How the Bible Canon Was Formed

Introduction: What a Canon Is and How It Can Be Studied

The word canon comes from the Greek kanōn, a straight rod or measuring line, and in its earliest Christian uses it meant a rule or standard of faith and conduct rather than a list of books. Only in the fourth century did Greek writers begin to speak of books as "canonised" (kanonizomena), and the earliest surviving use of the term in exactly that sense is usually traced to Athanasius of Alexandria in his Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter of 367.¹ Jewish sources of the same centuries used other language altogether. The rabbis spoke of the "holy writings" (kitvei ha-qodesh) and of books that "render the hands unclean", an idiom whose exact origin is still debated, but which certainly marked off a set of sacred scrolls from all other writing.² When this page speaks of the canon, then, it uses a modern term for an ancient reality: the bounded collection of books that a community reads as scripture and that it distinguishes, sometimes sharply and sometimes loosely, from other religious literature.

That distinction is the subject of what follows. The Bibles on library shelves today are not one book but several closely related collections. The Jewish Bible, the Tanakh, has twenty-four books in its traditional reckoning. Protestant Bibles contain the same Hebrew books counted as thirty-nine, together with twenty-seven books of the New Testament. Roman Catholic Bibles add seven further books to the Old Testament, together with longer forms of Esther and Daniel. Eastern Orthodox Bibles add more again, including 1 Esdras, 3 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh and Psalm 151. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, whose canon is the broadest of all, reads 1 Enoch and Jubilees as scripture, books that survive complete only in its own language, Ge'ez.³ None of these collections fell from the sky as a finished list. Each is the outcome of a long history, partly recoverable from the books themselves, from manuscripts, from the lists that ancient writers drew up, and from the decisions of councils and synods.

Recognition, Development and Choice

Three words describe the processes by which the canon took shape, and they are not interchangeable. Recognition is the oldest. Before anybody drew up a list, communities were already reading certain books aloud in worship, quoting them as authoritative and copying them with special care. A list, when it came, usually recorded what was already in use. Development describes the slow growth of collections: the gathering of the Torah into five books, of the prophetic scrolls into a set, of Paul's letters into a corpus and of four Gospels into a single codex. Choice is the latest and the most visible. At certain moments, under pressure from rival collections, divergent practice or printing, church authorities and Jewish teachers stated which books belonged and which did not. Choice in this sense rarely invented a canon. More often it fixed the edges of a body of writings whose centre had been settled for centuries.

Scholars have long distinguished between a "canon 1", meaning books that function as authoritative, and a "canon 2", meaning a closed and authoritative list.⁴ The distinction matters because the evidence for the two is different. Quotation formulas such as "as it is written" show that a book functioned with authority, but they do not show that its users possessed a closed list. A list, conversely, shows what one writer believed belonged, but it does not prove that every congregation in his region agreed. Much of the confusion in older accounts of the canon arose from treating evidence of the first kind as though it were evidence of the second.

The Kinds of Evidence

The historian of the canon works with five main bodies of evidence, and this page returns to each of them repeatedly.

The first is the biblical books themselves. Several passages describe the writing, finding, reading or guarding of sacred texts: the "book of the law" found in the Temple in the reign of Josiah, the public reading of the law by Ezra, the warning not to add to or subtract from the commandments in Deuteronomy, the closing words of the book of Revelation.⁵ Such passages do not tell us which books later readers would include, but they show how the idea of a fixed and authoritative text arose inside the literature itself.

The second is manuscripts. A scroll or codex is physical evidence of what was copied, and the great codices of the fourth and fifth centuries, which bound many books together under one cover, are especially revealing because the act of binding is a kind of listing. Codex Sinaiticus, for example, contains the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas after Revelation, while Codex Alexandrinus ends with the two letters attributed to Clement of Rome.⁶ The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered from 1947 onward, gave scholars for the first time a library of biblical and other manuscripts from the centuries before the destruction of the Second Temple.⁷

The third is explicit lists, which survive from the second century onward. Among Jewish sources the most important are the account of twenty-two books in Josephus's Against Apion and the order of books given in the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Bava Batra. Christian lists include those of Melito of Sardis, Origen, Eusebius, Athanasius, Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory of Nazianzus, Amphilochius of Iconium, Epiphanius, Jerome, Rufinus and Augustine, together with anonymous lists such as the Muratorian Fragment and the catalogue in Codex Claromontanus.⁸

The fourth is the decisions of councils and synods. Some of these, such as the North African councils of Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397 and 419, issued lists of books to be read in church. Others, such as the Council of Trent in 1546 and the Synod of Jerusalem in 1672, defined the canon for a whole communion in response to controversy.⁹ Many supposed "decisions" of councils, however, turn out on inspection to be later legends, of which the so-called Council of Jamnia is the most famous.

The fifth is the use of books by ancient writers: the quotations, allusions and commentaries in which authors such as Philo, the New Testament writers, Clement of Rome, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria drew on earlier scripture. Such evidence must be handled with care, for an author may quote a book he values without regarding it as scripture, and may fail to quote a book he does regard as scripture simply because it served none of his purposes.

The Limits of This Page

This page is deliberately historical and textual. It asks what the books, manuscripts, lists and councils show, when they show it, and how securely the evidence can be dated. It does not argue for one canon over another, nor does it lay later doctrinal systems over the ancient material. Where a council or writer gave reasons for including or excluding a book, those reasons are reported in his own terms, because they are part of the historical record. Where modern scholars disagree about dates or interpretations, as they do over the Muratorian Fragment, the supposed council at Jamnia and the closing of the Writings, the disagreement is stated and the main positions are given.

The page is arranged in five parts. Part One follows the Hebrew scriptures from the evidence inside the books themselves to the rabbinic order of the Talmud. Part Two traces the Greek scriptures of the Jewish diaspora and the Old Testament lists of the early churches. Part Three turns to the New Testament, from the first collections of Paul's letters and the four Gospels to the lists of the fourth century. Part Four examines the councils, the great versions and the distinctive canons of the Syriac, Armenian, Coptic and Ethiopian churches. Part Five follows the medieval Bible, the Reformation, the Council of Trent and the Orthodox synods to the printed Bibles of the modern world. A closing chapter compares the canons in use today, and a final section offers suggestions for further study.

Readers who want a shorter account of the New Testament story will find one on the site's existing page on the development of the Greek Bible canon, and the related pages on the Greek Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls treat those subjects in more detail than is possible here. The Journal's essays on individual witnesses, such as the Muratorian Fragment, the Hexapla of Origen and Codex Sinaiticus, are linked at the points where they bear on the argument.

A Note on Names and Numbers

The same books carry different names in different traditions, and the same collection can be counted in different ways. The Hebrew Bible's twenty-four books become thirty-nine in Christian Bibles because Samuel, Kings and Chronicles are each divided in two, Ezra and Nehemiah are separated, and the Twelve Minor Prophets, which form a single book in Jewish reckoning, are counted individually. Josephus and several early Christian writers counted twenty-two, apparently by joining Ruth to Judges and Lamentations to Jeremiah so as to match the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet.¹⁰ The books called "Apocrypha" by Protestants are called "deuterocanonical" by Roman Catholics, a term coined in the sixteenth century by Sixtus of Siena, and "anagignoskomena", meaning "books to be read", by many Orthodox writers.¹¹ The names 1 and 2 Esdras are notoriously confusing, because the same Greek and Latin books have been numbered differently in the Septuagint, the Vulgate and English Bibles. This page explains each such difference where it first arises and gives the names in their most common English form.

How the Story Unfolds

The chapters that follow are not a single story of steady progress toward a fixed result. They show instead a pattern that recurs across both Testaments and across many communities. A core of books was recognised early and almost universally: the Torah, the Prophets, the Psalms, the four Gospels and the letters of Paul. Around that core lay a margin of books whose standing differed from place to place and from century to century: Esther, the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes among the Hebrew books; the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Tobit and Judith among the Greek ones; Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude and Revelation in the New Testament; and books such as 1 Enoch, the Shepherd of Hermas and the letters of Clement that were read as scripture in some places and not in others. The modern canons differ from one another almost entirely in how they resolved the standing of books in that margin.

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Chapter 1. Writing and Authority Inside the Hebrew Bible

The story of the biblical canon begins inside the books that would later form it. Long before any list existed, the Hebrew scriptures already described the act of writing down divine instruction, of preserving it in a sacred place and of reading it aloud to the people. These passages are not a theory of the canon, and they were not written to answer the questions that later readers asked. They show, however, that the idea of a written, authoritative and unalterable text took shape within the literature itself, and they supplied the vocabulary on which later Jewish and Christian discussions drew.

Commandments Written and Deposited

Exodus presents the Ten Commandments as written on two tablets of stone and placed in the ark of the covenant (Exodus 24:12; 31:18; 34:1, 27–28; 40:20). Moses is also said to have written "all the words of the Lord" in a "book of the covenant", which he read aloud to the people at Sinai (Exodus 24:4–7). Deuteronomy, which presents itself as Moses' final address on the plains of Moab, carries the theme further. Moses writes "this law" and gives it to the Levitical priests who carry the ark, with instructions that it be read before all Israel every seventh year at the feast of Tabernacles (Deuteronomy 31:9–13). The book is then placed "beside the ark of the covenant", to remain there "as a witness" (Deuteronomy 31:24–26).¹

Deuteronomy also contains the first formula that later readers would treat as a principle of canon: "You shall not add to the word which I command you, nor take from it" (Deuteronomy 4:2; compare 12:32, numbered 13:1 in Hebrew Bibles). Comparable formulas are known from ancient Near Eastern treaties and law codes, where curses are pronounced on anyone who alters an inscription. The Code of Hammurabi, for example, ends with curses against any future ruler who changes its words or erases the king's name.² In Deuteronomy the formula protects the commandments the book is about to give rather than a list of books, but its wording was repeated centuries later, in almost the same form, at the end of the book of Revelation (Revelation 22:18–19), and it was cited by Josephus when he described the Jewish attitude to the sacred books.³

The law of the king in Deuteronomy instructs a future ruler to write for himself "a copy of this law" from the scroll kept by the Levitical priests, and to read it all his life (Deuteronomy 17:18–19). The Greek translators rendered the phrase "copy of this law" as to deuteronomion touto, literally "this second law", and the Greek title Deuteronomion, from which the English name of the book descends, preserves that rendering.⁴

The Book Found in the Temple

The most dramatic scene of written authority in the Hebrew Bible is the finding of the "book of the law" in the Temple in the eighteenth year of King Josiah, conventionally 622 BCE (2 Kings 22–23; 2 Chronicles 34). During repairs to the building the high priest Hilkiah gives the scroll to Shaphan the scribe, who reads it before the king. Josiah tears his garments, sends to the prophetess Huldah for an oracle, and then reads "all the words of the book of the covenant" to the assembled people before carrying out a sweeping reform of worship.⁵

Since the early nineteenth century, when W. M. L. de Wette argued the case in his dissertation of 1805, most critical scholars have identified the book found by Hilkiah with some form of Deuteronomy, because the reforms that Josiah carries out, above all the centralisation of sacrifice in Jerusalem, correspond to the distinctive laws of that book.⁶ The identification is a scholarly inference rather than a statement of the text, and scholars differ over whether the account reflects an actual discovery, a later framing, or a combination of the two. What the narrative shows beyond dispute is that its authors could imagine a written scroll holding authority over a king, a priest and a prophet together, and that public reading was the means by which such authority was exercised.

Prophets and Their Scrolls

The prophetic books describe their own written origins in several places. Isaiah is told to "bind up the testimony, seal the teaching among my disciples" (Isaiah 8:16) and to write a message "on a tablet" and "in a book", so that it might be "for the time to come as a witness for ever" (Isaiah 30:8). Habakkuk is told to "write the vision; make it plain upon tablets" (Habakkuk 2:2), a verse on which the Qumran commentary on Habakkuk would later comment line by line.⁷

The fullest account is in Jeremiah 36. In the fourth year of Jehoiakim, Jeremiah dictates his oracles to the scribe Baruch son of Neriah, who writes them on a scroll and reads them in the Temple. The scroll is brought to the king, who cuts off each section with a scribe's knife as it is read and burns it in a brazier. Jeremiah then dictates a second scroll, to which "many similar words were added" (Jeremiah 36:32).⁸ The chapter is remarkable for its picture of a prophetic book growing by stages, being destroyed and being rewritten. Modern scholarship on Jeremiah has confirmed that the book existed in more than one edition in antiquity: the Greek Septuagint text is about one-seventh shorter than the Masoretic text and arranges the oracles against the nations differently, and Hebrew fragments from Qumran, notably 4QJer-b and 4QJer-d, preserve a text close to the shorter Greek form.⁹

Ezra and the Public Reading of the Law

The books of Ezra and Nehemiah present the restoration of Judah after the Babylonian exile as a community gathered around a written law. Ezra is described as "a scribe skilled in the law of Moses" (Ezra 7:6), sent by the Persian king Artaxerxes with authority to teach and enforce "the law of your God, which is in your hand" (Ezra 7:14, 25–26). In Nehemiah 8, the people gather in the square before the Water Gate, and Ezra reads "the book of the law of Moses" from early morning until midday, standing on a wooden platform built for the purpose. Levites help the people to understand the reading, "and they read from the book, from the law of God, clearly, and they gave the sense" (Nehemiah 8:8). The Hebrew word translated "clearly", meforash, has been taken by some interpreters to mean that the reading was accompanied by translation, perhaps into Aramaic, though that is an interpretation rather than a statement of the text.¹⁰

The scene shows the Torah being read in a public liturgy, explained by teachers and accepted by the assembly, and it is followed in Nehemiah 10 by a sealed covenant in which the people pledge to keep its commandments. Later Jewish tradition remembered Ezra as a second Moses, and two very different later sources attribute to him a decisive role in the restoration of scripture. The apocalypse known as 4 Ezra, written about 100 CE, has Ezra dictate ninety-four books by divine inspiration after the scriptures had been burned, of which twenty-four are to be published openly and seventy kept for the wise (4 Ezra 14:37–48).¹¹ The Babylonian Talmud states that "Ezra wrote his book and the genealogies of Chronicles up to his own time" and associates the "men of the Great Assembly" with the writing of several books (Bava Batra 15a).¹² Neither text is a historical record of Ezra's own age, but both show that later generations linked the shape of the scriptures to the period of the return.

The Torah as a Recognised Whole

By the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, as the books present it, the "law of Moses" was a recognised written entity. How closely it corresponded to the five books of the Pentateuch as we know them is a matter of scholarly debate, but several lines of evidence suggest that the Torah had essentially reached its present shape by the fourth century BCE. The Samaritan community, which separated from the Jerusalem community over the place of worship, regards only the five books of Moses as scripture, and its Pentateuch, while differing from the Masoretic text in about six thousand places, most of them minor, contains the same five books in the same order.¹³ The Greek translation of the Pentateuch in Alexandria, dated by most scholars to the third century BCE, likewise presupposes a fixed five-book Torah. The chapter that follows takes up the Samaritan evidence in more detail.

Books Mentioned but Lost

The Hebrew Bible also refers to books that it does not contain. Numbers cites "the Book of the Wars of the Lord" (Numbers 21:14). Joshua and 2 Samuel cite "the Book of Jashar" (Joshua 10:13; 2 Samuel 1:18). The books of Kings repeatedly refer readers to "the Book of the Acts of Solomon" and to the chronicles of the kings of Israel and of Judah, and Chronicles cites the records of the prophets Samuel, Nathan, Gad, Iddo and others.¹⁴ These references show that the biblical writers worked with written sources that were not themselves preserved as scripture. The canon, in other words, was never simply the whole of ancient Hebrew literature. It was a selection, and the selection began within the books themselves.

What the Internal Evidence Shows

The internal evidence of the Hebrew Bible therefore establishes several points that remain important throughout the rest of this page. It presents divine instruction as something written, deposited in a sacred place and read publicly. It contains a formula forbidding addition and subtraction. It depicts prophetic books as growing over time and existing in more than one form. It associates the Torah with Moses and its restoration with Ezra. It refers to other books that it does not include. What it does not contain is a list of its own books, and it gives no indication of which later writings would one day be read alongside the Torah. For that, the historian must turn to the evidence of the Second Temple period.

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Chapter 2. The Torah, the Samaritans and the Gathering of the Prophets

If the internal evidence of the Hebrew Bible shows how the idea of authoritative writing arose, the evidence of the Persian and early Hellenistic periods shows how the first great collection, the Torah, became fixed, and how a second collection, the Prophets, gathered around it. The two processes are best examined separately, because the evidence for each is different and because one community, the Samaritans, accepted the first collection while never accepting the second.

The Five Books of Moses

The five books of the Torah, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, have been read as a unit for as long as there is evidence for their reading. Their division into five scrolls is reflected in the rabbinic name "the five fifths of the Torah" (hamishah humshei torah) and in the Greek name Pentateuch, "five scrolls", first attested in the second century CE in the Letter to Flora by the Christian teacher Ptolemy and in Origen.¹ The division into five was almost certainly practical as well as literary: a single scroll containing the whole Torah would have been very long, and five scrolls of manageable length could be copied and stored more easily.

How and when the Torah reached its present form is one of the most debated subjects in biblical scholarship, and it lies largely outside the scope of a history of the canon. What matters here is the evidence that by the end of the Persian period, around 330 BCE, a five-book Torah existed and was recognised as authoritative by communities that disagreed with one another on other matters. Three witnesses point in that direction: the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Greek Pentateuch of Alexandria and the many Torah manuscripts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. All three contain the same five books in the same order, despite differences in wording.²

The Samaritan Pentateuch

The Samaritans, who today number fewer than a thousand people living at Kiryat Luza on Mount Gerizim and in Holon near Tel Aviv, regard themselves as descendants of the northern Israelite tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh. Their scripture consists solely of the five books of Moses, written in a distinctive script that descends from the Palaeo-Hebrew alphabet used in Israel before the exile.³ The Samaritans do not regard Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings or the prophetic books as scripture, although they possess a separate chronicle-like Book of Joshua of their own, which is not a translation of the Hebrew book.

The Samaritan Pentateuch differs from the Masoretic text in around six thousand places. Most differences are spelling variants or small grammatical adjustments, but some are deliberate and significant. The most famous concerns the place of worship. Where the Masoretic text of Deuteronomy speaks of "the place which the Lord your God will choose", the Samaritan text reads "has chosen", and an additional commandment after the Ten Commandments in Exodus and Deuteronomy directs the building of an altar on Mount Gerizim.⁴ The Samaritan text also harmonises parallel passages, filling out narratives in Exodus with material drawn from Deuteronomy.

