The 39th Festal Letter

In his Festal Letter for the Easter of 367, St. Athanasius gave what is the earliest surviving list of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament exactly as the Church later received them. The letter also sets out an Old Testament list, names a distinct category of books “to be read but not canonized,” and warns against apocrypha — but its categories do not map neatly onto later Western or Orthodox distinctions, and what “canon” meant for Athanasius requires careful statement.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Festal-Letter Institution

The “Festal” (or “Paschal”) Letters were an annual feature of the see of Alexandria. Each year, after the Feast of the Theophany, the Patriarch of Alexandria wrote to the churches and monasteries of Egypt to announce the date of the coming Pascha — fixed by the Alexandrian computation, on which much of the Christian world depended — and to exhort the faithful to the Lenten fast that prepared for it. The genre was thus pastoral and catechetical before it was canonical: a yearly circular for the spiritual ordering of the Church’s central feast.

Athanasius wrote such letters across his long and frequently interrupted episcopate (328–373); many survive only in Syriac and Coptic fragments. The thirty-ninth, for the Easter of 367, is the most famous, because in the course of warning the newly baptized against heretical writings the bishop set down a precise list of the books “handed down and accredited as Divine” (Festal Letter 39; trans. NPNF II/4) [PG 26:1436].

The Canon List of 367

The Old Testament

Athanasius enumerates the Old Testament as twenty-two books, matching, he says, the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet: “There are, then, of the Old Testament, twenty-two books in number; for, as I have heard, it is handed down that this is the number of the letters among the Hebrews” (Festal Letter 39; trans. NPNF II/4). To reach twenty-two he counts in the Hebrew manner — the four books of Kingdoms (Samuel–Kings) as two, the two books of Chronicles as one, Ezra(–Nehemiah) as one, the Twelve Minor Prophets as one, and Jeremiah grouped with Baruch, Lamentations, and the Epistle.

Two features deserve note. First, Athanasius omits Esther from the canonical Old Testament, relegating it (with others) to the category of books to be read — a placement at odds with later usage. Second, his list, though it includes Baruch and the Epistle of Jeremiah within “Jeremiah,” does not canonize the wider range of anaginoskomena (Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, Tobit, the Maccabees) that later Orthodox usage receives and that the Synod of Jerusalem (1672) explicitly affirmed. His Old Testament is therefore narrower than the later Greek and Slavonic Old Testament. This is consistent with the treatment in the repository’s Holy Scripture file, which notes that Athanasius’s categories “do not perfectly match later Western distinctions” and that the precise canonical status of several books varies among the Orthodox churches.

The New Testament

For the New Testament Athanasius lists exactly the twenty-seven books now universally received: the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John); the Acts of the Apostles; the seven Catholic Epistles (James; 1–2 Peter; 1–3 John; Jude); the fourteen Epistles of Paul (Romans through Philemon, counting Hebrews among Paul’s); and the Revelation of John (Festal Letter 39; trans. NPNF II/4). He closes the list with the image that has become its signature: “These are fountains of salvation, that they who thirst may be satisfied with the living words they contain” (Festal Letter 39; trans. NPNF II/4).

This is the earliest extant list that matches the later New Testament canon in full, including the seven Catholic Epistles and the Revelation — both of which had been disputed in earlier centuries. (It is, however, a misconception to call it simply “the first complete list” without qualification: it is the first surviving list to enumerate exactly these twenty-seven, but it crowns a long process of reception rather than inaugurating one, as Michael Kruger and others stress.)

The “Read But Not Canonized” Category

Between the canonical books and the rejected apocrypha Athanasius defines a third, intermediate class — books not in the canon but approved for the instruction of catechumens:

“But for greater exactness I add this also, writing of necessity; that there are other books besides these not indeed included in the Canon, but appointed by the Fathers to be read by those who newly join us, and who wish for instruction in the word of godliness. The Wisdom of Solomon, and the Wisdom of Sirach, and Esther, and Judith, and Tobit, and that which is called the Teaching of the Apostles [the Didache], and the Shepherd [of Hermas].” (Festal Letter 39; trans. NPNF II/4) [PG 26:1436]

This is a remarkable list. It groups together books later received among the Old Testament anaginoskomena (Wisdom, Sirach, Esther, Judith, Tobit) with two early Christian writings (the Didache and the Shepherd of Hermas) that the Church would ultimately not canonize at all. The category is liturgical-catechetical rather than strictly canonical: these are edifying books for the newly baptized, profitable to read but not adduced as proof of doctrine.

