos. 11:1b NASB1995 וּמִמִּצְרַיִם קָרָאתִי לִבְנִי) to “Out of Egypt I called his children” (καὶ ἐξ Αἰγύπτου μετεκάλεσα τὰ τέκνα αὐτοῦ LXX), but when Matthew wrote in the early church age under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, he translated from the Hebrew, “Out of Egypt I called my Son” (Matt. 2:15b NASB1995 Ἐξ Αἰγύπτου ἐκάλεσα τὸν υἱόν μου). Likewise, Zechariah wrote, “so that they will look on Me whom they have pierced” (Zech. 12:10b NASB1995 וְהִבִּיטוּ אֵלַי אֵת אֲשֶׁר־דָּקָרוּ), which the Septuagint missed by translating, “and they will look attentively to me, because they danced triumphantly” (Zech. 12:10b LES καὶ ἐπιβλέψονται πρός με ἀνθ᾿ ὧν κατωρχήσαντο), and so John corrected with “They shall look on Him whom they pierced” (John 19:37b NASB1995 Ὄψονται εἰς ὃν ἐξεκέντησαν).¹⁴ The early church did not have the authority to redefine the Hebrew Scriptures and even if they did, they still did not see the Septuagint as inspired.

By the time that the Septuagint had been passed along, added to, and translated into Latin, Augustine’s community had a text that included more than what God inspired and so Jerome warned his audience about this when he translated the Hebrew Scriptures into the Latin Vulgate. In his preface to the books of Samuel and Kings, Jerome noted that there were books in the previous Latin translation that were not genuinely canonical:

This preface to the Scriptures may serve as a “helmeted” introduction to all the books which we turn from Hebrew into Latin, so that we may be assured that what is not found in our list must be placed amongst the Apocryphal writings. Wisdom, therefore, which generally bears the name of Solomon, and the book of Jesus, the Son of Sirach, and Judith, and Tobias, and the Shepherd are not in the canon. The first book of Maccabees I have found to be Hebrew, the second is Greek, as can be proved from the very style. Seeing that all this is so, I beseech you, my reader, not to think that my labours are in any sense intended to disparage the old translators.¹⁵

The Septuagint is not inspired and additional works that are found in the Septuagint are not to be accepted as canon. This is not to say that there is no benefit to studying these works for historical, linguistic, or other purposes, but to elevate them to the status of the Word of God is entirely uncalled for.

1. For an overview of the dispute from a Roman Catholic perspective, see Ignacio Carbajosa, Hebraica veritas versus Septuaginta auctoritatem: Does a Canonical Text of the Old Testament Exist? (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2024).
2. Augustine, City of God, XVIII.43, trans. Gerald G. Walsh, S.J., and Daniel J. Honan (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1954), 155, 157.
3. ibid., 156.
4. The Septuagint is often denoted with the nomenclature LXX, which is the Roman numeral for 70, which is 72 rounded down.
5. B. Megillah, 9a.10 ff.
6. Letter of Aristeas, especially §§301–307. The selection of seventy-two translators occurs in §§41–50, in which Eleazar allegedly selects six elders from each of the twelve tribes of Israel. While likely legendary propaganda, the claim that six came from each tribe could only have been made because the twelve tribes were present in the Hellenistic period. This is further argumentation against the myth that ten of the twelve tribes were somehow lost during the Babylonian exile, but somewhat of a tangent here.
7. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XII.34 ff.
8. Philo, On the Life of Moses, II.6 ff.
9. וְהִסְכִּימוּ כּוּלָּן לְדַעַת אַחַת b. Megillah, 9a.11b.
10. οἱ δὲ ἐπετέλουν ἕκαστα σύμφωνα ποιοῦντες πρὸς ἑαυτοὺς ταῖς ἀντιβολαῖς· Letter of Aristeas, §302a.
11. ἐκέλευσαν, εἴ τις ἢ περισσόν τι προσγεγραμμένον ὁρᾷ τῷ νόμῳ ἢ λεῖπον, πάλιν ἐπισκοποῦντα τοῦτο καὶ ποιοῦντα φανερὸν διορθοῦν Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XII.109b.
12. Eusebius of Caesarea, Praeparatio Evangelica, VII.i–v.
13. Philo, On the Life of Moses, II.VIII.vii.
14. Following the principle that an author may reduce a text (without adding to or changing the text) without speaking in error, the original text had וְהִבִּיטוּ אֵלַי אֵת אֲשֶׁר־דָּקָרוּ, which perhaps could be translated more fully as Ὄψονται πρός με εἰς ὃν ἐξεκέντησαν, but John was free to shorten the quote to Ὄψονται εἰς ὃν ἐξεκέντησαν, knowing that his audience would be familiar with the passage he was referencing. As such, perhaps a better translation for John 19:37 may be, “They shall look [on Me] on whom they pierced.” In other words, John did not necessarily change the Hebrew from the first person to the third in his quotation.
15. Jerome, “Preface to the Books of Samuel and Kings,” in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series, Volume VI: Jerome: Letters and Select Works, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, trans. W. H. Fremantle, G. Lewis, and W. G. Martley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1893), 490.