The Dead Sea Scrolls transformed the study of the Samaritan Pentateuch. Several manuscripts from Qumran, notably 4QpaleoExod-m and 4QNum-b, contain harmonising expansions of the kind found in the Samaritan text but lack its specifically Samaritan readings about Gerizim.⁵ Scholars have concluded that the Samaritans adopted a form of the Pentateuch already in circulation among Jews in the late Second Temple period, which scholars call "pre-Samaritan", and added a thin layer of their own sectarian readings to it. The date of the Samaritan schism itself is disputed. The older view, based on Josephus, placed it in the late Persian period, while more recent scholarship, drawing on the archaeology of the Gerizim temple and on the palaeography of the Samaritan script, tends to place the decisive separation in the Hasmonean period of the second century BCE, after John Hyrcanus destroyed the Gerizim temple about 111–110 BCE.⁶

For the history of the canon the significance of the Samaritan Pentateuch is clear. A community that later separated from Judaism retained the Torah as its whole scripture and nothing else. Whatever the date of the separation, the Samaritan evidence shows that the Torah had a standing that no other collection then possessed. The Journal's articles on the Samaritan Pentateuch discuss its manuscripts, including the Abisha scroll kept by the community at Nablus, in more detail.

The Prophets: Former and Latter

The second division of the Hebrew Bible, the Nevi'im or Prophets, contains two groups of books. The Former Prophets, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, tell the story of Israel from the entry into the land to the Babylonian exile. The Latter Prophets consist of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Book of the Twelve, the collection of shorter prophetic books from Hosea to Malachi that Christian Bibles count as twelve separate books. The terms "Former" and "Latter" are medieval and describe the order of the books rather than their dates.⁷

The grouping of narrative books with oracular books under the single heading "Prophets" reflects a view, found in Chronicles and in later Jewish tradition, that the history of Israel was written by prophets. Chronicles cites the records of Samuel the seer, Nathan the prophet and Gad the seer as its sources for David's reign (1 Chronicles 29:29), and the Talmud attributes Joshua to Joshua, Judges and Samuel to Samuel and Kings to Jeremiah (Bava Batra 14b–15a).⁸ Whatever the historical value of these attributions, they explain why the historical books stood in the prophetic division of the Hebrew canon rather than among the Writings, where Chronicles is placed.

The Book of the Twelve

The Twelve Minor Prophets illustrate how smaller books were gathered into a larger collection. The word "minor" refers only to length. All twelve were written on a single scroll, a practice confirmed by the Greek Minor Prophets scroll from Nahal Hever, copied in the late first century BCE, and by the Hebrew scroll from Wadi Murabba'at, both of which contain several of the Twelve in sequence on one roll.⁹ Ben Sira, writing in the early second century BCE, already speaks of "the twelve prophets" as a group (Sirach 49:10), which shows that the collection existed by about 190 BCE.¹⁰ The order of the first six books differs between the Hebrew and the Greek: the Masoretic order runs Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, while the Septuagint has Hosea, Amos, Micah, Joel, Obadiah, Jonah. From Nahum to Malachi the two orders agree. The Journal's study of the Nahal Hever Greek Minor Prophets Scroll discusses that manuscript.

Ben Sira's Praise of the Ancestors

The single most important witness to the shape of the Prophets before the Christian era is the Wisdom of Jesus son of Sirach, also called Ecclesiasticus, written in Hebrew in Jerusalem in about 190–180 BCE. In chapters 44 to 49 Ben Sira offers a "praise of famous men", a poetic survey of Israel's heroes from Enoch and Noah to the high priest Simon son of Onias, his own contemporary.¹¹ The survey follows the biblical books in order. It moves through the patriarchs and Moses, Aaron and Phinehas, then Joshua and Caleb, the judges, Samuel, Nathan, David and Solomon, Elijah and Elisha, Hezekiah and Isaiah, Josiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, before referring to "the twelve prophets" and then to Zerubbabel, Joshua son of Jozadak and Nehemiah.

The sequence of the survey corresponds closely to the order of the Torah and the Former and Latter Prophets as they stand in the Hebrew Bible. Ben Sira mentions Job alongside Ezekiel in the Hebrew text of Sirach 49:9, a reference that the Greek translation obscures, and he knows the figures of Ezra-Nehemiah, although strikingly he names Nehemiah but not Ezra.¹² Scholars have long drawn from this passage the conclusion that, by about 190 BCE, the Prophets existed as a recognised collection in essentially their present order, even if the boundary between the Prophets and the later Writings was not yet sharply drawn.

The Hebrew Text of Ben Sira

Ben Sira's own book has a remarkable textual history that bears on the canon. It was known for centuries chiefly in the Greek translation made by the author's grandson in Egypt, and in Latin and Syriac versions derived from Greek and Hebrew respectively. The rabbis quoted it occasionally but did not include it among the holy writings; the Tosefta says that "the books of Ben Sira and all books written from then onward do not defile the hands" (Tosefta Yadayim 2:13).¹³ In 1896, however, manuscripts of the Hebrew original began to emerge from the Cairo Genizah, identified first by Solomon Schechter, and between 1963 and 1965 Yigael Yadin's excavations at Masada recovered a scroll containing parts of chapters 39 to 44 copied in the first century BCE.¹⁴ The Journal's article on Masada and the Hebrew scroll of Ben Sira and the site's page on the Cairo Genizah give the story of these finds.

A Collection Not Yet Closed

The evidence considered in this chapter shows a Torah fixed by the late Persian or early Hellenistic period and a collection of Prophets recognised by the early second century BCE. It does not show that the scriptures as a whole had been closed. The books later grouped as the Writings, above all the Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Daniel and Chronicles, had their own histories, and some of them were still being composed or edited in the Hellenistic period. Daniel, in its present form, contains visions that refer in detail to the persecution of the Jews under the Seleucid king Antiochus IV between 167 and 164 BCE, and most scholars date its final chapters to those years.¹⁵ The next chapter follows the evidence for a third division of scripture and for the earliest references to the scriptures as a threefold whole.

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Chapter 3. The Law, the Prophets and the Other Books

The Hebrew Bible as Jews read it today is divided into three parts: Torah, Nevi'im and Ketuvim, the Law, the Prophets and the Writings, from whose initials the acronym Tanakh is formed. The question of when this threefold division first appears, and when the third part was closed, has been at the centre of modern debate about the Jewish canon. The evidence is fragmentary, and much depends on a handful of passages whose interpretation is contested.

The Prologue to Ben Sira

The earliest reference to a threefold body of scripture occurs in the prologue that Ben Sira's grandson wrote for his Greek translation of his grandfather's book. The grandson says that he came to Egypt "in the thirty-eighth year of the reign of Euergetes", which is generally understood to be Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II, giving a date of 132 BCE, and that he completed the translation some time afterwards.¹ In the prologue he refers three times to the scriptures his grandfather had studied. He speaks first of "the Law and the Prophets and the others that followed them"; then of his grandfather's devotion to "the reading of the Law and the Prophets and the other books of our ancestors"; and finally, apologising for the inadequacy of any translation, he observes that "the Law itself and the Prophecies and the rest of the books" differ not a little when read in their original language.²

The passage proves that by 132 BCE, and probably already in his grandfather's day, the Law and the Prophets were recognised collections. It also shows that other books were read alongside them. What it does not show is that the third group had a fixed membership, or even a fixed name. The grandson's three different expressions, "the others that followed them", "the other books of our ancestors" and "the rest of the books", suggest a category that was still loosely defined. Scholars divide sharply over the implications. Some, such as Roger Beckwith, have read the prologue as evidence that the canon was effectively closed in three parts by the mid-second century BCE.³ Others, such as John Barton and Lee Martin McDonald, see in it only a firm core of Law and Prophets surrounded by an open body of other writings.⁴ The prologue's own wording is compatible with either reading, which is precisely why it has been argued over for so long.

A further observation from the prologue matters for the later history of the Greek Bible. The grandson notes that the Law, the Prophecies and the other books, when translated into Greek, differ considerably from the Hebrew. He thus indicates that Greek translations of at least some of the prophetic and other books already existed in Egypt by his day, and that their divergence from the Hebrew was noticed.⁵

Second Maccabees and Nehemiah's Library

A second passage often cited in this connection occurs in 2 Maccabees, in the second of two letters prefixed to the book and purporting to be sent from Jerusalem to the Jews of Egypt. It reports that Nehemiah, "founding a library, collected the books about the kings and prophets, and the writings of David, and letters of kings about votive offerings" (2 Maccabees 2:13). The letter continues that Judas Maccabaeus "likewise collected all the books that had been lost on account of the war which had come upon us, and they are in our possession" (2 Maccabees 2:14).⁶

The letter's authenticity and date are disputed, but it is generally placed in the late second or early first century BCE. Its description of Nehemiah's library combines books "about the kings and prophets", which may correspond to the Former and Latter Prophets, with "the writings of David", which may refer to the Psalms. The "letters of kings about votive offerings" are probably the Persian documents quoted in Ezra. The passage thus reflects a tradition that the books of the Prophets and the Psalms had been gathered in Jerusalem in the Persian period and preserved by Judas during the Maccabean revolt. Whether any such library existed cannot be confirmed, but the passage shows how, in the second century BCE, the gathering of scripture was associated with the restoration of the nation.

The Psalms as a Third Category

Several sources of the late Second Temple period name the Psalms alongside the Law and the Prophets. A document from Qumran known as 4QMMT, a letter or treatise setting out disputed points of law, addresses its recipient with the words: "we have written to you so that you may study the book of Moses and the books of the Prophets and David".⁷ The editors of the text, Elisha Qimron and John Strugnell, restored the passage in this form from small fragments, and the reconstruction has been challenged; Eugene Ulrich in particular has argued that the fragments do not securely establish a reference to a third division of scripture.⁸ If the restoration is correct, it parallels the wording of 2 Maccabees in placing David, meaning the Psalms, after the Law and the Prophets.

The Gospel of Luke has the risen Jesus say that "everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled" (Luke 24:44).⁹ This is the only place in the New Testament where three groups of scripture are named, and as in 4QMMT the third is the Psalms. Elsewhere the New Testament speaks of "the law and the prophets" (Matthew 5:17; 7:12; Luke 16:16; Acts 13:15; Romans 3:21) or simply of "the scriptures". Philo of Alexandria, describing the community of the Therapeutae near Lake Mareotis in Egypt, says that they take into their sanctuaries "laws and oracles delivered through prophets, and hymns and the other books by which knowledge and piety are increased and perfected".¹⁰ The form of words echoes the grandson's prologue: Law, Prophets, hymns and other books.

A Third Division in Formation

Taken together, these passages show that by the first century BCE and the first century CE, Jewish writers recognised a body of scripture larger than the Law and the Prophets. The Psalms, often referred to by the name of David, stood at the head of the further books, and other books, unnamed, followed. Two inferences seem safe. First, the Psalms were already treated as scripture of the highest standing; they are among the books most frequently copied at Qumran and most frequently quoted in the New Testament. Second, the category of "the other books" was not described by any single fixed term, which makes it likely that its exact boundaries were not yet everywhere agreed.

The Order of the Writings

When the third division does appear with a fixed list, in the Babylonian Talmud, its order is: Ruth, Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Lamentations, Daniel, the scroll of Esther, Ezra and Chronicles.¹¹ This order differs from the one familiar from printed Hebrew Bibles, which place Psalms first and Chronicles last, and it differs again from the order in the Aleppo and Leningrad codices, which open the Writings with Chronicles. The order of the Writings was evidently not regarded as fixed in the way that the order of the Torah was, and medieval Jewish manuscripts show many variations.¹² Chapter Twenty-One returns to the medieval evidence.

The Five Scrolls

Within the Writings, five short books came to be read on festivals: the Song of Songs at Passover, Ruth at Shavuot, Lamentations on the Ninth of Av, Ecclesiastes at Sukkot and Esther at Purim. These Five Megillot are grouped together in many medieval manuscripts and in most printed Hebrew Bibles. The public reading of Esther at Purim is required already in the Mishnah, which devotes a tractate, Megillah, to the rules for reading it.¹³ The liturgical use of the other four scrolls is attested later, in the post-Talmudic tractate Soferim, and their grouping as a set is a medieval development. It shows, however, how liturgical practice could shape the arrangement of the canon even after its contents were settled.

What Remained to Be Settled

By the end of the first century CE, then, the threefold structure of the Hebrew scriptures was well established in outline. The Law and the Prophets were fixed collections; the Psalms headed a third group; and other books, including Proverbs, Job and Daniel, were widely read as scripture. A handful of books, above all Esther, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs, were still the subject of discussion, as the rabbinic evidence shows. At the same time, books that would later stand outside the Hebrew canon, including Ben Sira, 1 Enoch and Jubilees, were being read and copied, in some communities with great reverence. The Dead Sea Scrolls, to which the next chapter turns, provide a direct view of one such community's library.

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Chapter 4. The Library of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Until 1947 the oldest substantial Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible dated from the ninth and tenth centuries CE. The discovery of scrolls in caves near Khirbet Qumran on the north-western shore of the Dead Sea, and the subsequent finds at Masada, Wadi Murabba'at, Nahal Hever and other sites in the Judaean Desert, pushed the manuscript evidence back by more than a thousand years. For the history of the canon the scrolls are uniquely valuable, because they show what one Jewish community of the late Second Temple period actually copied, read and treasured, before the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. The site's main page on the Dead Sea Scrolls tells the story of their discovery; this chapter asks what they reveal about scripture.

The Scale of the Finds

The eleven caves around Qumran yielded the remains of some nine hundred to a thousand manuscripts, most of them in small fragments. Cave 4 alone, discovered by Bedouin in 1952, produced fragments of about five hundred and fifty. The manuscripts were copied over a period of roughly three centuries, from the third century BCE to the first century CE, and most are in Hebrew, with a substantial minority in Aramaic and a small number in Greek.¹ About two hundred and twenty of the manuscripts are copies of books that are now in the Hebrew Bible. The rest include commentaries, rules for community life, liturgical texts, calendars, wisdom texts and works now classed as apocrypha and pseudepigrapha.

Which Books Are Present

Every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther is represented by at least one fragment at Qumran, if Ezra and Nehemiah are counted as one book; Nehemiah itself has been identified only in a disputed fragment.² The distribution of copies is revealing. The books most frequently represented are Psalms, with about thirty-six manuscripts from the Qumran caves; Deuteronomy, with about thirty; Isaiah, with about twenty-one; Genesis, with about twenty; and Exodus, with about seventeen. By contrast, Chronicles is represented by a single small fragment, and Ezra by one manuscript.³ The numbers depend on how fragments are counted and are subject to revision, but the general picture is clear: the Torah, the Psalms and Isaiah dominated the community's reading.

The absence of Esther has been explained in several ways. It may be an accident of survival, since Esther is a short book and many manuscripts of longer books survive only in small fragments. It may reflect the community's calendar, which differed from that of the Jerusalem establishment and may not have included Purim. Or it may reflect reservations about a book in which the name of God does not appear. None of these explanations can be proved, and some scholars have pointed to Aramaic texts from Cave 4, sometimes called "Proto-Esther" or "Tales of the Persian Court", as evidence that stories of the same type were known.⁴

Books Later Outside the Hebrew Canon

The scrolls also contain many copies of books that are not in the Jewish Bible. Fragments of about twenty Aramaic manuscripts of works belonging to 1 Enoch were found in Cave 4, alongside some fifteen copies of Jubilees, a retelling of Genesis and the first part of Exodus arranged by a calendar of jubilee periods.⁵ Other works include the Aramaic Levi Document, the Genesis Apocryphon, Tobit in four Aramaic copies and one Hebrew copy, the Letter of Jeremiah in Greek from Cave 7, and Ben Sira in a fragment from Cave 2 that preserves part of chapter 6.⁶ The Journal's essay on the Genesis Apocryphon discusses one of these works.

The number of copies of 1 Enoch and Jubilees is comparable to that of the major prophetic books other than Isaiah. Jubilees is cited by name in the Damascus Document, a rule text of the Qumran movement, as "the book of the divisions of the times into their jubilees and weeks" (CD 16:3–4).⁷ For this community, then, Jubilees had real authority. It is striking that both 1 Enoch and Jubilees survive complete today only in Ge'ez and form part of the canon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, a connection to which Chapter Nineteen returns.

The Great Psalms Scroll

The most discussed manuscript in this connection is the Great Psalms Scroll from Cave 11, designated 11QPs-a and unrolled in 1961 by James A. Sanders. Copied in the first half of the first century CE, it preserves parts of about forty-nine compositions. These include psalms from the last third of the Masoretic Psalter, but in a markedly different order, together with Psalm 151, known previously from the Septuagint; Psalms 154 and 155, known previously from Syriac manuscripts; parts of Sirach 51; a version of David's last words from 2 Samuel 23; and a prose passage, "David's Compositions", which credits David with 3,600 psalms and 450 songs, 4,050 in all.⁸

Sanders argued that the scroll represents a genuine form of the biblical Psalter, still open at its end in the first century, while other scholars, notably Patrick Skehan and Shemaryahu Talmon, regarded it as a secondary liturgical collection drawn from an already fixed Psalter.⁹ The debate continues. Peter Flint's study of all the Psalms manuscripts from the Judaean Desert concluded that the first three books of the Psalter (Psalms 1–89) were largely stable by the first century BCE, while the last two books (Psalms 90–150) remained fluid in some communities.¹⁰ The scroll is discussed in the Journal's article on the Psalms Scroll from Cave 11. Whichever view is taken, the evidence shows that even the book at the head of the Writings had more than one form in the first century.

Textual Plurality

The biblical scrolls from Qumran confirmed what the Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch had already suggested: in the late Second Temple period the text of individual books circulated in more than one form. Many Qumran manuscripts agree closely with the consonantal Masoretic text, and the great Isaiah scroll from Cave 1, 1QIsa-a, copied about 125 BCE, contains the whole of Isaiah in a form that differs from the Masoretic text chiefly in spelling and in many small variants.¹¹ Other scrolls stand closer to the Hebrew text that underlies the Septuagint, as in the case of the Jeremiah fragments mentioned in Chapter One, or to the pre-Samaritan text, and a large group shows independent readings. Emanuel Tov classified the Qumran biblical manuscripts into groups along these lines, and Eugene Ulrich proposed that books grew through "successive literary editions" that coexisted for a time.¹²

This textual plurality bears on the canon in an important way. A canon is a list of books, not a single wording of each book, and the scrolls show that the two questions were separate. A community could regard Jeremiah or the Psalms as scripture while possessing them in more than one edition. The stabilisation of a single Hebrew text, the proto-Masoretic text, is visible in manuscripts from Masada and from the Bar Kokhba caves of the late first and early second centuries CE, which agree almost entirely with the later Masoretic text.¹³ The site's pages on the guardians of the Hebrew text and the Leningrad Codex take up that later story.