The Warning Against Apocrypha

Finally, Athanasius condemns a fourth class outright — the pseudepigraphic “apocrypha” circulated under apostolic or prophetic names, which he calls “an invention of heretics, who write them when they choose, bestowing upon them their approbation, and assigning to them a date” (Festal Letter 39; trans. NPNF II/4). It is partly against such forgeries — and against the use of unaccredited books in Egyptian (including monastic) circles — that the whole canon list is framed.

What “Canon” Meant for Athanasius

Athanasius’s term kanonizomena (“canonized,” ruled) is among the earliest uses of “canon” for a bounded list of Scriptures, and his categories repay precision. For him the canonical books are those “handed down and accredited as Divine,” from which alone doctrine is proved; the books “to be read” are profitable for catechesis but not so adduced; the apocrypha are to be shunned. The criterion is the Church’s tradition of reception — what was “delivered to the fathers” — not private judgment. In this his practice already embodies the principle later articulated in Orthodox theology: that the canon is the Church’s own act of recognition, Scripture being the Church’s book received within Tradition (see Holy Scripture).

It is worth stressing that Athanasius’s threefold scheme (canonical / read / rejected) is his, and does not coincide with the later Western twofold protocanonical/deuterocanonical division, nor with the later Orthodox anaginoskomena category, which receives more books and locates them differently. His letter is a witness to the canon’s formation, not its final settlement.

There is, further, a social dimension to the letter that recent scholarship has emphasized. David Brakke has read the 39th Festal Letter as an act of episcopal governance: by drawing a firm line around the accredited Scriptures and consigning unaccredited books to the catechetical margin or to outright rejection, Athanasius sought to regulate the reading practices of Egyptian Christians — including monastic and ascetic circles where a wider and more fluid body of texts (apocalypses, “secret” books, apocryphal acts) circulated (Brakke, “Canon Formation and Social Conflict in Fourth-Century Egypt,” HTR 87 [1994]). The canon list is thus not an abstract scholarly exercise but a pastoral and disciplinary intervention, of a piece with the letter’s annual purpose of ordering the Church’s life. The boundary Athanasius draws is meant to protect the newly baptized from forgeries “to which they give the name of antiquity” and to keep the proving of doctrine tied to the books the Church had received.

Afterlife in Canon History

The 39th Festal Letter quickly acquired authority. In the West, the councils associated with Hippo (393) and Carthage (397, 419) issued canon lists; in the East, Athanasius’s letter was copied, excerpted, and treated as a benchmark, and it stands behind the canon-15 of the Pedalion tradition. The Quinisext Council (692) in its second canon ratified, among other things, Athanasius’s canonical epistle, lending it conciliar standing in the East. Yet because Orthodox usage came to receive the wider Septuagintal corpus, the letter functioned in the East less as a closed boundary than as a venerable witness within a canon-history that the Church continued to articulate liturgically and conciliarly — culminating, on the contested Old Testament books, in the affirmations of the Synod of Jerusalem (1672). For the fuller Orthodox account, including the anaginoskomena and the primacy of the Septuagint, see Holy Scripture.

References

Athanasius of Alexandria. Festal Letter 39 (367) [PG 26:1436]; trans. NPNF II/4 (ed. Schaff), “Letter 39.”
Brakke, David. “Canon Formation and Social Conflict in Fourth-Century Egypt: Athanasius of Alexandria’s Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter.” Harvard Theological Review 87 (1994): 395–419.
Kruger, Michael J. The Question of Canon. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2013. (On the misconception that the letter is simply “the first complete list.”)
Pentiuc, Eugen J. The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Robertson, J. N. W. B., trans. The Acts and Decrees of the Synod of Jerusalem. London: Thomas Baker, 1899.