That Puzzling Erasmus.

Erasmus is invariably cited as someone with the opinion that the "deuterocanonical books" - i.e., the books that were contained in the Greek Septuagint, but not contained in the Hebrew canon formulated after the destruction of Jerusalem, such as Maccabees, Wisdom, Judith, Tobit, etc - were or should not be part of the Christian canon.

That statement has puzzled me ever since I read Erasmus' Diatribe on Free Will which was written to rebut Luther's doctrine of predestination. In the Diatribe, Erasmus offers as a "proof text" a quotation from Ecclesiasticus - one of the books subseqently removed from the canon by Luther. Erasmus has a throw-away line about how he assumes that Luther will accept Ecclesiasticus as authoritative because it has been recognized by the Church for so long. Luther, of course, does no such thing in his "On the Bondage of the Will, and his kerfuffle with Erasmus might be the point where his attitude to defining his own canon begins to really take shape. (OK, I'm really speculating about that idea.)

Erasmus wrote a rebuttal to "On the Bondage of the Will" called the Hyperaspistes. Although "On the Bondage of the Will" is considered to be one of Luther's three most important books, the Hyperaspistes gets very little notice. For example, it cannot be found on-line.

So, I ordered it.

On page 344 is this passage:

But when Luther says that he has a right to take exception to the authority of htis book, which goes under the title of Ecclesiasticus, because in the past it was not in the canon of the Jews, either he is inconsistent or he gives little credit to the authority of the Catholic church. For previously he had said that the book of Esther, which is in the canon of the Jews, is especially worthy of being removed from the canon; and here he attributes such great authority to their canon that he proclaims he is free to reject a book that the Catholic church accepts as a holy source of its public liturgy, often beginning mass with a text from this book instead of a psalm or taking something from it to be read as an Epistle. Even St. Augustine himself borrows weapons from this book to transfix heretics, and when they in turn aimed at him arguments from it, he does not have recourse to rejecting it but rather to interpreting it soundly.

It seems that Erasmus should not be cited as a reason for believing that the Old Testament canon was uncertain prior to Luther.