Allegory and Ambiguity in Late Antique Canon Lists

Jesse Ophoff

doi:10.1515/jbr-2023-0007

Article

Allegory and Ambiguity in Late Antique Canon Lists

Jesse Ophoff

Published/Copyright: May 8, 2023

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From the journal Journal of the Bible and its Reception Volume 10 Issue 1

Abstract

In the mid-sixth century, Cassiodorus wrote his Institutiones Divinarum et Saecularium Litterarum to instruct the monks at Vivarium in their scribal work of collecting, codifying, and copying the Christian Scriptures, along with a vast array of Latin Christian literature. His text remained an essential handbook for monks and nuns working as scribes for centuries. Within it, he includes three authoritative canon lists which he takes from Jerome, Augustine, and the Septuagint. To modern scholars these lists often read as nonsense: he seems entirely ambivalent towards which books are “in” or “out” of the canon, he appears unfaithful to his source material, and none of these lists reflects his own system for listing or grouping the Scriptures. What then is the point of them? The answer lies in the importance that Cassiodorus, and other late antique authors, place on numbers as sources of allegorical interpretation in the search for higher meaning. Through a process of “holy arithmetic”, Cassiodorus presents what he claims is an inner logic of these authoritative canon lists, bringing to light three different hermeneutical lenses for understanding what the Scriptures are. As allegories, those lenses can coexist in a complementary fashion, aiding Cassiodorus in his larger mission to codify a Latin Christian tradition. Examining Cassiodorus’s approach to listing the canon and comparing it to modern scholarship on the subject bring into focus some of the key ways in which our own assumptions and methods differ from those of our late antique sources. It also opens up new possibilities for interrogating these sources.

Keywords: canon; late antiquity; allegory; Cassiodorus; Reception History

Corresponding author: Jesse Ophoff, History, MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society, Postboks 5144, Oslo 0302, Norway; and PO Box 207, Creede, CO 81130, USA, E-mail: jesse.ophoff@gmail.com

Article note: SBL-De Gruyter Prize for Biblical Studies and Reception History. This article has been awarded the SBL-De Gruyter Prize for 2022 in the category of Textual Culture and Reception of the Bible. The prize recognizes excellence in the field of Reception History, which aims to shed light on the broader horizon of the use and influence of the Bible in a wide variety of academic fields, historical periods, and cultural settings. The Prize Committee and the Editors of JBR offer their congratulations on this achievement.

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Published Online: 2023-05-08

Published in Print: 2023-05-25

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/jbr-2023-0007

Keywords for this article

canon; late antiquity; allegory; Cassiodorus; Reception History