Festal Letters, with the Festal Index

It was the custom of the bishops of Alexandria to write to their churches some months before Easter, announcing its date and adding a pastoral address. Athanasius wrote such letters through the forty-five years of his episcopate. A collection of them, with gaps, survives in a Syriac translation brought to England in the nineteenth century, and fragments of others are quoted by later writers.

With the Syriac collection came an index, of uncertain date but thought by its editors to be only a little later than Athanasius, which gives for each year the date of Easter, the consuls, the prefect of Egypt and a note of the main events in the bishop’s life. It is the chief source for the chronology of his career: it dates his ordination to 328 and his death to 7 Pachon, 2 May 373. Of the thirty-ninth letter, for Easter 367, the part containing the list of the books of Scripture is preserved in the original Greek by the Byzantine canonist Theodore Balsamon, and in a Syriac translation. The index says of that year that he wrote “forming a Canon of the Holy Scriptures”.