"... But to this first terminus ante quem we can now add a second, even more precise one— that is, the sending of Athanasius’s Festal Letter 39 on the occasion of Easter in 367. In this letter the patriarch makes a clear distinction between the biblical books, truly “inspired by God,” to be read by the faithful, and “the so-called apocrypha,” which are but “an invention of heretics,” to be proscribed. To the first category belong not only the writings “that have been canonized” (i.e., the “twenty-two books of the Old Testament” and the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, listed at §§ 17– 18), but also the books “appointed to be read,” that is, the apocryphal / deuterocanonical books of the Septuagint (the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Esther, Judith, and Tobit), to which Athanasius adds the Teaching of the Apostles (most probably, the Didache) and the Shepherd of Hermas. As for the second group, in spite of the intentionally generic tone he uses, the reference Athanasius makes to the different writings attributed to Enoch, Moses, or Isaiah, written with the purpose of “deceiving the simple folk” (§ 21), seems to perfectly apply to 1 Enoch,32 Jubilees, and the Ascension of Isaiah, the three most significant pseudepigrapha translated into Ethiopic. If these texts, apparently popular among Egyptian monks, were officially forbidden by the inflexible bishop of Alexandria in 367, it is difficult to imagine that they would still have been sent to Aksum or elsewhere for translation after that date ..."