Commentaries and Quotation

The Qumran community wrote commentaries, called pesharim, on certain books, interpreting them verse by verse as prophecies of the community's own time. Pesharim survive on Isaiah, Hosea, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah and the Psalms.¹⁴ The choice is instructive: the community treated the Psalms as prophetic, in the same way as the Prophets proper. Quotation formulas such as "as it is written" and "as he said" introduce passages from the Torah, the Prophets and the Psalms throughout the sectarian texts, and the Damascus Document quotes a passage from the Aramaic Levi Document, while a text from Cave 4, 4Q228, appears to cite Jubilees with similar formulas.

What Qumran Shows and Does Not Show

The Qumran library is the library of one group, usually identified with the Essenes described by Philo, Josephus and Pliny the Elder, although that identification has been questioned.¹⁵ It cannot be assumed that the Jerusalem priesthood, the Pharisees or the Jews of Alexandria held exactly the same books in the same regard. Nor did the community leave a list of its scriptures, so the status of individual books must be inferred from copies, citations and commentary. With those cautions, the scrolls permit three conclusions. The Torah, the Prophets and the Psalms held supreme authority. Other books now in the Hebrew Bible were read and copied, with the probable exception of Esther. And some books now outside the Hebrew canon, notably 1 Enoch and Jubilees, enjoyed an authority in this community comparable to that of scripture. The boundaries of scripture at Qumran, in short, were firm at the centre and porous at the edge.

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Chapter 5. Philo, the New Testament and Josephus

The first century CE produced three bodies of Jewish evidence for the scriptures that are especially important for the history of the canon: the writings of Philo of Alexandria, the New Testament, whose authors were for the most part Jews quoting Jewish scripture, and the works of Flavius Josephus. To these may be added the apocalypse known as 4 Ezra, written at the end of the century. Josephus and 4 Ezra provide the earliest surviving statements of the number of sacred books.

Philo of Alexandria

Philo, who lived from about 20 BCE to about 50 CE, was a member of a wealthy Jewish family of Alexandria and the most prolific Jewish author of the period whose works survive. He wrote in Greek and read the scriptures in the Septuagint. His surviving works are overwhelmingly devoted to the Torah, which he interpreted allegorically in treatises such as the Allegorical Interpretation, On the Creation of the World and the Life of Moses. He quotes the Pentateuch some two thousand times, the Prophets and the Writings comparatively rarely, and books outside the Hebrew canon, such as the Wisdom of Solomon and Sirach, apparently not at all.¹

Philo's silence about the books later called deuterocanonical is significant because it is sometimes assumed that the Jews of Alexandria possessed a larger canon than the Jews of Palestine. That "Alexandrian canon" hypothesis, widely held in the nineteenth century, was effectively challenged by Albert Sundberg in 1964, who argued that there is no evidence for a distinct Alexandrian Jewish list and that the larger Christian Old Testament arose within the church.² Philo's practice supports Sundberg's view to the extent that it shows a strong concentration on the Torah and no clear use of the additional books. It does not show what Philo would have said about the limits of scripture, since he never addressed the question.

Scripture in the New Testament

The New Testament writers refer constantly to "the scriptures" (hai graphai) and introduce quotations with formulas such as "it is written" (gegraptai) and "the scripture says". The books they quote most often are Isaiah, the Psalms, Deuteronomy, Exodus and Genesis, followed by the Twelve Prophets, Leviticus, Jeremiah, Daniel and Ezekiel.³ Most quotations follow the Septuagint or a text close to it, although some agree with the Hebrew against the Greek, and some cannot be matched exactly with any known text.

The New Testament quotes no book now outside the Hebrew canon with an explicit formula such as "it is written", with one notable exception: the Letter of Jude, which cites a prophecy spoken by "Enoch, the seventh from Adam" (Jude 14–15). The quotation corresponds closely to 1 Enoch 1:9, a passage preserved in Aramaic at Qumran and in Greek and Ge'ez.⁴ Jude also alludes to a dispute between the archangel Michael and the devil over the body of Moses (Jude 9), which Origen and other early writers attributed to a lost work known as the Assumption of Moses. Elsewhere, Paul's letters and Hebrews contain passages that echo the Wisdom of Solomon and Sirach, and 2 Timothy 3:8 names Jannes and Jambres, the magicians of Pharaoh, whose names are found in Jewish tradition but not in Exodus.⁵ Allusion of this kind shows familiarity with a book, but not necessarily that the author regarded it as scripture.

Conversely, several books of the Hebrew Bible are not quoted or clearly alluded to in the New Testament. These are usually listed as Ruth, Esther, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, Ezra, Nehemiah, Obadiah, Nahum and Zephaniah, though some scholars detect allusions to one or two of them.⁶ Because the New Testament writers did not set out to quote every book, the absence of a quotation is weak evidence for a book's status.

"From Abel to Zechariah"

A saying of Jesus in Matthew and Luke has sometimes been taken as evidence for the shape of the Jewish canon in the first century. Jesus warns that the blood of all the prophets shed "from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah" will be required of his generation (Luke 11:50–51; Matthew 23:35). Abel is the first murder victim in Genesis 4. If Zechariah is the son of Jehoiada, stoned in the court of the Temple in 2 Chronicles 24:20–22, then the saying spans the scriptures from the first book to the last in an order that ended with Chronicles, as later rabbinic Bibles often did.⁷ The argument has been made by Beckwith and others, but it depends on two uncertain assumptions: that the Zechariah meant is the one in Chronicles (Matthew calls him "son of Barachiah", the patronymic of the prophet Zechariah in Zechariah 1:1), and that Chronicles already stood last. The saying may simply mean "from the first murder to the last that scripture records", which would hold regardless of the order of books.

Flavius Josephus

Josephus, born in Jerusalem in 37 or 38 CE to a priestly family, commanded Jewish forces in Galilee in the revolt of 66, surrendered to the Romans and spent the rest of his life in Rome, where he wrote the Jewish War, the Jewish Antiquities and a defence of the Jewish people known as Against Apion. In the first book of Against Apion, written in the 90s CE, he contrasts the many conflicting histories of the Greeks with the Jewish records:

"For we have not an innumerable multitude of books among us, disagreeing from and contradicting one another, as the Greeks have, but only twenty-two books, which contain the records of all the past times, which are justly believed to be divine. And of them five belong to Moses, which contain his laws and the traditions of the origin of mankind till his death. ... But as to the time from the death of Moses till the reign of Artaxerxes, king of Persia, who reigned after Xerxes, the prophets, who were after Moses, wrote down what was done in their times in thirteen books. The remaining four books contain hymns to God, and precepts for the conduct of human life."⁸

Josephus adds that since the time of Artaxerxes events have been recorded, but those records are not esteemed of the same authority, "because there has not been an exact succession of prophets since that time". He insists that "no one has been so bold as either to add anything to them, to take anything from them, or to make any change in them", echoing the formula of Deuteronomy.⁹

Josephus does not name the twenty-two books. The five books of Moses are clear. The "four books" of hymns and precepts are usually identified as Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs. The thirteen books of the prophets would then include Joshua, Judges with Ruth, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah with Lamentations, Ezekiel, the Twelve, Job, Daniel, Esther, Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles. On that reckoning his twenty-two books correspond exactly to the twenty-four of the later rabbinic list, with Ruth and Lamentations attached to Judges and Jeremiah.¹⁰ Some scholars have questioned this reconstruction, suggesting that Josephus's count could have excluded Esther or the Song of Songs, or that his number was symbolic, but the majority view is that his twenty-two books match the rabbinic Bible in content.

Two features of the passage need emphasis. First, Josephus's criterion is historical and prophetic: the sacred books were written in the period from Moses to Artaxerxes, when prophecy was continuous, and later books lack that authority. The same idea appears in rabbinic sources, which say that with the deaths of the last prophets, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi, the holy spirit departed from Israel.¹¹ Second, Josephus presents the twenty-two books as a matter of long-standing national consensus, not as the decision of any body. Against Apion is an apologetic work written to impress non-Jewish readers, and its claim of complete unanimity may be idealised; but it is the earliest explicit statement of a closed number of Jewish scriptures.

Twenty-Four Books in 4 Ezra

Roughly contemporary with Josephus is the apocalypse known as 4 Ezra, preserved as chapters 3–14 of the book called 2 Esdras in English Bibles. Written in Hebrew or Aramaic after the destruction of the Temple, about 100 CE, it survives in Latin, Syriac, Ethiopic, Arabic, Armenian and other versions. In its last chapter, Ezra is told that the law has been burned and prays for the spirit to rewrite it. Over forty days he dictates to five scribes ninety-four books. The Most High then commands: "Make public the twenty-four books that you wrote first, and let the worthy and the unworthy read them; but keep the seventy that were written last, in order to give them to the wise among your people" (4 Ezra 14:45–46).¹²

The twenty-four books are almost certainly the books of the Hebrew Bible, counted in the way that later became standard in rabbinic tradition. The seventy hidden books represent esoteric literature, perhaps including apocalypses such as 4 Ezra itself. The passage therefore attests, at the end of the first century, both a public collection of twenty-four books and a conviction that further inspired books existed for a restricted readership. The coexistence of the two numbers, twenty-two in Josephus and twenty-four in 4 Ezra, foreshadows a pattern that continues in Christian lists, which sometimes count twenty-two books and sometimes twenty-four, while describing the same collection.¹³

The State of the Evidence at the End of the First Century

By the end of the first century, then, two Jewish sources state a fixed number of sacred books, and both numbers can be reconciled with the later rabbinic canon. The New Testament attests a body of "scriptures" whose core is the same, and which its authors read mostly in Greek. Philo concentrates overwhelmingly on the Torah. The Qumran library shows that some groups also revered books such as 1 Enoch and Jubilees. The next chapter turns to the rabbinic sources and to the legend of a council at Jamnia that was once thought to have closed the canon at about this time.

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Chapter 6. The Rabbis, Yavneh and the Myth of the Council of Jamnia

For much of the twentieth century, textbooks taught that the Hebrew canon was closed by a council of rabbis held at Jamnia, the Greek name of the coastal town of Yavneh, in about 90 CE. The council was said to have rejected the books of the Septuagint not found in Hebrew, to have confirmed the disputed books of the Writings and, in some versions, to have responded to the rise of Christianity. Since the 1960s that picture has been largely abandoned. This chapter sets out what the rabbinic sources actually say, how the theory of a council arose, and why most scholars now regard it as a modern construction.

Yavneh after 70 CE

After the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai is said to have obtained permission from the Romans to establish a centre of learning at Yavneh, and for the following decades the town was the seat of the rabbinic academy and of the patriarch Rabban Gamaliel II.¹ The rabbinic sources describe discussions, rulings and disputes among the sages who gathered there, and they refer to a particular day, "on the day that they seated Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah in the academy", when many rulings were made after Gamaliel had been temporarily deposed. Yavneh was a place of continuing study and debate, not a single assembly convened to settle a question.

"Defiling the Hands"

The rabbinic discussion of disputed books turns on a curious idiom. According to the Mishnah, "all the holy scriptures render the hands unclean" (Mishnah Yadayim 3:5). The phrase appears paradoxical, since one would expect holiness to confer purity rather than impurity. The Mishnah itself records the Sadducees' objection to it (Yadayim 4:6), and later explanations vary: one view holds that the rule discouraged people from storing scrolls next to food offerings where mice might damage them; another, that it prevented casual handling of sacred books.² Whatever its origin, the phrase functioned as a test of sacred status: to ask whether a book "defiled the hands" was to ask whether it was holy scripture.

The key passage reads:

"All the holy scriptures render the hands unclean. The Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes render the hands unclean. Rabbi Judah says: the Song of Songs renders the hands unclean, but there is a dispute about Ecclesiastes. Rabbi Yose says: Ecclesiastes does not render the hands unclean, and there is a dispute about the Song of Songs. ... Rabbi Simeon ben Azzai said: I have received a tradition from the seventy-two elders, on the day that they seated Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah in the academy, that the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes render the hands unclean. Rabbi Akiva said: Heaven forbid! No man in Israel ever disputed that the Song of Songs renders the hands unclean, for the whole world is not worth the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel; for all the scriptures are holy, but the Song of Songs is the holy of holies. And if they had a dispute, they had a dispute only about Ecclesiastes."³

This passage is the textual basis for the Jamnia theory. It records that on a particular day at Yavneh, a tradition was affirmed that the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes were holy. But it also shows that the matter was still disputed among rabbis of the second century, including Rabbi Judah and Rabbi Yose, who flourished in the decades after the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–135 CE. A related passage in the Mishnah records that the schools of Shammai and Hillel disagreed about Ecclesiastes (Mishnah Eduyot 5:3).⁴

Other Disputed Books

The Talmuds and other rabbinic sources mention discussions about further books. The Babylonian Talmud records that the sages sought to "hide away" (lignoz) the book of Ezekiel because its description of the future Temple seemed to contradict the Torah, until Hananiah ben Hezekiah sat in an upper room with three hundred jars of oil and reconciled the contradictions (Shabbat 13b; Hagigah 13a; Menahot 45a).⁵ Proverbs was likewise said to have been nearly withdrawn because of internal contradictions (Shabbat 30b). Esther was discussed in connection with whether it "defiles the hands" (Megillah 7a), with Samuel reported as saying that it does not, while other sages affirmed that it was composed under the holy spirit.⁶ None of these passages describes a vote to admit a book. They record attempts to withdraw books already in use, which failed.

The rabbis also expressed judgments on books outside their collection. The Tosefta states that "the books of Ben Sira and all books written from then onward do not defile the hands" (Tosefta Yadayim 2:13). The Mishnah, in a list of those who have no share in the world to come, includes Rabbi Akiva's addition of "one who reads in the outside books" (sefarim hitsonim; Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:1). The Palestinian Talmud and later rabbinic sources interpret this in various ways, and the Babylonian Talmud discusses whether it includes Ben Sira (Sanhedrin 100b).⁷ The passage appears to discourage the public or liturgical reading of books outside the sacred collection, though the rabbis themselves quote Ben Sira on occasion.

The Talmudic Order of Books

The fullest rabbinic statement on the canon is a baraita, an early tradition quoted in the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Bava Batra 14b–15a. It sets out the order of the Prophets and the Writings and then the authorship of each book:

"Our rabbis taught: the order of the Prophets is Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah and the Twelve. ... The order of the Writings is Ruth, the Book of Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, Lamentations, Daniel, the Scroll of Esther, Ezra and Chronicles."⁸

The order of the Latter Prophets in this list, with Isaiah after Ezekiel, differs from that in the printed Bibles, and the Talmud explains it on the grounds that Kings ends with destruction, Jeremiah is wholly destruction, Ezekiel begins with destruction and ends with consolation, and Isaiah is wholly consolation. The list does not give a number, but it contains exactly twenty-four books when the Torah is added. Its date is uncertain; baraitot purport to be traditions from the period of the Mishnah, before about 200 CE, but they were transmitted and edited in Babylonia over the following centuries.

The Rise of the Jamnia Theory

The idea of a council or synod at Jamnia that closed the canon is usually traced to the German Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz, who argued in an appendix to his commentary on Ecclesiastes in 1871 that the canon was finally fixed at Jamnia about 90 CE.⁹ The theory was taken up by the English scholar Herbert Edward Ryle in The Canon of the Old Testament (1892), and from there it passed into a great many handbooks, where the "Council of Jamnia" was given a date, a membership and an agenda. Some accounts added that the council acted against Christian writings, or against the Septuagint because Christians used it.

The Critique of Jack Lewis

In 1964 Jack P. Lewis published an article, "What Do We Mean by Jabneh?", that examined every rabbinic reference to the discussions at Yavneh.¹⁰ Lewis showed that the sources do not speak of a council or synod; that the only discussions associated with Yavneh concern Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs; that the disputes continued after Yavneh; and that there is no evidence that any decision at Yavneh concerned the books outside the Hebrew collection or the Christian writings. Sid Z. Leiman's monograph The Canonization of Hebrew Scripture (1976), which collected and analysed the talmudic and midrashic evidence, reached similar conclusions, arguing that the rabbinic discussions at Yavneh concerned the interpretation of books already regarded as scripture rather than their admission.¹¹

Most scholars now accept that there was no council of Jamnia in the sense of an authoritative assembly that defined the canon. Some, such as David Aune and Lee Martin McDonald, still regard Yavneh as a significant moment in the gradual closing of the Jewish canon, in the sense that the academy there was the setting for discussions that eventually settled the edges.¹² Others, following Beckwith and Leiman, place the effective closure earlier, in the second or first century BCE, and treat the Yavneh discussions as debates about books already accepted. The disagreement reflects the limits of the evidence: the rabbinic sources record disputes and traditions but do not narrate the formation of the collection.

The Rabbinic Canon in Summary

What can be said with confidence is this. By the time of the Mishnah, about 200 CE, the rabbis recognised a collection of holy scriptures that "defile the hands", whose limits were discussed with respect to Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs and perhaps Esther, and which excluded Ben Sira and other later books. By the time of the baraita in Bava Batra, a list of twenty-four books in a fixed order existed. That collection corresponds in content to the twenty-two books of Josephus and the twenty-four of 4 Ezra. It is the canon of the Jewish Bible to this day and the Old Testament of Protestant Bibles. How it came to stand alongside the larger Greek collection used by most early Christians is the subject of the next three chapters.

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Chapter 7. The Greek Scriptures and the Additional Books

Most of the earliest Christians, and a great many Jews of the Hellenistic and Roman world, read the scriptures not in Hebrew but in Greek. The collection of Greek translations and Greek compositions known collectively as the Septuagint was the Old Testament of the early church, and its contents differed from the Hebrew collection in ways that still divide the canons of the churches. This chapter describes the Greek scriptures and the books that they contained beyond the Hebrew Bible. The site's page on the Greek Septuagint and the Journal's article on the Septuagint and the Letter of Aristeas give fuller accounts of the translation itself.

The Translation of the Torah

The Letter of Aristeas, a Jewish work in Greek usually dated to the second century BCE, tells how Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285–246 BCE), at the suggestion of his librarian Demetrius of Phalerum, asked the high priest Eleazar in Jerusalem to send translators for the Jewish law. Seventy-two elders, six from each tribe, came to Alexandria and completed the translation in seventy-two days on the island of Pharos. The translation was read to the Jewish community, which approved it and pronounced a curse on anyone who should alter it.¹ The story is legendary in its details; Demetrius of Phalerum, for instance, was probably not Ptolemy II's librarian. But most scholars accept that the Torah was translated into Greek in Alexandria in the third century BCE, for the use of the Greek-speaking Jewish community there.² The name Septuagint, from the Latin septuaginta, "seventy", derives from this story, and in its strict sense refers only to the Greek Pentateuch.

