Gelasian Decree


The Gelasian Decree is a Latin text traditionally thought to be a decretal of the prolific Pope Gelasius I. The work reached its final form in a five-chapter text written by an anonymous scholar between 519 and 553. The second chapter is a list of books of Scripture defined as part of the biblical canon by a Council of Rome, traditionally dated to Pope Damasus I and thus known as the Damasine List. The fifth chapter of the work includes a list of rejected works not encouraged for church use.
In The Carolingians and the Written Word, Mckitterick Rosamond wrote:

Content

The Decretum exists in a number of recensions of varying lengths. The longest has five chapters, another recension has the last four of these chapters, another the last three, and another the first three.

Chapters

  1. A list of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit as attributes of Christ, and of the titles that are applied to Christ
  2. A list of the books that make up the Old and New Testament. The Old Testament list contains, in addition to the books of the Hebrew Bible, all of the deuterocanonical books other than Baruch with the Letter of Jeremiah. The New Testament list contains the 27 standard books: 4 Gospels, Acts, 14 letters of Paul, Apocalypse of John, and 7 General Letters. The Decretum's canon of Scripture is thus identical with the Catholic canon issued by the Council of Trent.
  3. a short endorsement of the supremacy of the Bishop of Rome over the other bishops, citing the authority of Peter, and a statement of the order of precedence of the three principal episcopal sees: Rome, then Alexandria, then Antioch.
  4. a list of writings that are "to be received": the decrees of the first four ecumenical councils, and the writings of the Church Fathers and ecclesiastical writers mentioned in the chapter, varying from famous to obscure. Notably, it suggests that while Origen of Alexandria's work can be read, he personally should be rejected as a "schismatic".
  5. a list of writings that are "not to be received": many early Christian gospels, acts, apocalypses and similar works that are part of what we know as the New Testament Apocrypha. Mentioned are:

Attribution

The various recensions of the Decretum appear in multiple surviving manuscripts. It is "attributed in many manuscripts to Pope Damasus. In other and more numerous manuscripts the same decree occurs in an enlarged form assigned within the documents in some cases to Pope Gelasius, in others to Pope Hormisdas, and in a few cases the documents are simply anonymous."

The Damasine recension

In the Damasine recension, there is no mention of pope Gelasius. Though the date of the Roman Council is not mentioned in the Decretum, the view that came to prevail was that it was the council held in 382: "In 1794 F. Arevalo, the editor of Sedulius, started the theory that the first three of these five chapters were really the decrees of a Roman Council held a century earlier than Gelasius, under Damasus, in 382 A.D.".

The Gelasian recension

Another recension contains only the last three chapters and is prefaced by the sentence: "Here begins the decretal 'On books to be received and not to be received' which was written by Pope Gelasius and seventy most erudite bishops at the apostolic seat in the city of Rome". Here the focus is on the books and the Decretum is considered to be a decretal of Pope Gelasius. In the Gelasian recension there is no mention of Pope Damasus and the Council of Rome.

Traditional View

For years, the commonly accepted view was that the Decretum Gelasianum was a decretal of pope Gelasius, containing the text of a canon of Scripture originally produced by the Council of Rome under Damasus a century earlier, and that this canon was identical with the Catholic canon issued by the Council of Trent.
For instance, the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, states:
Likewise, Catholic historian William Jurgens writes:
Similarly, the Catholic Encyclopedia links the Decree to the Council of Rome of 382 and its definition of the canon:

Critical view

In 1912, Ernst von Dobschütz examined all the manuscripts of the Decretum. Dobschütz showed that the first chapter of the five-chapter recension contains a quotation from a work of Augustine written in 416 and therefore the Damasine recension of the Decretum could not be a decree of the Council of Rome held in 382. He also argued that all of the shorter versions are derived from the five-chapter recension and concluded that the Decretum was "no genuine decree or letter either of Damasus or Gelasius, but a pseudonymous literary production of the first half of the sixth century ".
In the course of examining the place of the Muratorian fragment in the development of the canon, Geoffrey Mark Hahnemann examined the Decretum Gelasianum and came to similar conclusions. Hahnemann argues against the Decretum originating in Pope Damasus's time based on two arguments:
  • Jerome's silence about a canonical list issued by the council of Rome in 382: "It seems highly improbable that, if Jerome, who was probably present at the council and was certainly at Rome, had ever heard of such a pronouncement about canonical books, he should nowhere have mentioned it, or that it should not have qualified his own statements on the Canon. Yet there is no mention or evidence of a change of position in the works of Jerome. The authenticity of at least the catalogue in the Damasine Decree is thus called into question."
  • the Damasine Decree not being mentioned as such by any independent document until 840. Most notably, Pope Nicholas I, when discussing the canon in the 9th century, mentions the letter of Innocent I but not any decrees by Damasus, which, being earlier, would be more important.
Hahnemann also points out that the later writers of the 9th century who refer to the document under the name of Gelasius or Hormisdas never credit it to Damasus. He also argues that Dionysius Exiguus beginning his collection of Latin canons and decretals with Damasus's successor, Siricius, implies that no pope before Siricius issued decretals.

Textual history

The complete text is preserved in the mid-eighth-century Ragyndrudis Codex, fols. 57r-61v, which is the earliest manuscript copy containing the complete text. The earliest manuscript copy was produced, Brussels 9850-2.
Versions of the work appear in multiple surviving manuscripts, some of which are titled as a Decretal of Pope Gelasius, others as a work of a Roman Council under the earlier Pope Damasus. However, all versions show signs of being derived from the full five-part text, which contains a quotation from Augustine, writing about 416 after Damasus, which is evidence for the document being later than that.
Little is known of the compiler of the decree, other than perhaps he was of Southern Gallic origin.