other · 170 · Palestine
Onesimus had asked more than once — not Philemon's Onesimus, who is a different man with his own page here — and Melito did not answer from memory or from what was to hand at Sardis. He says: when I went East and came to the place where these things were preached and done, I learned accurately the books of the Old Testament, and send them to thee as written below. Then he lists them. What the list shows is as interesting as that it exists: it is essentially the Hebrew canon, and it omits Esther. Eusebius gives no year for the journey at all, so 170 is an editorial placing inside Jerome's window for his episcopate rather than a recorded date, and 'the East' is read here as Palestine, which is the standard reading and is an inference.
To answer his brother Onesimus, who had asked him repeatedly for an accurate account of which books the old covenant actually contains.
The earliest Christian list of the Old Testament that survives, and the reason anyone knows what a second-century bishop in Asia thought the canon was.