Philo, writing in the first century CE, adds that the translators, working separately, produced identical renderings, as though under inspiration, and that an annual festival was held on Pharos to celebrate the translation.³ Later Christian writers, beginning with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus in the second century, extended the legend to the whole Greek Old Testament and elaborated the miracle of agreement, so that the Greek Bible itself came to be regarded by many churches as inspired.⁴

The Growth of the Greek Collection

The other books of the Hebrew Bible were translated into Greek over the following two or three centuries, by different translators of differing skill and in different places. The prologue to Ben Sira, as noted in Chapter Three, shows that translations of the Prophets and of "the rest of the books" existed in Egypt by 132 BCE. Some books were revised more than once: the Greek Minor Prophets scroll from Nahal Hever, of the late first century BCE, shows a revision of the older Greek toward the Hebrew, the so-called kaige recension, and the revisions of Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion in the second century CE continued the process.⁵ Origen's Hexapla set these versions side by side with the Hebrew.

Alongside the translations, the Greek-speaking communities used books that had no Hebrew counterpart in the later Jewish collection. Some of these had been written in Hebrew or Aramaic and translated; others were composed in Greek. They were not gathered into a single, defined "Septuagint canon" in Jewish antiquity. Our knowledge of the collection as a whole comes chiefly from the great Christian codices of the fourth and fifth centuries, which contain them in varying selections and orders.⁶

The Additional Books

The books found in Greek Bibles but not in the Hebrew canon are the following. Their names and grouping vary between traditions.

Tobit is a story set among the exiles of the northern tribes at Nineveh, telling how the pious Tobit, blinded, sends his son Tobias on a journey to Media accompanied by the angel Raphael in disguise. Written in Aramaic or Hebrew, probably in the third or second century BCE, it survives in two main Greek forms, a shorter and a longer, and the Aramaic and Hebrew fragments from Qumran support the longer.⁷

Judith tells how a widow of the town of Bethulia beheads the Assyrian general Holofernes and saves her people. It is generally dated to the second or early first century BCE and survives only in Greek and versions derived from it; Jerome made his Latin translation from an Aramaic text he said he possessed.⁸

The Additions to Esther are six passages, conventionally labelled A to F, which add to the Hebrew story a dream of Mordecai and its interpretation, the texts of two royal decrees, prayers of Mordecai and Esther, and an expanded account of Esther's audience with the king. They give the book an explicitly religious character absent from the Hebrew text, which does not mention God.⁹

The Wisdom of Solomon, written in Greek, probably in Alexandria in the first century BCE or early first century CE, speaks in the person of Solomon and praises Wisdom as the agent of God in creation and in the history of Israel.

Sirach, or Ecclesiasticus, the work of Jesus son of Eleazar son of Sira, written in Hebrew about 190–180 BCE and translated into Greek by his grandson, is the longest wisdom book of the Greek collection and the only one whose author and date are known.

Baruch, attributed to Jeremiah's scribe, consists of a prose confession of sin, a poem on wisdom and a poem of consolation for Jerusalem. The Letter of Jeremiah, a polemic against idols in the form of a letter to the exiles, is printed as Baruch chapter 6 in Latin Bibles and their descendants, but forms a separate book in Greek manuscripts.¹⁰

The Additions to Daniel are three: the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men, inserted in chapter 3; the story of Susanna, falsely accused by two elders and vindicated by the young Daniel; and the stories of Bel and the Dragon, in which Daniel exposes the priests of Bel and kills a dragon worshipped in Babylon.

1 Maccabees, written in Hebrew about 100 BCE but surviving only in Greek, narrates the revolt against Antiochus IV and the rise of the Hasmonean dynasty from 175 to 134 BCE. 2 Maccabees, an abridgement in Greek of a five-volume history by Jason of Cyrene, covers the events from about 180 to 161 BCE with a strong emphasis on the Temple and on martyrdom.¹¹

Further books appear in some Greek manuscripts and in Eastern canons. 1 Esdras (called 3 Esdras in the Latin tradition) is a Greek version of material from the end of 2 Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah 8, with an added story of three young guardsmen at the court of Darius. 3 Maccabees, despite its name, concerns the persecution of Egyptian Jews under Ptolemy IV Philopator, before the Maccabean period. 4 Maccabees is a philosophical discourse on the supremacy of reason over the passions, illustrated by the martyrdoms in 2 Maccabees. The Prayer of Manasseh is a short penitential prayer attributed to the king of Judah, based on 2 Chronicles 33:12–13. Psalm 151, a short poem on David's anointing and his victory over Goliath, follows the Psalter in Greek manuscripts and is described there as "outside the number". The Psalms of Solomon, eighteen psalms from the first century BCE, are listed in the contents of Codex Alexandrinus, though the leaves containing them are lost.¹²

The Contents of the Great Codices

The three great Greek Bibles of the fourth and fifth centuries show how fluid the Greek collection remained even among Christians. Codex Vaticanus, of the fourth century, contains the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Judith, Tobit, Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah, but no books of Maccabees. Codex Sinaiticus, of the same century, contains Tobit, Judith, 1 and 4 Maccabees, Wisdom and Sirach; it may once have contained 2 and 3 Maccabees in leaves now lost. Codex Alexandrinus, of the fifth century, contains all four books of Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach, Tobit, Judith, Baruch, the Letter of Jeremiah, 1 Esdras and fifteen Odes, among them the Prayer of Manasseh.¹³ The site's pages on Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Alexandrinus describe these manuscripts in detail.

The codices do not agree on which additional books to include or on their order, and none of them corresponds exactly to the later canon of any church. They show that Christians of the fourth century, who were producing complete Bibles for the first time, did not regard the edges of the Greek Old Testament as fixed. They also show, however, that books such as Wisdom, Sirach, Tobit and Judith were bound in the same volumes as Genesis and Isaiah and read in the same churches.

Jewish Use of the Greek Books

It is often said that the Jews rejected the Septuagint after Christians adopted it. The truth is more complicated. Greek-speaking Jews continued to use Greek translations long after the first century, but they increasingly preferred revisions that kept closer to the Hebrew, especially the translation of Aquila, a convert to Judaism said to have been a pupil of Rabbi Akiva. Aquila's version was still in use in synagogues in the sixth century, when the emperor Justinian, in Novella 146 of 553, permitted Jewish congregations to read the scriptures in Greek and specifically allowed Aquila's translation.¹⁴ The additional books, by contrast, were not preserved in Jewish tradition. Several of them, including 1 Maccabees, Judith and Tobit, were known to medieval Jewish writers chiefly through later Hebrew retellings.

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Chapter 8. Early Christian Lists of the Old Testament

The first Christians inherited their scriptures rather than choosing them. For two or three generations after Jesus the word "scripture" in Christian writings refers to the books of Israel, read for the most part in Greek. The question of which books belonged to that inheritance was not raised as a formal question for some time. When it was raised, in the second and third centuries, it was raised by individual teachers who knew that Christians and Jews used the books differently and who wanted to be able to argue with Jews from texts that both sides accepted. This chapter examines the earliest surviving Christian lists of the Old Testament books: the list of Melito of Sardis, the list attributed to Origen, and the Hebrew-Aramaic list preserved in a manuscript found in Jerusalem in the nineteenth century. It also considers the Christian use of books that stood outside those lists.

Scripture in the Earliest Christian Writings

The writings later collected in the New Testament quote the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms constantly, but never give a list of the books they regard as scripture. They quote or allude to most books of the later Hebrew canon; no quotation is found from Esther, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, Ezra-Nehemiah, Obadiah, Nahum or Zephaniah, though the silence may mean little, since these books offered few proof texts.¹ The Letter of Jude, in verses 14–15, quotes a prophecy of "Enoch, the seventh from Adam" that corresponds closely to 1 Enoch 1:9, and verse 9 refers to a dispute between Michael and the devil over the body of Moses that early writers traced to a work called the Assumption of Moses.² The Letter to the Hebrews, in its catalogue of the faithful, refers to those who "were tortured, refusing to accept release" (11:35), probably an allusion to the martyrs of 2 Maccabees 6–7, and to those "sawn in two" (11:37), which recalls the tradition of the martyrdom of Isaiah. Echoes of the Wisdom of Solomon have been detected in Romans 1 and of Sirach in James, though none is a formal quotation.³

The writers of the generation after the apostles, such as Clement of Rome, Ignatius and Polycarp, use the scriptures in the same way. 1 Clement, a letter from the church at Rome to the church at Corinth usually dated about 96 CE, cites the story of Judith (55.4–5) and alludes to the Wisdom of Solomon (27.5). The Epistle of Barnabas, perhaps of the 130s, quotes a passage it attributes to "Enoch" and introduces it with the words "as it is written".⁴ The Shepherd of Hermas quotes a now lost work called Eldad and Modad. None of these writers distinguishes between books as canonical and non-canonical; they simply quote what they read in the scriptures of their communities.

Justin Martyr and the Jewish Scriptures

Justin Martyr, a philosopher-teacher from Flavia Neapolis in Samaria who taught at Rome and was executed there about 165 CE, is the first Christian writer known to have reflected on the difference between the Jewish and Christian forms of the scriptures. In his Dialogue with Trypho, a long argument with a Jewish interlocutor written about 155–160, Justin accuses the Jewish teachers of having removed from the scriptures passages that supported Christian claims, and he cites texts from Esdras and Jeremiah that are not found in any known manuscripts.⁵ He also insists that he will argue only from texts that Trypho accepts. Justin's accusation is not supported by the textual evidence, but the episode shows that by the middle of the second century Christians were aware that Jewish and Christian scriptures were not identical and that the Greek text read in churches differed from that recognised by Jewish teachers.

Melito of Sardis

The earliest surviving Christian list of the Old Testament books comes from Melito, bishop of Sardis in the Roman province of Asia, who wrote about 170 CE. Melito's works are mostly lost, apart from a homily On the Pascha recovered from papyri in the twentieth century, but Eusebius of Caesarea preserved a passage from the preface to his Extracts, a collection of passages from the Law and the Prophets concerning Christ, in six books.⁶ In it Melito tells his correspondent Onesimus that he has travelled to the East:

Accordingly when I went East and came to the place where these things were preached and done, and learned accurately the books of the Old Testament, I set down the facts and sent them to you. These are their names: of Moses five, Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, Deuteronomy; Joshua son of Nun, Judges, Ruth, four of Kingdoms, two of Chronicles, the Psalms of David, the Proverbs of Solomon, also called Wisdom, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Job; of the Prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, the Twelve in one book, Daniel, Ezekiel, Ezra.⁷

Melito's phrase "the books of the Old Testament" (ta tēs palaias diathēkēs biblia) is the earliest known use of "Old Testament" for a collection of books, though it is uncertain whether he meant a collection or the old covenant itself.⁸ His list has several notable features. It reverses Leviticus and Numbers. It gives Kingdoms four books, following the Greek division in which 1–2 Samuel and 1–2 Kings form 1–4 Kingdoms. It places Job among the wisdom books, after the Song of Songs. "Ezra" probably includes Nehemiah, as in the Jewish counting, and possibly also the Greek 1 Esdras. The list omits Esther, and contains none of the additional books of the Greek collection, unless "Wisdom" is taken as a separate title for the Wisdom of Solomon rather than an alternative name for Proverbs; the Greek is ambiguous, and most scholars understand it as an alternative title, since Proverbs was often called "Wisdom" in the second century.⁹

Melito's list matches the Jewish canon in content, apart from the omission of Esther, but not in order. Its arrangement — Law, Histories, Poetry and Wisdom, Prophets — resembles that of the later Greek Christian codices rather than the threefold division of the rabbis. The list therefore suggests that Melito obtained the names of the books from Jewish or Jewish-Christian informants in Palestine, but recorded them in an order familiar to Greek-speaking Christians. The omission of Esther may reflect doubts current among some Jews in Palestine; it was also omitted by several later Christian lists, as later chapters show.¹⁰

Origen's List

Origen of Alexandria (about 185–254), the most learned Christian scholar of the third century, worked first at Alexandria and later at Caesarea in Palestine, where he compiled the Hexapla. Eusebius again preserves the evidence, quoting a passage from Origen's commentary on the first Psalm:

But it should be known that there are twenty-two canonical books, according to the Hebrew tradition; the same as the number of the letters of their alphabet.¹¹

Origen then lists the books, giving for each both the Greek title and a transliteration of the Hebrew name: Genesis (Bresith), Exodus (Ouelle smoth), Leviticus (Ouikra), Numbers (Ammes phekodeim), Deuteronomy (Elle addebareim); Joshua (Iosoue ben noun); Judges and Ruth, "in one book" (Sophteim); 1–2 Kingdoms (Samuel), 3–4 Kingdoms (Ouammelch david); 1–2 Chronicles (Dabreiamein); 1–2 Esdras, "in one" (Ezra); the Psalms (Sphar thelleim); the Proverbs of Solomon (Meloth); Ecclesiastes (Koelth); the Song of Songs (Sir assirim); Isaiah (Iessia); Jeremiah with Lamentations and the Letter, "in one" (Jeremia); Daniel (Daniel); Ezekiel (Ezekiel); Job (Job); Esther (Esther). "And besides these," Origen adds, "there are the Maccabees, which are entitled Sarbeth Sarbane el."¹²

The list as preserved in Eusebius omits the Twelve Minor Prophets, an omission universally regarded as an accident of transmission, since it would otherwise number only twenty-one. Origen's list is described as "according to the Hebrews", and the Hebrew transliterations show that he had access to Jewish informants or Jewish manuscripts. It includes the Letter of Jeremiah with Jeremiah, a feature that probably reflects Greek Christian practice rather than Jewish. The note on Maccabees, whose title has never been satisfactorily explained, places it outside the twenty-two.¹³

Origen's own practice, however, was broader than his list. In his Letter to Africanus, written about 240 in reply to Julius Africanus, who had argued that the story of Susanna could not be genuine because it contained Greek puns and was not in the Hebrew, Origen defended the use of Susanna and of the other additions to Daniel and Esther, and of Tobit and Judith, which were read in the churches:

And in many other cases I am aware of much which is in our copies, but not in the Hebrew, and that the Hebrew has some things not in our copies. ... Are we to suppose that providence, which in the sacred Scriptures has ministered to the edification of all the churches of Christ, had no thought for those bought with a price?¹⁴

Origen distinguished between what the Jews accepted, which he needed to know in order to argue with them, and what the churches used, which he was not prepared to abandon. In his homilies and commentaries he quotes Wisdom, Sirach, Tobit, Judith and the Maccabees freely, sometimes with a qualification such as "if anyone accepts this book".¹⁵ The tension in Origen between a narrow list for disputation and a wider collection for reading was inherited by the Greek church and was never wholly resolved.

The Bryennios List

In 1873 Philotheos Bryennios, metropolitan of Nicomedia, discovered in the library of the Jerusalem patriarchate in Constantinople a manuscript copied in 1056 that contained, among other works, the Didache and the letters of Clement. On folio 76 of the same manuscript (now Jerusalem, Greek Patriarchal Library, cod. 54) is a short list of the books of the Old Testament headed "Names of the books among the Hebrews", giving each book in Hebrew or Aramaic transliteration followed by its Greek name.¹⁶ The twenty-seven entries count the books separately: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Joshua, Deuteronomy, Numbers, Ruth, Job, Judges, Psalms, 1–4 Kingdoms counted as four, 1–2 Chronicles as two, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Jeremiah, the Twelve, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, 1–2 Esdras as two, and Esther.

Jean-Paul Audet argued in 1950 that this list, despite its late manuscript, preserves a Jewish list of the first or early second century CE, because of the archaic forms of its Hebrew names and its unusual order.¹⁷ Audet's dating has been widely discussed; some scholars accept a second-century origin, while others think it more probably derives from Origen's period or later and that its peculiarities reflect a scribal source rather than antiquity. Its order, with Joshua placed between Leviticus and Deuteronomy and Job between Ruth and Judges, is unparalleled and may be the product of disorder in transmission.¹⁸ Its contents are those of the Jewish canon, again with no additional books. Like Melito's list, it shows Christian scholars making a careful record of what Jews accepted.

Hippolytus, Africanus and the Third-Century West

Hippolytus of Rome (died about 235), writing in Greek, commented on Daniel including Susanna and the story of Bel and the Dragon, and quoted Baruch as "Jeremiah". Julius Africanus, as noted above, rejected Susanna. Tertullian of Carthage, in his work On the Apparel of Women (about 200), defended the authority of 1 Enoch, arguing that it was rejected by the Jews only because it spoke of Christ, and that it should be received because Jude quotes it.¹⁹ Cyprian of Carthage (died 258) quotes Tobit, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and the Maccabees in the same manner as the books of the Hebrew canon, and his collection of proof texts, To Quirinus, includes them under the formula "it is written".²⁰

These writers did not compose lists of their own, but their usage shows that in Latin-speaking North Africa, as in Rome and Alexandria, the additional books were read and quoted as scripture. The West inherited this broader usage; the distinction drawn by Melito and Origen between the books of the Jews and the books used by Christians had less influence there until Jerome revived it at the end of the fourth century.

The Significance of the Early Lists

The early lists share several features. They are compiled by scholars who had travelled to Palestine or lived there. They describe the Jewish collection and record its count of twenty-two books, a number already known from Josephus and connected by Origen with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. They contain few or none of the additional books. They are not, however, statements of what the churches read. The churches continued to read the wider collection, and the writers who compiled the lists continued to quote the wider collection themselves. The difference between the "list" and the "library" — between the books counted as canonical in a strict sense and the books that were copied and read — would shape the fourth-century debates and the divergent canons of the later churches.²¹

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Chapter 9. The Fourth-Century Lists of the Old Testament

The fourth century produced more lists of biblical books than any period before it. The end of persecution under Constantine, the growth of large churches with public libraries, and the controversies that led bishops to meet in councils all encouraged the definition of what the church read. The lists that survive from this period come from bishops, teachers and synods across the Greek, Latin and Syriac worlds. On the Old Testament they show two tendencies: an Eastern tendency, rooted in Origen, to count twenty-two books according to the Hebrews and to set the additional books aside as books "to be read", and a Western tendency, strongest in North Africa, to include the additional books among the canonical scriptures. This chapter surveys the principal lists; the New Testament portions of the same lists are treated in Chapters Fourteen to Sixteen.

