Philip Melanchthon on Canon of the Old Testament
No position located in this corpus
Searched in the sources read for this figure and not found. A limit of the reading rather than a claim about the figure — a source not yet read could settle it.
THE POSITION
Nothing found. The Augsburg Confession and the Apology never state a canon list, and the Loci passages read this run do not touch the question. This is the first kind of blank — not searched to exhaustion, not a position held open. Melanchthon worked alongside Luther on the German Bible, where the Apocrypha were moved to an appendix, but inferring his own canon from that collaboration is exactly the move this corpus refuses.
WHY THERE IS NO QUOTATIONFour positions carry no quotation — the Old Testament canon, spiritual gifts, divine plurality and natural revelation. Nothing in the Augsburg Confession, the Apology or the Loci passages read this run addresses the first three; on natural revelation the material is abundant but sits in his natural-philosophy writings, which were not read.
WHAT OTHERS HOLD HERE
ABOUT THIS FIGURE
Luther's colleague at Wittenberg and the Reformation's systematizer. He wrote the first Protestant systematic theology (Loci Communes, 1521), drafted the Augsburg Confession (1530) and its Apology (1531), and then revised his own work far enough that the Formula of Concord condemned the later version seventeen years after his death. This entry rests on the Augsburg Confession read in Latin and English — Part I less Articles VI-VIII and XIV-XVI, plus Part II Articles XXII-XXIV and XXVIII — on the opening articles of the Apology in English, and on the successive editions of the Loci through Latin sentences preserved by Schaff and Bente; no edition of the Loci itself was read.
Cite this page
"Philip Melanchthon on Canon of the Old Testament", Examined Doctrine, July 2026 edition, https://examineddoctrine.com/position/melanchthon/ot-canon (archived at https://examineddoctrine.com/editions/2026-07/position/melanchthon/ot-canon).