The 39th Festal Letter
Athanasius, Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter (Easter, A.D. 367)
Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, in the fifth year of his fifth exile’s aftermath
An Easter letter with a list in it, and the list is the reason anyone remembers the Easter.
- Catch rate
- Not found in the wild
- Base research
- 186
- Stat total
- 274
Base stats
Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.
Why these numbers
The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.
An Easter letter, not a treatise. The Greek of most of it is lost; what carries the canon survives in Greek, Coptic and Syriac together.
Nobody disputes what this document says. It is the earliest surviving list of exactly the twenty-seven, and it has never needed defending — only reading.
Cited in every argument about the canon that has ever been had.
Cited for this book
Every year after Epiphany the bishop of Alexandria wrote to the churches of Egypt to say when Easter fell. In 367 Athanasius used the letter to list the books of the New Testament — the four Gospels, Acts, the seven catholic epistles, fourteen of Paul, and the Revelation of John — which is the twenty-seven the church still has, in the earliest surviving list that names exactly them. Two things are usually forgotten. He was not inventing a canon; he was writing down one that had settled. And he immediately named a SECOND shelf, of books that are not Scripture and are to be read anyway by new converts — Wisdom, Sirach, Esther, Judith, Tobit, the Shepherd, and the Teaching of the Apostles.
Development
A book develops as it is read — the fragment becomes the work, the work becomes the corpus.
Moves learned
By levelling up. A book that develops keeps what it knew and learns the rest on its new schedule.
| Lv | Move | Type | Cat. | Pwr | Acc | PP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 22 | Fountains of Salvation | Bible | Argument | 92 | 100% | 5 |
| 22 | Appointed to Be Read | Ecclesiology | Argument | 80 | 100% | 10 |
| 24 | Chapter… | Bible | Scripture | — | — | 12 |