Athanasius of Alexandria

The most influential list of the century is contained in the thirty-ninth Festal Letter of Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, issued for Easter in 367. Each year the bishop of Alexandria announced the date of Easter to the churches of Egypt in a letter, and Athanasius used the letter of 367 to warn against apocryphal books circulated by heretical groups, by which he probably meant Melitian and other dissident communities in Egypt.¹ He lists twenty-two books of the Old Testament: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1–4 Kingdoms counted as two books, 1–2 Chronicles as one, 1–2 Esdras as one, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Job, the Twelve Prophets as one, Isaiah, Jeremiah with Baruch, Lamentations and the Letter, Ezekiel and Daniel.²

Athanasius then adds a second category. For the sake of greater exactness, he writes, he must also mention other books which are not included in the canon but which earlier teachers had appointed to be read by new converts seeking instruction in godliness: the Wisdom of Solomon, the Wisdom of Sirach, Esther, Judith, Tobit, the work called the Teaching of the Apostles, and the Shepherd.³

Athanasius' list thus has three tiers: the canonical books (kanonizomena), the books to be read (anaginōskomena), and the apocrypha, which are to be rejected altogether. Esther is placed among the books to be read, not among the canonical books, while Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah are counted within the canon as parts of Jeremiah. The Maccabees are not mentioned at all. The Coptic fragments of the letter, which preserve more of the text than the Greek, show that Athanasius was concerned that the reading of books such as Enoch and others attributed to the patriarchs, which he calls "apocrypha", was leading the faithful astray.⁴ The category of books "to be read" became fundamental in the Eastern churches, and the word anagignoskomena is still used in Orthodox discussion of the additional books, as Chapter Twenty-Four shows.

Cyril of Jerusalem

Cyril, bishop of Jerusalem from about 350 to 387, delivered a series of catechetical lectures to candidates for baptism about 350. In the fourth lecture he urges them to read "the divine scriptures, these twenty-two books of the Old Testament, which were translated by the seventy-two interpreters", and lists the same books as Athanasius, with Jeremiah including Baruch, Lamentations and the Letter, and with Esther counted among the twenty-two.⁵ He tells his hearers:

Have nothing to do with the apocryphal writings. Study earnestly these only which we read openly in the Church.⁶

Cyril's list includes Esther and adds nothing beyond the Hebrew books and their Greek appendages. His instruction to read only what is read openly in church suggests a principle of selection based on public liturgical use.

Epiphanius of Salamis

Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis in Cyprus from 367 to 403, a native of Palestine who knew some Hebrew, gives three lists in his works, differing slightly in order. In his Panarion, a refutation of eighty heresies completed about 377, he counts twenty-seven books which are reckoned as twenty-two, "as the letters of the Hebrews are twenty-two", and remarks that five letters have double forms. He then mentions Wisdom and Sirach as "useful and helpful, but not included in the number".⁷ In his work On Weights and Measures (392) he compares the double books with the doubled letters and recounts the legend of the seventy-two translators placed in thirty-six cells.⁸ Epiphanius' lists, like those of Athanasius and Cyril, represent the Palestinian-Alexandrian learned tradition that followed Origen.

Gregory of Nazianzus and Amphilochius of Iconium

Gregory of Nazianzus (about 329–390), the Cappadocian bishop and theologian, set out the books of the Bible in a poem written in hexameters and elegiacs. He lists twelve historical books, five poetic books and five prophetic books, making twenty-two, and omits Esther. He does not mention the additional books.⁹ His contemporary Amphilochius, bishop of Iconium (died after 394), wrote a poem in iambic verse addressed to a certain Seleucus, the Iambi ad Seleucum, which lists the books of both Testaments. For the Old Testament he adds that "some add Esther to these". On the New Testament his poem is still more cautious, as Chapter Fourteen shows.¹⁰

The Synod of Laodicea and the Apostolic Canons

A collection of sixty canons attributed to a synod held at Laodicea in Phrygia, probably between 343 and 381, ends with canon 59, which forbids the reading of "privately composed psalms" or "uncanonical books" in church. Some manuscripts add a sixtieth canon listing the books: the Old Testament list is the same as Cyril's, with Baruch, Lamentations and the Letter included with Jeremiah and Esther counted among the twenty-two.¹¹ Canon 60 is absent from the Latin and Syriac versions of the collection and from some Greek manuscripts, and most scholars regard it as a later addition, perhaps derived from Cyril.¹² Its inclusion in later Byzantine canon law collections, however, gave it authority in the Greek church regardless of its origin.

The last of the eighty-five Apostolic Canons, appended to the Apostolic Constitutions, a Syrian compilation of about 380, gives another list. It includes Judith and three books of Maccabees among the Old Testament, and recommends that Sirach be taught to the young. Its New Testament list is unusual, as noted in Chapter Fourteen.¹³ The Council in Trullo of 692 later confirmed the Apostolic Canons, alongside canon 60 of Laodicea and the lists of Athanasius, Gregory and Amphilochius, without attempting to reconcile their differences.

Hilary, Rufinus and the Latin Reception of the Greek Tradition

Latin-speaking writers who knew the Greek tradition repeated its count of twenty-two books. Hilary of Poitiers, in the prologue to his commentary on the Psalms (about 365), counts twenty-two books and notes that "some" add Tobit and Judith to make twenty-four, the number of the letters of the Greek alphabet.¹⁴ Rufinus of Aquileia, in his Commentary on the Apostles' Creed (about 404), lists the canonical books of both Testaments following the Greek tradition, and then describes a second category of books that are "not canonical but ecclesiastical": Wisdom, Sirach, Tobit, Judith and the books of Maccabees in the Old Testament, and the Shepherd and the Two Ways in the New. A third category, the apocrypha, "they would not have read in the churches".¹⁵ Rufinus' "ecclesiastical books" correspond closely to Athanasius' books "to be read".

Jerome and the Hebrew Truth

Jerome (about 347–420), who settled at Bethlehem in 386 and learned Hebrew from Jewish teachers, translated the books of the Hebrew Bible into Latin directly from the Hebrew between about 390 and 405. In the preface to his translation of Samuel and Kings, known from its opening phrase as the Prologus Galeatus or "helmeted preface", because it was to serve as a helmeted defence of all his translations from the Hebrew, Jerome sets out the twenty-two books of the Hebrew canon in the Jewish order of Law, Prophets and Writings, and concludes:

This preface to the Scriptures may serve as a "helmeted" introduction to all the books which we turn from Hebrew into Latin, so that we may be assured that what is not found in our list must be placed amongst the Apocryphal writings. Wisdom, therefore, which generally bears the name of Solomon, and the book of Jesus, the Son of Sirach, and Judith, and Tobias, and the Shepherd are not in the canon.¹⁶

Jerome was the first Christian writer to apply the word "apocrypha" to the additional books themselves, rather than to heretical or pseudonymous works such as Enoch. In his preface to the books of Solomon he states that the church reads Judith, Tobit and the Maccabees "but does not receive them among the canonical scriptures", and reads Wisdom and Sirach "for the edification of the people, not to confirm the authority of ecclesiastical doctrines".¹⁷ He nevertheless translated Tobit and Judith from Aramaic, at the request of bishops, and his translations of the additions to Daniel and Esther were placed in the text of the Vulgate with notes indicating that they were absent from the Hebrew. Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and 1–2 Maccabees entered the Vulgate in their Old Latin form, unrevised by Jerome.¹⁸

Jerome's position was controversial in his own time. His preference for the "Hebrew truth" (Hebraica veritas) over the Septuagint was attacked by Rufinus, his former friend, and questioned by Augustine, who feared that a translation departing from the Greek would divide the Latin churches from the Greek. The site's page on the Latin Vulgate and the Journal's article on Jerome's translation describe the translation in more detail.

Augustine of Hippo

Augustine, bishop of Hippo Regius in North Africa from 395 to 430, sets out the canon in the second book of On Christian Doctrine, begun about 396. His Old Testament comprises forty-four books: the five of Moses, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, four of Kingdoms, two of Chronicles, Job, Tobit, Esther, Judith, two of Maccabees, two of Esdras, the Psalms, the three books of Solomon, Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus ("which are called Solomon's from a certain resemblance"), the twelve prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel and Ezekiel.¹⁹ Jeremiah probably includes Baruch, as in the Latin manuscripts of the time.

Augustine also states a principle for evaluating the books:

Now, in regard to the canonical Scriptures, he must follow the judgment of the greater number of catholic churches; and among these, of course, a high place must be given to such as have been thought worthy to be the seat of an apostle and to receive epistles. Accordingly, among the canonical Scriptures he will judge according to the following standard: to prefer those that are received by all the catholic churches to those which some do not receive.²⁰

In the City of God, written later, Augustine acknowledges that the Maccabees are not accepted by the Jews but "are held to be canonical by the church on account of the violent and terrible sufferings of certain martyrs".²¹ His list corresponds closely to the lists approved by the North African councils of Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397, at which he was present, as Chapter Sixteen describes. Through Augustine and those councils the broader collection became the norm for the Latin church.

Two Traditions

By the end of the fourth century, therefore, Christian lists of the Old Testament fell into two broad groups. The Greek lists of Athanasius, Cyril, Epiphanius, Gregory, Amphilochius and Laodicea counted twenty-two books on the Hebrew model, sometimes with Esther doubtful and usually with Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah included as appendages of Jeremiah, and assigned the other books to a secondary class of books to be read. Jerome, the Latin scholar most familiar with Hebrew, adopted the same position in a stricter form. The North African lists of Augustine and the councils, on the other hand, placed Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach and the Maccabees among the canonical books without distinction.

In practice, the difference was smaller than the lists suggest. The Eastern writers who excluded the additional books from the canon still read and quoted them, and the codices produced in the East included them. The Western writers who included them knew that the Jews did not. The question was not which books were read but how they were classified. This difference in classification, rather than in usage, underlies the later divergence of Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Old Testaments.²²

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Chapter 10. The New Testament Writings and Their First Collections

The New Testament canon, unlike the Old, was not inherited. Its books were written within the Christian movement during roughly the second half of the first century and the early second century, and they were collected, copied and read in Christian communities before anyone drew up a list of them. The process by which twenty-seven writings came to form a second section of the Christian Bible lasted some three centuries. This chapter considers the earliest stage: the writings themselves, the evidence they give of their own authority, and the first collections of Paul's letters and of the Gospels. The site's page on the development of the New Testament canon gives a shorter overview, and the pages on the earliest New Testament papyri and the move from scrolls to codices describe the physical evidence.

The Authority of Jesus and the Apostles

The earliest Christian authority was not a book but a person. The words of Jesus, transmitted orally and later in writing, were cited by Paul with the formula "the Lord says" or "I have a command of the Lord" (1 Corinthians 7:10, 9:14, 11:23), and they carried an authority equal to or greater than that of the Jewish scriptures. The apostles, as authorised witnesses of the risen Jesus, also spoke with authority, and Paul expected his letters to be read in the assemblies (1 Thessalonians 5:27; Colossians 4:16).¹ The authority of the Christian writings thus derived from the authority of those whose teaching they were thought to preserve, and it existed before the writings were regarded as scripture in the same sense as the Law and the Prophets.

Papias, bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia in the early second century, whose five books of Expositions of the Sayings of the Lord survive only in fragments, expressed a preference for oral tradition:

For I did not suppose that information from books would help me so much as the word of a living and surviving voice.²

Papias nevertheless knew written Gospels. He reports a tradition from "the elder" that Mark, "having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately, though not in order, whatever he remembered of the things said or done by the Lord", and that "Matthew collected the oracles in the Hebrew language, and each interpreted them as best he could".³ These statements, whose meaning has been debated for centuries, are the earliest surviving testimony on the origin of any Gospel. They show that by the early second century written Gospels were associated with apostolic names and that questions were already being asked about their order and accuracy.

The Writings

The twenty-seven writings that eventually formed the New Testament are of five kinds: four Gospels, a narrative of the early church (the Acts of the Apostles), thirteen letters attributed to Paul, a letter to the Hebrews which does not name its author, seven letters called "catholic" or general (James, 1–2 Peter, 1–3 John and Jude), and an apocalypse (the Revelation of John). Scholarly dating of these writings varies. Most critical scholars date the undisputed letters of Paul (Romans, 1–2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon) to the 50s CE, Mark to about 65–75, Matthew and Luke to about 80–90, John to about 90–100, and some of the letters to the late first or early second century; others argue for earlier dates for several of the writings.⁴ These questions bear on the canon chiefly because ancient readers believed the writings to be apostolic, and because apostolic authorship became one of the main criteria applied to disputed books.

The Collection of Paul's Letters

Paul's letters were the first Christian writings to be collected. The Second Letter of Peter, written in the name of the apostle and usually dated by critical scholars to the early second century, refers to them as a known group:

So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, speaking of this as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures.⁵

The phrase "the other scriptures" places Paul's letters alongside the Jewish scriptures, though the precise sense is disputed. Ignatius of Antioch, writing about 110 on his way to martyrdom at Rome, says that Paul mentions the Ephesians "in every letter", and Polycarp of Smyrna, writing to the Philippians about the same time, refers to Paul's letters to them and quotes or alludes to several of the Pauline letters.⁶ 1 Clement, about 96, refers the Corinthians to "the letter of the blessed Paul the apostle".

How the collection was formed is uncertain. Edgar Goodspeed proposed in the 1920s that an admirer of Paul, perhaps Onesimus, gathered the letters at Ephesus about 90 CE after the publication of Acts and composed Ephesians as an introduction; few scholars now accept the details of this hypothesis. David Trobisch has argued that Paul himself prepared an edition of four letters (Romans, 1–2 Corinthians and Galatians), and others think of a gradual accumulation in several centres.⁷ The manuscripts and early lists show collections of ten letters (in Marcion's edition, which lacked the Pastoral Epistles), of thirteen, and of fourteen including Hebrews, and different orders of the letters.

P46: The Earliest Pauline Codex

The oldest surviving manuscript of Paul's letters is the papyrus codex known as P46, part of the Chester Beatty papyri acquired in the 1930s and now divided between the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin and the University of Michigan. It is usually dated to about 200 CE, though dates from the late first to the third century have been proposed.⁸ The codex originally consisted of a single quire of about 104 leaves. Its surviving eighty-six leaves contain, in order, Romans (from 5:17), Hebrews, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Ephesians, Galatians, Philippians, Colossians and 1 Thessalonians. The final leaves are lost; calculation of the space remaining suggests that it contained 2 Thessalonians but probably not the Pastoral Epistles (1–2 Timothy and Titus), though the scribe might have added extra leaves.⁹

P46 is important for the canon in three ways. It shows that a collection of Paul's letters was circulating in Egypt about 200 in a single volume. It places Hebrews among Paul's letters, immediately after Romans, reflecting the Eastern view that Hebrews was Pauline. And it appears to have lacked the Pastoral Epistles, which raises the question whether these letters were part of every early collection. The site's page on the earliest papyri and the Journal's article on Papyrus 46 and the Chester Beatty Pauline collection give further detail.

The Fourfold Gospel

Many Gospels were written in the first and second centuries. The prologue to Luke refers to "many" who had undertaken to compile a narrative (Luke 1:1), and works such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of the Egyptians and the Gospels of the Hebrews and of the Ebionites circulated in the second century.¹⁰ The process by which four Gospels, those attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, came to be treated as a single authoritative collection is one of the central problems of canon history.

Several pieces of evidence suggest that the four Gospels were being used together by the middle of the second century. Justin Martyr, writing at Rome about 150–160, describes the "memoirs of the apostles, which are called Gospels" being read at Sunday worship alongside the writings of the prophets.¹¹ He appears to have used Matthew, Mark and Luke, and probably knew John. His pupil Tatian composed, about 170, a harmony of four Gospels known as the Diatessaron ("through four"), which presupposes a recognised group of four.¹² Irenaeus, about 180, argued that there could be neither more nor fewer than four Gospels, as Chapter Eleven shows. The earliest manuscripts of the Gospels date from the second and third centuries; P75, of about 200 or a little later, contains Luke and John in a single codex, and P45, of the third century, contains all four Gospels and Acts.¹³

Graham Stanton and others have argued that the adoption of the codex by Christians, at a time when most literary works were written on rolls, was connected with the collection of the four Gospels, since a codex could hold all four in a single volume, which a roll could not.¹⁴ The connection is debated, but the Christian preference for the codex is well established: the great majority of Christian biblical manuscripts from the second and third centuries are codices, while the great majority of non-Christian literary manuscripts of the same period are rolls.

Reading in Worship

A decisive factor in the formation of the canon was the public reading of writings in Christian worship. Justin's account of the Sunday assembly describes the reading of the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets "as long as time permits", followed by an exhortation by the president.¹⁵ Books that were read in this way acquired the status of scripture in practice, and the later lists were largely concerned with deciding which books should be read in church. Thus the Muratorian Fragment says that the Shepherd of Hermas may be read privately but not publicly in church, and canon 59 of Laodicea forbids the reading of uncanonical books. The canon emerged, in the words of one scholar, as a list of the books "read in the churches" rather than as a theological definition imposed from above.¹⁶

Books Read at the Edges

Beside the writings later included in the New Testament, other early Christian works were read in some churches and treated by some writers as scripture. The Shepherd of Hermas, a series of visions and parables written at Rome in the first half of the second century, was quoted as scripture by Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria and was included in Codex Sinaiticus. The Epistle of Barnabas was also included in Sinaiticus and quoted by Clement and Origen. 1 and 2 Clement were included at the end of Codex Alexandrinus. The Didache, a church manual of the late first or early second century, was listed among the books "to be read" by Athanasius. The Apocalypse of Peter was listed in the Muratorian Fragment, though with the note that some would not allow it to be read in church.¹⁷ These books show that the edges of the New Testament were as fluid as the edges of the Old in the second and third centuries.

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Chapter 11. Marcion, Justin, Tatian and Irenaeus

The middle and later decades of the second century were decisive for the New Testament. In this period a wealthy shipowner from Pontus produced the first known fixed collection of Christian writings; a philosopher at Rome described the reading of Gospels in worship; his pupil combined four Gospels into one; and a bishop in Gaul argued that the church possessed four Gospels, no more and no fewer, and a body of apostolic writings to set beside the scriptures of Israel. This chapter describes these four figures and the debate over how far Marcion's collection provoked the formation of the wider canon.

Marcion of Sinope

Marcion, a native of Sinope on the Black Sea, arrived in Rome about 140 and was expelled from the Roman church about 144. His own writings are lost, and his views are known only from his opponents, above all Tertullian's five books Against Marcion (about 207–208), Irenaeus, and later writers such as Epiphanius.¹ According to these sources, Marcion taught that the God of the Jewish scriptures, the creator and lawgiver, was a just but inferior god, distinct from the good and previously unknown God revealed by Jesus. He therefore rejected the Jewish scriptures as Christian scripture altogether.

