Chapter 6 — One Church, Different Old Testaments (I): The Contested History

Two Men, Two Judgments

Jerome was commissioned to produce a Latin translation of the whole Bible directly from the original languages, rather than from the existing Greek-based Old Latin versions. In the preface to his translation of Samuel and Kings, he drew a hard line — a preface Jerome himself described as armor for the fight he knew it would start, and which came to be known by its Latin nickname, the Prologus Galeatus, the "helmeted prologue." His position: only the books contained in the Hebrew canon as received by the Jewish community of his own day are properly canonical. Everything outside that list he consigns to the apocrypha, naming Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, and Tobit specifically among the books "not in the canon" by that standard — read for edification in the churches, on Jerome's own account, but not treated as a source of settled doctrine.

This is the root of the later Protestant position, stated here in the words of a father of the church centuries before there was a Protestant position for it to be the root of.

Augustine went the other way, and did not go there casually. Writing directly against Jerome's narrower list, and shaping the outcome at Hippo and Carthage described in the last chapter, Augustine laid out his own method in his own words, in the standard Shaw translation of On Christian Doctrine: "Now in regard to the canonical Scriptures, he must follow the judgment of the greater number of catholic Churches; and among these, of course, a high place must be given to such as have been thought worthy to be the seat of an apostle and to receive epistles." Where churches differed on a book, he went on, the interpreter should prefer those received by all the catholic churches to those some do not receive, and among the rest, weigh the judgment of the greater number and those of greater authority over the fewer and those of lesser. Applying that method himself, Augustine held that the fuller forty-six-book Old Testament — including the seven books Jerome set aside — belonged in the church's canon, received on the authority of the church's own long-standing use of these books in worship and teaching, even where their manuscript history was less certain than the Hebrew-canon books'. This became the working practice of the Western church for the next thousand years and more.

A Complication Neither Side's Later Heirs Fully Own

Here is where an honest telling has to slow down, because the story is not as clean as either later tradition's popular memory of it. Origen, writing in the third century — a full century before Jerome and Augustine had their disagreement — shows something almost nobody expects: a documented gap between his formal list and his actual practice. When Origen gives a canon list styled after the Hebrew count, he places Maccabees outside it, following the Jewish reckoning he is explicitly working from in that context. But in his actual homilies and commentaries — the sermons he preached, the texts he expounded verse by verse for real congregations — he quotes Wisdom, Sirach, Tobit, Judith, Baruch, and the Daniel additions as Scripture, without qualification. And when a scholar named Julius Africanus directly challenged the authenticity of the Susanna narrative — the addition to Daniel this book will tell in the next chapter — Origen defended its inclusion, appealing not to a formal list but to the church's settled reception of the text in her actual practice.

This is not one clean, unified patristic position that later got corrupted on one side or clarified on the other. The Fathers themselves held the formal-list question and the liturgical-practice question somewhat loosely apart from each other — a real, documented tension inside a single theologian's own body of work, a full century before Jerome and Augustine turned the same tension into a formal disagreement between two named positions. Both later traditions can, and do, appeal selectively to this same early evidence. Neither is fabricating a source. Both are choosing which half of Origen's own practice to treat as decisive.

That is the honest starting point for the chapter that follows: not two sides inventing a dispute in the sixteenth century, but two sides inheriting, and finally formalizing, a genuine ambiguity that the church had been living inside since at least the third century.