In their place Marcion set a collection of Christian writings in two parts: the Gospel (Euangelion), a version of the Gospel according to Luke without its first two chapters and with other passages omitted, and the Apostle (Apostolikon), ten letters of Paul in the order Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, "Laodiceans" (which corresponds to Ephesians), Colossians with Philemon, and Philippians.² His collection did not include the Pastoral Epistles, Hebrews, the other Gospels, Acts or the catholic letters. Marcion also composed a work called the Antitheses, setting out contradictions between the Jewish scriptures and the Gospel.

Marcion's opponents accused him of mutilating the texts to remove passages that contradicted his teaching. Modern scholars have debated how far his text of Luke and Paul was his own revision and how far it reflected forms already in circulation; some have argued that Marcion's Gospel preceded canonical Luke, though this remains a minority view.³ His edition is reconstructed from the citations of his opponents, notably in the work of Adolf von Harnack (1921) and more recently Dieter Roth and Jason BeDuhn.

Marcion and the Formation of the Canon

Adolf von Harnack and Hans von Campenhausen argued that Marcion's collection was the first Christian canon and that the church's New Testament was formed largely in reaction to it. In Campenhausen's words, "the idea and the reality of a Christian Bible were the work of Marcion, and the Church which rejected his work, so far from being ahead of him in this field, from a formal point of view simply followed his example".⁴ Other scholars, among them John Barton and Harry Gamble, have doubted this. They point out that collections of Paul's letters and the reading of Gospels in worship existed before Marcion, that the church's collection was broader rather than narrower than his, and that the formation of the New Testament was a long process influenced by many factors.⁵ The current consensus is that Marcion's challenge accelerated the definition of the church's collection, especially its inclusion of the Jewish scriptures and its insistence on more than one Gospel, but did not create the idea of a Christian scripture.

Justin Martyr

Justin, introduced in Chapter Eight, did not compose a list of Christian writings. In his First Apology and Dialogue with Trypho he quotes sayings of Jesus, most often in forms resembling Matthew and Luke, sometimes harmonised, and refers to "the memoirs of the apostles" (apomnēmoneumata tōn apostolōn), which he says are "called Gospels" and were composed "by the apostles and those who followed them".⁶ The phrase may describe Matthew and John as works of apostles, and Mark and Luke as works of their followers. Justin refers to the Revelation of John as the work of "a certain man among us named John, one of the apostles of Christ".⁷ He does not quote Paul by name. Justin is important for the canon chiefly because of his account of the Sunday reading of Gospels alongside the prophets, which shows that the Gospels were functioning as scripture in the Roman church by the 150s.

Tatian and the Diatessaron

Tatian, an Assyrian who became a pupil of Justin at Rome, returned to the East about 172 after breaking with the Roman church. Probably about 170, either in Rome or in Syria, he composed a single narrative of the life of Jesus by combining the four Gospels; the work became known as the Diatessaron, from the Greek musical term "through four".⁸ The original Diatessaron, whether written in Greek or Syriac, is lost; it is known from later versions and commentaries, especially Ephrem the Syrian's commentary of the fourth century, preserved in Armenian and in part in Syriac, and from later Arabic, Persian and medieval Western harmonies. A small Greek fragment found at Dura-Europos, dated before 256, may come from it or from a similar harmony.⁹

The Diatessaron was the standard Gospel text of the Syriac-speaking churches until the fifth century, when Rabbula of Edessa and Theodoret of Cyrrhus ordered it replaced by the separate Gospels, as Chapter Seventeen shows. Its existence demonstrates that by about 170 four Gospels were regarded as authoritative enough to be combined, but also that they were not regarded as untouchable as separate texts. The Journal's article on Tatian's Diatessaron discusses the harmony in more detail.

Irenaeus of Lyon

Irenaeus, bishop of Lugdunum (Lyon) in Gaul from about 177, was a native of Asia Minor who in his youth had heard Polycarp of Smyrna. His five books Against Heresies, written about 180 in Greek but preserved complete only in a Latin translation, refute the Valentinians and other Gnostic teachers and set out the faith of the church as transmitted from the apostles.¹⁰ Irenaeus is the first writer to use the writings later collected in the New Testament systematically as scripture alongside the Jewish scriptures. He quotes or alludes to almost all of them: the four Gospels, Acts, the Pauline letters including the Pastorals, 1 Peter, 1 and 2 John and Revelation. He makes little or no use of Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 3 John or Jude. He also quotes the Shepherd of Hermas with the formula "scripture says".¹¹

Irenaeus' most famous argument concerns the number of the Gospels:

It is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are. For, since there are four zones of the world in which we live, and four principal winds, while the Church is scattered throughout all the world, and the pillar and ground of the Church is the Gospel and the spirit of life; it is fitting that she should have four pillars, breathing out immortality on every side.¹²

He associates the four Gospels with the four living creatures of Ezekiel 1 and Revelation 4, an association that became a standard feature of Christian art, though the assignment of creatures to evangelists varied. He gives an account of the origins of the four:

Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect, while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome, and laying the foundations of the Church. After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter. Luke also, the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the Gospel preached by him. Afterwards, John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon His breast, did himself publish a Gospel during his residence at Ephesus in Asia.¹³

Irenaeus criticised groups that used too few Gospels or too many: the Ebionites, who used only Matthew; Marcion, who used a mutilated Luke; those who preferred Mark; the Valentinians, who used John extensively and also had a "Gospel of Truth".¹⁴ His argument assumes that the fourfold Gospel was already established in the churches he knew, and that its number needed to be defended against alternatives.

Irenaeus also developed the idea of a "rule of truth" or "rule of faith" (regula veritatis), a summary of the apostolic faith held by the churches founded by the apostles and preserved by the succession of their bishops.¹⁵ The rule of faith was not itself a list of books, but it became a criterion for judging writings: a book whose teaching contradicted the rule could not be apostolic. In this way the formation of the canon was connected with the controversies of the second century over the interpretation of the Christian message.

The State of the Collection about 180

By about 180, therefore, the main body of the later New Testament was established in practice in the churches known to Irenaeus: four Gospels, Acts, thirteen letters of Paul, 1 Peter, 1 John and Revelation. Around this core were writings whose status varied from region to region, among them Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, the Shepherd, the Apocalypse of Peter and the Epistle of Barnabas. There was as yet no single authoritative list. The writings were regarded as scripture because they were read in the churches and were believed to derive from the apostles, not because a council or bishop had defined them.¹⁶

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Chapter 12. The Muratorian Fragment

The oldest surviving list of New Testament books is a fragment of eighty-five lines in poor Latin, preserved in a single manuscript of the seventh or eighth century in the Ambrosian Library at Milan. It was discovered and published in 1740 by the antiquarian Ludovico Antonio Muratori, after whom it is named. The fragment has been at the centre of debate about the history of the New Testament canon for nearly three centuries, above all because of uncertainty over its date. This chapter describes the manuscript, its contents and the arguments over its date and origin. The Journal's article on the Muratorian Fragment gives an account of the manuscript itself.

The Manuscript

The fragment occupies folios 10a–11a of Codex Ambrosianus I 101 sup., a miscellany of theological texts copied in the seventh or eighth century, probably at the monastery of Bobbio in northern Italy.¹ The Latin is full of errors in spelling and grammar, and most scholars believe that it is a careless translation from a Greek original, perhaps made in the fourth or fifth century. Four short excerpts of the same text were later identified in manuscripts of the eleventh and twelfth centuries at Monte Cassino, confirming that the Milan copy was not unique.² The beginning and end of the text are lost: the fragment begins in the middle of a sentence, apparently about Mark, and breaks off abruptly.

Contents

The surviving text begins:

... at which nevertheless he was present, and so he placed them. The third book of the Gospel, according to Luke. Luke, the well-known physician, after the ascension of Christ, when Paul had taken him with him as one zealous for the law, composed it in his own name, according to [general] belief.³

The fragment then describes the Gospel of John, composed at the urging of John's fellow disciples and bishops, and stresses that although the Gospels differ in their beginnings, they agree on the essential facts of Christ's life. It continues with Acts, written by Luke for "the most excellent Theophilus", and thirteen letters of Paul, which it describes as written to seven churches, as John wrote to seven churches in Revelation, so that Paul's letters are addressed to the whole church. It lists the letters to the Corinthians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Galatians, Thessalonians and Romans, and the letters to individuals: Philemon, Titus and two to Timothy, "held sacred in the esteem of the Church catholic".⁴

The fragment then rejects two letters circulated in Paul's name:

There is current also one to the Laodiceans, another to the Alexandrians, both forged in Paul's name to further the heresy of Marcion, and several others which cannot be received into the catholic church — for it is not fitting that gall be mixed with honey.⁵

It accepts the Letter of Jude and two letters of John, and, unexpectedly, the Wisdom of Solomon, "written by the friends of Solomon in his honour". It accepts the Apocalypses of John and of Peter, "though some of us are not willing that the latter be read in church". It then discusses the Shepherd of Hermas:

But Hermas wrote the Shepherd very recently, in our times, in the city of Rome, while bishop Pius, his brother, was occupying the chair of the church of the city of Rome. And therefore it ought indeed to be read; but it cannot be read publicly to the people in church either among the Prophets, whose number is complete, or among the Apostles, for it is after their time.⁶

Finally it rejects the writings of Arsinous, Valentinus, Miltiades and Basilides, and "a new book of psalms for Marcion". The fragment does not mention Hebrews, James, 1 or 2 Peter, or the third letter of John, though 1 Peter may have been lost through a corruption in the text, and the reference to "two" letters of John may mean 2 and 3 John in addition to 1 John, which is quoted in the section on the Gospel of John.⁷

The Traditional Date

The sentence about the Shepherd has been the main basis for dating the fragment. Pius was bishop of Rome from about 140 to 155. If the author wrote that the Shepherd was composed "very recently, in our times" (nuperrime temporibus nostris) while Pius was bishop, he presumably wrote not long afterwards, in the later second century. Most scholars from Muratori onward accepted a date about 170–200 and a Roman origin, since the author speaks of "the city of Rome" and of the Roman bishop.⁸ On this view the fragment is the earliest witness to a list of New Testament books, and it shows that by about 200 the Roman church had a collection close to the later canon, with uncertainty about some of the catholic letters and the Apocalypse of Peter and with the exclusion of Hebrews.

The Later Date

In 1973 Albert C. Sundberg argued that the fragment belonged instead to the fourth century and to the East, probably Syria or Palestine.⁹ He pointed out that catalogues of New Testament books are otherwise unknown before the fourth century, that the fragment's concern with closed lists of prophets and apostles resembles fourth-century thought, and that "in our times" could be read loosely. Geoffrey Mark Hahneman developed Sundberg's case at length in 1992, arguing that the inclusion of the Wisdom of Solomon in a New Testament list, the reference to the Apocalypse of Peter and the description of the Shepherd's authorship all fitted the fourth century better, and that the fragment's author may have misunderstood earlier traditions about Hermas.¹⁰

The later date has been rejected by many scholars, among them Everett Ferguson, Bruce Metzger, Charles Hill and Joseph Verheyden. They argue that "very recently, in our times" is a natural expression of a writer of the later second century, who sought to exclude the Shepherd by emphasising its recent date; that a fourth-century author would not have recognised the Apocalypse of Peter, which was by then generally rejected, or have needed to argue against the Shepherd in this way; and that the absence of earlier lists is a matter of the accidents of survival.¹¹ Clare Rothschild has proposed that the fragment is a later forgery or literary fiction designed to appear ancient, a view that has not won wide acceptance.¹²

The question remains open. The majority of scholars still date the fragment to the late second or early third century, but a significant minority favour the fourth century. A cautious statement is that the fragment is a Latin translation of a Greek list composed either about 200 in or near Rome or, on a minority view, in the fourth century in the East. Its value for the history of the canon depends heavily on which date is accepted.

Significance

Whatever its date, the fragment illustrates several features of the canonical process. It shows a concern with which books may be read "in church" (in ecclesia), as opposed to privately. It applies criteria of apostolic origin and of catholicity, that is, acceptance by the church as a whole, and rejects books associated with heretical teachers. It shows that the collection of the Gospels and of Paul's letters was taken for granted, while the status of other books, both those later included and those later excluded, was still under discussion. Its inclusion of the Wisdom of Solomon is a reminder that the categories of Old and New Testament were not yet as fixed as they later became.¹³

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Chapter 13. The Third Century: Alexandria, Carthage and Rome

The third century saw the first systematic discussion of which Christian writings were accepted and which were disputed. Its leading figures, Clement and Origen at Alexandria, Tertullian at Carthage and Hippolytus at Rome, did not convene councils or issue binding decrees, but they wrote about the books, compared them, and applied critical judgement to questions of authorship and authenticity. Their works, together with a short Latin list preserved in a sixth-century manuscript, show a New Testament whose core was fixed but whose edges were still debated in different ways in different regions.

Clement of Alexandria

Clement (about 150–215), who taught at Alexandria until he left the city during the persecution of 202, cites an unusually wide range of writings. Besides the four Gospels, he quotes the Gospel of the Egyptians and the Gospel of the Hebrews, though he distinguishes them from "the four Gospels handed down to us".¹ He quotes the Pauline letters, including Hebrews, which he regarded as written by Paul in Hebrew and translated by Luke, and he quotes 1 Peter, 1 and 2 John, Jude and Revelation. He also quotes 1 Clement, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Didache, the Preaching of Peter and the Apocalypse of Peter as scripture or with high respect. Eusebius reports that in his lost Hypotyposeis Clement gave "concise explanations of all the canonical scriptures, not omitting the disputed books — I mean Jude and the other catholic epistles, and Barnabas and the so-called Apocalypse of Peter".² Clement's usage shows the breadth of reading in Alexandrian Christianity about 200, before the categories of accepted and disputed books had hardened.

Origen

Origen, whose Old Testament list was discussed in Chapter Eight, also discussed the New Testament books in several of his works. Eusebius gathered his statements from the commentaries on Matthew and John and the homilies on Hebrews.³ On the Gospels Origen affirmed "the four Gospels, which alone are unquestionable in the Church of God under heaven". On Paul he wrote that the apostle "did not write to all the churches that he taught, and even to those to which he wrote he sent but few lines". He accepted 1 Peter and noted that 2 Peter was doubted; he accepted 1 John and noted doubts about 2 and 3 John; he accepted Revelation.

On Hebrews Origen made a famous judgement based on style:

That the character of the diction of the epistle entitled To the Hebrews has not the apostle's rudeness in speech ... every one who is able to discern differences of phraseology will acknowledge. ... But who wrote the epistle, in truth God knows.⁴

Origen thought the thoughts of Hebrews were Paul's but the composition was by someone else, perhaps Clement of Rome or Luke. He accepted the letter as scripture while doubting its direct authorship. In his homilies, preserved in Latin translations by Rufinus, he lists the books of the New Testament in a form that matches the later canon of twenty-seven books, but this list may reflect Rufinus' adaptation rather than Origen's own words.⁵ Origen quotes James, and he is the first writer known to do so by name, though he notes that it is not accepted by all. He also quotes the Shepherd, Barnabas and the Didache, and sometimes calls the Shepherd "divinely inspired".⁶

Origen introduced a threefold classification of writings that Eusebius later adopted: those that are acknowledged, those that are disputed or mixed, and those that are false. This classification did not settle any particular case, but it provided a method for weighing the evidence.

Dionysius of Alexandria and the Revelation of John

Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria from 247 to 264 and a pupil of Origen, wrote a treatise On the Promises against a millenarian teacher, Nepos, who had used the Revelation of John to support belief in a literal thousand-year reign of Christ on earth. Eusebius preserves an extended passage in which Dionysius examines the authorship of Revelation by comparing its vocabulary, style and grammar with the Gospel and First Letter of John.⁷ He concludes that the Gospel and the Letter were written by the same author, the apostle John, but that Revelation was written by a different John:

I would not deny that he was called John, and that this was the writing of one John. ... But I could not so easily admit that this was the apostle, the son of Zebedee, the brother of James, by whom the Gospel of John and the Catholic Epistle were written. For from the character of both, and the forms of expression, and the entire execution of the book, I conclude that the author is not the same.⁸

Dionysius did not reject Revelation as scripture; he declared that he would not presume to reject a book which many brethren held in high regard, though he could not understand it. His analysis is one of the most sophisticated pieces of literary criticism to survive from antiquity, and it had a lasting effect. Doubt about Revelation persisted in the Greek-speaking East for centuries, and the book was omitted from several Eastern lists and from the Syriac Peshitta.

Tertullian

Tertullian of Carthage (about 160–225), the first major Christian writer in Latin, quotes the four Gospels, Acts, thirteen Pauline letters, 1 Peter, 1 John, Jude and Revelation. In his work On Modesty (about 220) he quotes Hebrews as the work of Barnabas, which he regards as more acceptable than the Shepherd of Hermas, which he had once accepted but later rejected as "the shepherd of adulterers".⁹ He uses the Latin term instrumentum, a legal word for a document, and testamentum for the two parts of the scriptures, writing of "the old and new instrument". He argues in the Prescription against Heretics that the scriptures belong to the church, which received them from the apostles, and that heretics have no right to use them.¹⁰ Tertullian's polemic against Marcion led him to defend the four Gospels and the full collection of Pauline letters and to insist on the continuity of the two Testaments.

Hippolytus and the Roman Church

Hippolytus of Rome (died about 235) wrote in Greek. He quotes the four Gospels, Acts, thirteen letters of Paul, 1 Peter, 1 and 2 John and Revelation, and he wrote a defence of John's Gospel and Revelation against a Roman presbyter named Gaius, who had attributed them to the heretic Cerinthus.¹¹ The Roman church, which Hippolytus represents, seems to have accepted Revelation but not Hebrews, a pattern that persisted in the West until the later fourth century. Cyprian of Carthage (died 258) likewise never quotes Hebrews, 2 Peter, James or Jude.

The Catalogue in Codex Claromontanus

A list of books with the number of lines (stichoi) in each is preserved in Codex Claromontanus, a Greek-Latin manuscript of the Pauline letters of the sixth century now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.¹² The list, in Latin, is inserted between Philemon and Hebrews and appears to be much older than the manuscript; Theodor Zahn and Adolf Harnack dated it to about 300, perhaps from Egypt or North Africa. It lists the Old Testament books, including Wisdom, Sirach, Tobit, Judith and Maccabees, and then the New Testament: the four Gospels in the order Matthew, John, Mark, Luke; ten letters of Paul (omitting Philippians, 1–2 Thessalonians and Hebrews, probably by scribal error for the first three); two letters of Peter; James; three letters of John; Jude; and then the Epistle of Barnabas, Revelation, Acts, the Shepherd, the Acts of Paul and the Apocalypse of Peter. A dash before Barnabas, the Shepherd, the Acts of Paul and the Apocalypse of Peter may mark them as disputed.¹³ The list shows the wide range of writings read in some churches about 300.

Summary

By the end of the third century the four Gospels, Acts, the Pauline letters (with or without Hebrews), 1 Peter and 1 John were accepted almost everywhere. Revelation was accepted in the West and in much of the East, but questioned in Alexandria after Dionysius. Hebrews was accepted in the East as Pauline, though with doubts about its authorship, and largely ignored in the West. The other catholic letters were accepted in some regions and not in others. Several writings later excluded, especially the Shepherd, Barnabas and the Apocalypse of Peter, were still read in some churches. The stage was set for the attempt by Eusebius to sum up the evidence.¹⁴

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Chapter 14. Eusebius of Caesarea and the Fifty Bibles

Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea in Palestine from about 313 to 339, was the heir of Origen's library and the author of the first history of the church. His Ecclesiastical History, completed in its final form about 325, collects the statements of earlier writers on the books of the New Testament and offers his own classification of them. He was also commissioned by the emperor Constantine to produce fifty copies of the scriptures for the churches of Constantinople. These two contributions, the one literary and the other material, make him a central figure in the history of the canon.

The Classification in Ecclesiastical History 3.25

In the third book of his history Eusebius pauses to sum up "the writings of the New Testament which have been mentioned". He divides them into categories.¹

First then must be put the holy quaternion of the Gospels; following them the Acts of the Apostles. After this must be reckoned the epistles of Paul; next in order the extant former epistle of John, and likewise the epistle of Peter, must be maintained. After them is to be placed, if it really seem proper, the Apocalypse of John. ... These then belong among the accepted writings [homologoumena].²

Among the disputed writings [antilegomena], which are nevertheless recognised by many, are extant the so-called epistle of James and that of Jude, also the second epistle of Peter, and those that are called the second and third of John, whether they belong to the evangelist or to another person of the same name.³

Among the rejected writings [notha] must be reckoned also the Acts of Paul, and the so-called Shepherd, and the Apocalypse of Peter, and in addition to these the extant epistle of Barnabas, and the so-called Teachings of the Apostles; and besides, as I said, the Apocalypse of John, if it seem proper, which some, as I said, reject, but which others class with the accepted books. And among these some have placed also the Gospel according to the Hebrews.⁴

A fourth category consists of books put forward by heretics under the names of apostles, such as the Gospels of Peter, Thomas and Matthias and the Acts of Andrew and John, which "no one belonging to the succession of ecclesiastical writers has deemed worthy of mention" and which are "altogether absurd and impious".⁵

Problems of Interpretation

Eusebius' scheme is not as clear as it appears. Revelation appears in two categories, among the accepted books "if it really seem proper" and among the rejected "if it seem proper", reflecting the division of opinion in the East and perhaps Eusebius' own dislike of the book, which millenarians used. The terms antilegomena and notha are not used consistently elsewhere in his work; the notha, for instance, are distinguished from the heretical books, so that "rejected" means rejected as canonical rather than as heretical. Hebrews is not mentioned in this passage, but Eusebius elsewhere includes it among the fourteen letters of Paul, while noting that the Roman church disputed it.⁶

The categories were based on evidence of usage: Eusebius asked which books had been used by the "ecclesiastical writers" of earlier generations, and how widely. He also applied tests of style and doctrine, observing that the heretical books differed in character from the apostolic style and that their thought was "very far removed from true orthodoxy". His approach was that of a historian assembling testimony rather than that of a legislator defining a canon, and he did not claim to settle the matter.⁷

Constantine's Fifty Bibles

In his Life of Constantine, Eusebius preserves a letter of the emperor written about 331 or 332, ordering fifty copies of the scriptures for the new churches of Constantinople:

I have thought it expedient to instruct your Prudence to order fifty copies of the sacred Scriptures, the provision and use of which you know to be most needful for the instruction of the Church, to be written on prepared parchment in a legible manner, and in a convenient, portable form, by professional transcribers thoroughly practised in their art.⁸

The emperor authorised the use of two public carriages to transport the volumes and placed the costs on the imperial treasury. Eusebius adds that the copies were sent "in threes and fours" (en polyteleisi teuchesin trissa kai tetrassa), a phrase that has been interpreted variously as meaning volumes of three or four columns per page, or batches of three or four volumes.⁹

The letter does not say what books the "sacred Scriptures" were to contain. It has often been suggested that Codex Vaticanus or Codex Sinaiticus, both written in the fourth century in three and four columns respectively, might be survivors of this commission. The suggestion has been widely discussed but cannot be proved, and many scholars think it unlikely, pointing out among other things that the texts and contents of the two codices differ from what would be expected from Caesarea.¹⁰ Nevertheless the commission shows that by the 330s complete Bibles in a single volume or set of volumes were being produced, which required decisions about what to include.

The Codices and the Canon

The great codices of the fourth and fifth centuries provide physical evidence of what was regarded as belonging to the Bible. Codex Sinaiticus contains, after the Old Testament, the four Gospels, the Pauline letters including Hebrews (placed after 2 Thessalonians), Acts, the seven catholic letters, Revelation, the Epistle of Barnabas and part of the Shepherd of Hermas. Codex Vaticanus, whose end is lost, contains the Gospels, Acts, the catholic letters and the Pauline letters as far as Hebrews 9:14; whether it originally contained the Pastoral Epistles, Philemon and Revelation is unknown. Codex Alexandrinus, of the fifth century, contains the twenty-seven books with 1 and 2 Clement after Revelation, and its table of contents lists the Psalms of Solomon.¹¹ The site's pages on Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus and Codex Alexandrinus, and the Journal's articles on Sinaiticus, Vaticanus and Alexandrinus describe them.

These codices show that the inclusion of a book in a complete Bible did not necessarily mean that it was regarded as canonical in the strict sense. Barnabas, the Shepherd and the Letters of Clement appear in Bibles produced by and for churches that also knew the lists that excluded them. Conversely, the codices confirm that the twenty-seven books of the later New Testament were all known and copied by the fourth century.

Cyril, Gregory, Amphilochius and the Apostolic Canons

The Greek lists of the fourth century that were described in Chapter Nine for the Old Testament also include the New. Cyril of Jerusalem, about 350, lists the Gospels, Acts, the seven catholic letters and fourteen letters of Paul, and omits Revelation. Gregory of Nazianzus also omits Revelation. Canon 60 of Laodicea omits Revelation. Amphilochius of Iconium lists the Gospels, Acts, fourteen letters of Paul ("some say that Hebrews is spurious, but they say not well"), and then says that some accept seven catholic letters and others only three (James, 1 Peter, 1 John), and that some accept Revelation while "the majority call it spurious". He concludes: "This would be the most unerring canon of the divinely inspired scriptures."¹² The eighty-fifth Apostolic Canon includes the two letters of Clement and the Apostolic Constitutions among the New Testament books, and omits Revelation.¹³

The Greek East, in other words, was generally agreed on the Gospels, Acts, fourteen Pauline letters and, increasingly, all seven catholic letters, but was divided on Revelation. This division lasted for centuries; the book was rarely read in Greek liturgy, and it is still not read in the Orthodox lectionary.

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Chapter 15. Athanasius and the Twenty-Seven Books

Each year the bishop of Alexandria sent a letter to the churches of Egypt announcing the date of Easter and the beginning of the Lenten fast. These Festal Letters often included instruction on matters of faith and discipline. The Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter of Athanasius, written for Easter in 367, contains the earliest surviving list of New Testament books that corresponds exactly to the twenty-seven books found in most Bibles today. Its Old Testament list was discussed in Chapter Nine; this chapter considers its New Testament list, its purpose and its reception.

The Occasion

Athanasius (about 296–373) was bishop of Alexandria from 328, though he spent about seventeen years in five periods of exile. By 367 he was an old man restored to his see. The letter survives in part in Greek, quoted in later canonical collections, and more fully in Coptic and Syriac translations.¹ Its stated purpose was to counter the use of apocryphal books by certain groups, probably including the Melitians, a schismatic party in Egypt, and possibly ascetic circles who read books ascribed to Enoch, Isaiah and Moses.

Since some have taken in hand to set in order for themselves the so-called apocrypha and to mix these with the divinely inspired scripture, ... it seemed good to me also, having been urged by true brethren and having learned from the beginning, to set forth in order the books that are canonised and handed down and believed to be divine.²

The letter uses the verb kanonizomena, "canonised", one of the earliest uses of the word group in the sense of an official list of scripture.

The New Testament List

Again, it is not tedious to speak of the books of the New Testament. These are: the four Gospels, according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Afterwards, the Acts of the Apostles and the seven epistles called catholic, namely, of James, one; of Peter, two; of John, three; after these, one of Jude. In addition, there are fourteen epistles of Paul, written in this order: the first, to the Romans; then two to the Corinthians; after these, to the Galatians; next, to the Ephesians; then to the Philippians; then to the Colossians; after these, two to the Thessalonians, and that to the Hebrews; and again, two to Timothy; one to Titus; and lastly, that to Philemon. And besides, the Revelation of John.³

These are fountains of salvation, that they who thirst may be satisfied with the living words they contain. In these alone is proclaimed the doctrine of godliness. Let no man add to these, neither let him take ought from these.⁴

The order is that of the Greek manuscripts of Egypt: Gospels, Acts, catholic letters, Pauline letters with Hebrews between 2 Thessalonians and 1 Timothy, and Revelation. It matches the order in Codex Vaticanus and, with Acts moved, Codex Sinaiticus.

The Books "To Be Read"

Athanasius adds a third category. For the sake of greater exactness, he writes, he must also mention other books which are not included in the canon but which earlier teachers had appointed to be read by new converts seeking instruction in godliness: the Wisdom of Solomon, the Wisdom of Sirach, Esther, Judith, Tobit, the work called the Teaching of the Apostles, and the Shepherd.⁵

He then rejects the apocrypha as "an invention of heretics, who write them when they choose, bestowing upon them their approbation, and assigning to them a date, that so, using them as ancient writings, they may find occasion to lead astray the simple". This threefold division, canonical, read, and apocryphal, distinguishes between books that defined doctrine, books useful for instruction, and books to be avoided. The Didache and the Shepherd, which had been widely used, were thus placed in the middle category.

Reception

The letter was not a decree binding on the whole church, and it did not end debate. Didymus the Blind, head of the catechetical school at Alexandria in the later fourth century, still quoted the Shepherd and Barnabas and doubted 2 and 3 John and 2 Peter.⁶ Codex Sinaiticus, probably written about the same time, includes Barnabas and the Shepherd after Revelation. In the East outside Egypt, Revelation continued to be omitted from lists for centuries. Gregory of Nazianzus, writing about 380, gives a list of twenty-six books without Revelation.

Nevertheless, the letter's authority in Egypt was considerable. It was translated into Coptic, and its list was used by the Coptic church, where it was accompanied by a fierce exhortation that has been preserved in a Coptic fragment, rejecting secret books.⁷ The Greek extracts were included in later collections of canon law, and the letter was endorsed indirectly by the Council in Trullo in 692, which ratified the canons of Athanasius among others. In the West, Rufinus and Jerome knew the same twenty-seven books, and the African councils at the end of the century adopted the same New Testament list.

Some historians have connected the letter with the end of the Nag Hammadi library, a collection of Coptic codices of Gnostic and other writings buried near the Pachomian monasteries in Upper Egypt, perhaps about this time. The letter was read in the monasteries, and it has been suggested that monks buried their non-canonical books in response. This connection is a hypothesis; the date and reason for the burial are unknown.⁸ The site's Journal has an article on the Coptic Bible and the Nag Hammadi codices.

The Significance of 367

The year 367 is often given as the moment when the New Testament canon was "closed". This is an oversimplification. Athanasius' list was the first exact statement of the twenty-seven books, but it described the practice of one region and one bishop. Its importance lies in its clarity, its use of the language of canon, and the fact that later Western and Eastern authorities arrived at the same twenty-seven books, though by different routes and at different times. The canon was formed by consensus rather than by decree, and the letter of 367 is the best evidence for one stage in that consensus.⁹

Other Eastern Lists of the Fourth Century

Athanasius' letter was not the only list compiled in the Greek East in the fourth century, and comparison with the others shows how far it was representative. Cyril of Jerusalem, in his fourth Catechetical Lecture of about 350, listed twenty-two Old Testament books, including Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah with Jeremiah, and a New Testament of twenty-six books without Revelation, adding: "Let all the rest be put aside in a secondary rank. And whatever books are not read in churches, these read not even by thyself".¹⁰ Gregory of Nazianzus (died about 390) composed a list in verse of twenty-two Old Testament books and a New Testament that also omits Revelation.¹¹ Amphilochius of Iconium, in his Iambics for Seleucus of about 380, gave a list that noted the disagreement about some books: "Some say one must receive seven catholic epistles, others only three", and of Revelation, "some approve it, but the majority say it is spurious".¹² Epiphanius of Salamis (died 403) gave several lists in different works, and in one of them described Wisdom and Sirach as useful books that were nevertheless not counted with the others.¹³

Set against these, Athanasius stands out for including Revelation and all seven catholic letters in his twenty-seven books. His list coincided with the later consensus of both East and West more exactly than any of his contemporaries in the East, and that is one reason why the letter of 367 acquired its reputation. In its own time, however, it was one voice among several, and the Greek churches continued for centuries to differ on the status of Revelation.

The Codices of the Fourth Century

The two great Greek Bibles of the fourth century, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, provide physical evidence alongside the lists. Sinaiticus, probably copied about the middle of the century, contains the Septuagint including Tobit, Judith, 1 and 4 Maccabees, Wisdom and Sirach, and a New Testament of twenty-seven books, followed by the Letter of Barnabas and part of the Shepherd of Hermas.¹⁴ Vaticanus, of similar date, contains the Old Testament with Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, Tobit and Baruch, but not the books of Maccabees; its New Testament breaks off at Hebrews 9:14, so it is not known whether it contained Revelation.¹⁵ The presence of Barnabas and Hermas in Sinaiticus shows that, at least in the circle that produced it, the boundary of the New Testament was drawn more widely than in Athanasius' letter, where Hermas appears among the books to be read.

The fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus, now in the British Library, includes the two letters of Clement after Revelation, and its table of contents lists the Psalms of Solomon at the end, though the corresponding leaves are lost.¹⁶ The three codices together show the books that were being bound together in practice, and they match no single surviving list exactly. They demonstrate that, even in the century of the great lists, the actual contents of complete Bibles varied at the edges.

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Chapter 16. The Western Councils: Rome, Hippo and Carthage

In the Latin West the books of the Bible were listed by regional councils and by letters of the bishops of Rome during the last quarter of the fourth century and the first years of the fifth. These lists included the books of the Greek Old Testament later called deuterocanonical and the twenty-seven books of the New Testament. They were regional decisions, not decrees of an ecumenical council, but they established the Latin canon that the medieval Western church inherited.

Rome, 382, and the Decretum Gelasianum

A document known as the Decretum Gelasianum, or Gelasian Decree, contains a list of the books of scripture attributed in some manuscripts to a council held at Rome in 382 under Pope Damasus, in others to Pope Gelasius (492–496) and in others to Pope Hormisdas (514–523). The list includes the Old Testament with Wisdom, Sirach, Tobit, Judith and 1–2 Maccabees, and the New Testament with twenty-seven books, though some manuscripts attribute only one letter of John to the apostle and two to "John the presbyter".¹ The decree also contains a long list of books "not to be received", including many apocryphal gospels and acts.

Most scholars, following Ernst von Dobschütz's edition of 1912, regard the decree as a compilation of the early sixth century, made in Italy or southern Gaul, though the section with the canon list may preserve material from a Roman synod of 382. The question remains disputed.² The council of 382 is attested by other sources, and Jerome, who was in Rome as Damasus' secretary from 382 to 385, began his revision of the Latin Gospels at Damasus' request at that time.

Hippo, 393

The council held at Hippo Regius in North Africa in 393, in which Augustine participated as a presbyter, adopted a list of canonical books. Its acts are lost, but a summary (the Breviarium Hipponense) was approved by the Council of Carthage of 397.³ Canon 36 of this summary reads:

It was also determined that besides the canonical Scriptures nothing be read in church under the title of divine Scriptures. The canonical Scriptures are these: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua the son of Nun, Judges, Ruth, four books of Kingdoms, two books of Chronicles, Job, the Psalter, five books of Solomon, the books of the twelve prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Tobit, Judith, Esther, two books of Ezra, two books of the Maccabees. Of the New Testament: four books of the Gospels, one book of the Acts of the Apostles, thirteen epistles of the Apostle Paul, one epistle of the same to the Hebrews, two epistles of Peter, three of John, one of James, one of Jude, one book of the Apocalypse of John.⁴

The "five books of Solomon" are Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, Wisdom and Sirach, the last being attributed to Solomon by association. The "two books of Ezra" probably correspond to Ezra-Nehemiah and the Greek 1 Esdras, as in the Septuagint, though this is debated. Baruch is not named, but was usually included with Jeremiah. The careful phrase "thirteen epistles of Paul, one epistle of the same to the Hebrews" reflects lingering hesitation about Hebrews, which had not been widely accepted in the West.

The canon adds that the church across the sea, that is Rome, should be consulted to confirm the list, and that on the anniversaries of martyrs their passions might also be read.⁵

Carthage, 397 and 419

The Third Council of Carthage, on 28 August 397, confirmed the Hippo summary.⁶ The council of 419, held under Bishop Aurelius, repeated the list in its canon 24, with the modification "fourteen epistles of Paul", removing the separate mention of Hebrews.⁷ This collection of African canons was later included in the Greek canonical collections and ratified by the Council in Trullo of 692, so that the African list acquired formal standing in the East as well, though without displacing other Eastern lists.

Augustine

Augustine (354–430), bishop of Hippo from 395, gives the same list in his On Christian Doctrine, begun about 396.⁸ He explains how the reader should judge between books when they differ in authority:

He will hold this rule with respect to the canonical Scriptures, that he prefer those received by all catholic churches to those which some do not receive; but among those which are not received by all, he will prefer those which the more numerous and weightier churches receive to those which fewer and less authoritative churches hold.⁹

This principle of consensus, weighted by the number and authority of churches, describes the practical process by which the canon was formed. Augustine was aware that Jews did not receive the additional books, and in the City of God he notes that the books of Maccabees are held as canonical "not by the Jews but by the church" because of the sufferings of the martyrs they record.¹⁰

Innocent I, 405

In a letter of 20 February 405 to Exuperius, bishop of Toulouse, Pope Innocent I answered a question about which books were to be received. His list matches that of the African councils, with five books of Solomon, Tobit, Judith, two books of Maccabees and the twenty-seven books of the New Testament. He adds that books under the names of Matthias, James the Less, Peter, John, Andrew, Thomas and others should be "not only repudiated but also condemned".¹¹

Jerome and Rufinus

Against this consensus stood the opinion of Jerome, who had learned Hebrew and argued that the books not in the Hebrew Bible should be classed as apocrypha, as described in Chapter Nine. Rufinus of Aquileia, in his Commentary on the Apostles' Creed of about 404, gave a threefold division like that of Athanasius: canonical books (the Hebrew Old Testament and twenty-seven New Testament books), ecclesiastical books to be read but not used to confirm doctrine (Wisdom, Sirach, Tobit, Judith, Maccabees, the Shepherd, the Two Ways and the Judgement of Peter), and apocrypha.¹² The Western church thus inherited two traditions: the conciliar lists, which included the additional Old Testament books as canonical, and the Jerome-Rufinus distinction, which set them apart. Both traditions remained in circulation in the Middle Ages, and the tension between them reappeared in the sixteenth century.

The African Canon Lists in Detail

The North African summary of 393, as preserved in the Breviarium Hipponense and repeated in 397 and 419, lists the Old Testament as: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, four books of Kingdoms, two of Chronicles, Job, the Psalter, five books of Solomon, the twelve prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Tobit, Judith, Esther, two books of Ezra and two of Maccabees.¹³ The "two books of Ezra" in Latin usage at this date most probably meant Greek 1 Esdras (Esdras A) together with Ezra–Nehemiah (Esdras B), though some scholars take them as Ezra and Nehemiah.¹⁴ Jeremiah is understood to include Baruch and Lamentations, following the practice of the Greek and Old Latin Bibles. The New Testament list contains the four Gospels, Acts, thirteen letters of Paul, "one of the same to the Hebrews", two of Peter, three of John, one of James, one of Jude and Revelation. The council of 419 altered the wording to "fourteen epistles of Paul", absorbing Hebrews into the Pauline corpus.

The wording "one of the same to the Hebrews" in 397 shows that the authorship of Hebrews was still a matter of discussion in the West; the change in 419 reflects the growing acceptance of Pauline authorship, which Augustine himself treated with caution in his later writings.¹⁵ The African councils thus fixed the list of books while leaving questions of authorship open.

The Codex Bezae and the Western Text

The Western church's sense of its New Testament was also shaped by the manuscripts in use. Codex Bezae (D), a Greek-Latin bilingual of about 400, contains the Gospels in the "Western" order (Matthew, John, Luke, Mark) and Acts, together with a fragment of 3 John in Latin, indicating that the catholic letters once stood between the Gospels and Acts in this volume.¹⁶ Its text of Acts is about eight per cent longer than the text of other major manuscripts. The site's page on Codex Bezae describes the manuscript in detail. Such manuscripts show that the books listed by councils were transmitted in forms that could differ considerably in wording, a matter that belongs to textual history rather than to the canon, but one of which early Christian writers such as Origen and Jerome were themselves aware.

The Latin Bible Before Jerome

The Old Latin (Vetus Latina) translations, made in Africa and Italy from the second century, were based on the Greek and therefore included the books of the Septuagint. Cyprian of Carthage (died 258) quotes Wisdom, Sirach, Tobit and the books of Maccabees with the same formulas as the books of the Hebrew canon.¹⁷ The Cheltenham List, or Mommsen Catalogue, a Latin list of the books with their number of lines (stichometry), probably compiled in North Africa about 360, includes the Old Testament with Tobit, Judith and two books of Maccabees, and a New Testament without Hebrews, James and Jude; it adds, after the letters of John and Peter, the remark "one only" (una sola), apparently doubting 2 and 3 John and 2 Peter.¹⁸ The list shows a stage before the councils, in which Africa had not yet adopted the full twenty-seven books.

Jerome's Prologues

Jerome's preface to the books of Samuel and Kings, known as the Prologus Galeatus ("helmeted prologue") and written about 391, sets out the twenty-two books of the Hebrew canon and declares that "whatever is outside these must be set apart among the apocrypha", naming Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, Tobit and the Shepherd.¹⁹ In his preface to the books of Solomon he says that the church reads Judith, Tobit and Maccabees "but does not receive them among the canonical scriptures", and reads Wisdom and Sirach "for the edification of the people, not for confirming the authority of ecclesiastical doctrines".²⁰ Yet Jerome translated Tobit and Judith from Aramaic at the request of friends, and these translations entered the Vulgate. The tension between Jerome's prefaces and the contents of the Bible he produced, which the councils' lists did not resolve, explains why his distinction was revived by later writers from the Middle Ages to the Reformation.

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Chapter 17. The Syriac Churches and the East

The Christian communities that spoke Syriac, an Aramaic dialect centred on Edessa in Mesopotamia, developed their own scriptures and their own canon. Their history shows that the formation of the canon was not a single process but a series of regional developments that converged only partially. Several Syriac churches use a New Testament of twenty-two books to this day.

The Diatessaron and the Separate Gospels

The earliest Gospel text widely used in Syriac was the Diatessaron of Tatian, a harmony of the four Gospels into a single narrative, composed about 170 and discussed in Chapter Eleven. It was read in Syriac churches as the Gospel for more than two centuries. Ephrem the Syrian (about 306–373) wrote a commentary on it, which survives in Armenian translation and in part in Syriac.¹ Alongside the Diatessaron there existed the Old Syriac version of the separate Gospels, called "the Gospel of the Separated" (Evangelion da-Mepharreshe), preserved in two manuscripts, the Curetonian Gospels of the fifth century and the Sinaitic Syriac palimpsest of the late fourth or early fifth century, found at St Catherine's Monastery in 1892.² The site's Journal has articles on Tatian's Diatessaron and the Peshitta.

Rabbula and the Peshitta

In the early fifth century Rabbula, bishop of Edessa from 411 to 435, is reported to have ordered that "the presbyters and deacons shall take care that in all the churches there shall be a copy of the Gospel of the Separated, and it shall be read".³ Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus, says that he removed more than two hundred copies of the Diatessaron from churches in his diocese and replaced them with the four Gospels.⁴ The standard Syriac version, the Peshitta ("simple" or "common"), whose New Testament was probably revised in the early fifth century, became the Bible of all Syriac churches.

The Peshitta New Testament contains twenty-two books: the four Gospels, Acts, fourteen letters of Paul, and three catholic letters (James, 1 Peter and 1 John). It omits 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude and Revelation.⁵ This list matches the testimony of Eastern writers such as John Chrysostom, who quotes none of the five omitted books, and Theodore of Mopsuestia, who is said to have rejected the catholic letters altogether. An earlier Syriac document, the Doctrine of Addai, of about 400, says that the church should read "the Law and the Prophets and the Gospel ... and the epistles of Paul ... and the Acts of the Twelve Apostles", with no mention of the catholic letters or Revelation.⁶ A list from St Catherine's Monastery of about 400 includes the Gospels, Acts and the Pauline letters, but no catholic letters.

The Philoxenian and Harklean Versions

Philoxenus, Miaphysite bishop of Mabbug, commissioned a new translation from the Greek, completed by his chorepiscopus Polycarp in 508. This Philoxenian version included the five books missing from the Peshitta. It was revised in 616 by Thomas of Harkel, working at the Enaton monastery near Alexandria, in a version of extreme literalness known as the Harklean.⁷ The minor catholic letters and Revelation in many printed Syriac Bibles derive from these later versions. The Syriac Orthodox Church thus came to know all twenty-seven books, though the Peshitta's twenty-two remained the core of its liturgical reading.

The Church of the East

The Church of the East, the Syriac church of the Persian empire, often called Nestorian by its opponents, retained the twenty-two-book New Testament. Its lectionaries and manuscripts continued to omit the five books, and its standard editions do so to the present. The Assyrian Church of the East and the Chaldean tradition still use the twenty-two-book canon in worship.⁸ The Church of the East carried the Syriac scriptures across Central Asia to China, where the Xi'an Stele of 781 refers to "the twenty-seven books of the sutras" of the original scriptures, a phrase whose meaning is disputed.

The Syriac Old Testament

The Peshitta Old Testament was translated from Hebrew, probably by Jewish or Jewish-Christian translators in the first or second century; its precise origin is uncertain. It includes the books of the Hebrew Bible, and Syriac manuscripts also include several additional books translated from the Greek, notably Sirach (which seems to have been translated from Hebrew), Wisdom, Tobit, Judith, 1–3 Maccabees, Baruch and the Letter of Baruch, and 2 Baruch and 4 Ezra in some manuscripts.⁹ The Codex Ambrosianus in Milan, of the sixth or seventh century, contains the Peshitta Old Testament with 2 Baruch, 4 Ezra, Josephus' account of the Maccabean martyrs (as 5 Maccabees) and other books. The Syriac Old Testament canon was thus fluid.

The Council in Trullo, 692

The Council in Trullo, also called the Quinisext Council, met in the domed hall (trullos) of the imperial palace in Constantinople in 691–692. Its second canon ratified a collection of earlier canons, including the eighty-five Apostolic Canons, the canons of Laodicea and Carthage, and the canonical letters of Athanasius, Gregory of Nazianzus, Amphilochius and others.¹⁰ Since these sources differ on the canon, especially on Revelation and the Old Testament books, the council endorsed several lists without resolving their differences. Its effect was to give canonical authority in the Byzantine church to a range of lists, leaving a degree of latitude that persisted until modern times. The Western church did not accept the council.

The Syriac Old Testament Books Outside the Hebrew Canon

The Peshitta Old Testament was translated, in the judgement of most specialists, directly from Hebrew, probably over a long period between the late first and the third century; the question whether the translators were Jews or Jewish Christians remains open.¹¹ The books found in the Hebrew Bible therefore form its core. The books that the Greek churches received from the Septuagint, such as Wisdom, Sirach, Tobit, Judith and the books of Maccabees, entered Syriac use more gradually and were not translated as a single group. Sirach was rendered from a Hebrew text, while Wisdom and others were translated from Greek.¹² Syriac manuscripts differ in which of these books they include and where they place them, so that it is difficult to speak of a single Syriac Old Testament canon before the sixth or seventh century.

The oldest dated biblical manuscript in any language is a Syriac Pentateuch copied in 464 and now in the British Library (Additional MS 14,425).¹³ The most important complete witness is the Codex Ambrosianus in Milan (B. 21 inf.), a pandect of the sixth or seventh century that contains the whole Old Testament together with additional books, including 2 Baruch and the fourth book of Ezra, as well as the fourth and fifth books of Maccabees in some form.¹⁴ The presence of these books in a great biblical codex shows that the edges of the collection remained broad in the Syriac world even after the core was settled.

Ordering the Books

Syriac manuscripts also group the books in ways unfamiliar to readers of Western Bibles. Job sometimes follows the Pentateuch, reflecting a tradition that associated Job with the patriarchal age; Ruth may be placed with Judges or among the "books of women" alongside Esther, Judith and Susanna; and the wisdom books often form a separate block. Some manuscripts include a "Book of Women" as a distinct unit.¹⁵ Such arrangements remind the reader that "canon" in antiquity could mean a list of approved books without a fixed sequence, and that the order of books in a modern printed Bible is itself the product of later decisions.

The Shorter Catholic Letters and Revelation in Syriac

The four catholic letters missing from the Peshitta (2 Peter, 2 and 3 John and Jude) and the book of Revelation were eventually translated into Syriac. A version of these letters, usually associated with the Philoxenian revision of 507/508, was printed by Edward Pococke at Leiden in 1630, and a Syriac Revelation, probably also of Philoxenian or Harklean origin, was published by Louis de Dieu in 1627 from a manuscript now in Leiden.¹⁶ These books circulated among West Syrian (Syriac Orthodox) readers and were included in printed editions from the seventeenth century, but they did not enter the lectionary of the Church of the East, which retained the twenty-two-book New Testament. This divergence persists. The Syriac New Testament printed by the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1905–1920, contains all twenty-seven books, but marks the five later books as additions to the Peshitta.¹⁷

Ephrem and Aphrahat as Witnesses

The fourth-century Syriac writers Aphrahat ("the Persian Sage", active about 337–345) and Ephrem quote the Diatessaron, Acts and the letters of Paul, but show no clear knowledge of the shorter catholic letters or Revelation. Aphrahat's citations from the Old Testament follow the books of the Hebrew canon, and the books outside it are rarely cited.¹⁸ The evidence of these writers, alongside the list in the so-called Doctrine of Addai, which names "the Gospel, the Epistles of Paul and the Acts of the Twelve Apostles" as the readings of the church, indicates that the Syriac church of the fourth century worked with a smaller New Testament than its Greek neighbours, and that the catholic letters other than James, 1 Peter and 1 John arrived later.¹⁹

A list of books in the Sinai Syriac manuscript St Catherine's Syr. 10, sometimes called the "Catalogue of Sinai" and dated to about 400, enumerates the Old Testament books followed by the Gospels, Acts, Galatians and the other letters of Paul, without the catholic letters or Revelation.²⁰ Whatever its precise date, it confirms the general picture: the Syriac canon took shape in its own sequence and on its own evidence, and it shows the plurality of early Christian practice more clearly than any other regional tradition.

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Chapter 18. Armenian, Georgian, Coptic and Gothic Bibles

The spread of Christianity beyond the Greek, Latin and Syriac worlds brought the scriptures into new languages. Each translation required decisions about which books to translate and in what order, and each national church developed its own canon, usually based on the Greek or Syriac model that it received, but sometimes with distinctive additions or omissions.

The Armenian Bible

Armenia adopted Christianity as the state religion in the early fourth century, traditionally in 301 under King Tiridates III and Gregory the Illuminator; the date is disputed, and 314 is also proposed. For a century the scriptures were read in Greek or Syriac. About 405 Mesrop Mashtots, with the support of the Catholicos Sahak and King Vramshapuh, created an Armenian alphabet, and the translation of the Bible began. According to Mesrop's biographer Koriun, the first sentence written in the new script was Proverbs 1:2: "To know wisdom and instruction, to perceive the words of understanding".¹

The first translation was probably made from Syriac and then revised from Greek manuscripts brought from Constantinople after the Council of Ephesus in 431. The Armenian canon developed over several centuries. Early Armenian lists include the Third Letter of Paul to the Corinthians, a short apocryphal correspondence between Paul and the Corinthians that is part of the Acts of Paul, and it was included in some Armenian Bibles into the eighteenth century.² Revelation was translated relatively late, perhaps in the fifth or sixth century, and was not regarded as canonical in Armenia until the twelfth century, when Nerses of Lambron made a new translation. Old Testament manuscripts include the History of Joseph and Asenath, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and other works in some cases. The first printed Armenian Bible, edited by Oskan of Yerevan at Amsterdam in 1666, included Sirach and 4 Ezra and set 3 Corinthians in an appendix.³ The site's Journal has an article on the Armenian Bible.

The Georgian Bible

The Georgian kingdom of Kartli adopted Christianity in the fourth century, traditionally through the missionary woman Nino. The Georgian alphabet was created in the fifth century, perhaps on the Armenian model, and the Gospels were translated from Armenian or Syriac, with later revision from Greek. The Adysh Gospels of 897 preserve an early form. The Georgian New Testament at first lacked Revelation, which was translated by Euthymius the Athonite, a monk on Mount Athos, about 978, and accepted only gradually.⁴ The Georgian Old Testament was revised from Greek in the eleventh century by George the Athonite and others. The first printed Georgian Bible appeared at Moscow in 1743. The site's Journal has an article on the Georgian Bible.

The Coptic Bible

In Egypt the scriptures were translated into several dialects of Coptic, the last stage of the Egyptian language, written in an alphabet based on Greek. The Sahidic version of Upper Egypt was made in the third century and the Bohairic version of the Nile Delta somewhat later. The Bodmer and Chester Beatty collections include early Coptic biblical manuscripts. The Coptic canon followed that of Athanasius in its New Testament, though some Coptic lists include the two Letters of Clement. The canonical collection known as the Apostolic Canons in Coptic includes a list that adds the Apostolic Constitutions to the New Testament.⁵ Revelation was accepted in the Coptic church, as by Athanasius, but was not read in the liturgy. The Coptic Old Testament followed the Septuagint. The site's Journal discusses the Coptic Bible and the Nag Hammadi codices.

The Gothic Bible

The Goths, a Germanic people who settled north of the Danube, received Christianity through Ulfilas (about 311–383), who was consecrated bishop about 341 by Eusebius of Nicomedia. Ulfilas created a Gothic alphabet and translated the Bible from Greek. According to the historian Philostorgius, he translated all the books except the books of Kingdoms, which he omitted "because they contain the history of wars, and the Gothic nation was very fond of war, and needed rather to be restrained than spurred on to deeds of war".⁶ The report may be a later legend, but it is the only recorded case of a translator deliberately omitting a book on such grounds. The Gothic New Testament survives in part, most famously in the Codex Argenteus of the sixth century, written in silver and gold ink on purple parchment and now in Uppsala.⁷ The site's Journal has an article on Ulfilas, the Gothic Bible and the Codex Argenteus.

Patterns

These translations show three patterns. First, the canon of each new church was largely inherited from the church that evangelised it, whether Greek, Syriac or both. Second, books that were disputed in the source church, especially Revelation in the East, were often translated late and accepted slowly. Third, some books that later disappeared from the Greek and Latin Bibles, such as 3 Corinthians in Armenia, were retained in the peripheral churches for centuries. The most striking example of this third pattern is the Ethiopian canon, considered in the next chapter.⁸

Mesrop's Alphabet and the First Armenian Translation

According to Koriwn, the pupil and biographer of Mesrop Mashtots, the Armenian alphabet was devised in the opening years of the fifth century, conventionally about 405, with the encouragement of King Vramshapuh and the Catholicos Sahak. The first text rendered in the new script was, by Koriwn's account, the book of Proverbs, beginning "To know wisdom and instruction".⁹ The translation of the whole Bible followed over the next three decades. Moses of Khoren, a later and less reliable source, describes a first translation from Syriac revised after the Council of Ephesus (431) against Greek manuscripts brought from Constantinople.¹⁰ Modern scholars broadly accept a two-stage process, although the extent of Syriac influence on the first stage is disputed.

The Armenian Canon and Its Additional Books

The Armenian Old Testament generally follows the Greek canon, including the books outside the Hebrew Bible, but some manuscripts and lists also include works such as the History of Joseph and Asenath, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and the Deaths of the Prophets.¹¹ In the New Testament, the Armenian church for some centuries read 3 Corinthians, a short exchange of letters between Paul and the Corinthians that also survives in Latin and Coptic and was originally part of the Acts of Paul. It appears in some Armenian Bibles after 2 Corinthians and was included in the printed Armenian Bible of Yovhannes Zohrapean (Venice, 1805), where it was placed in an appendix.¹² Revelation entered the Armenian canon late; it was apparently translated in the fifth century but was not widely accepted until the twelfth, when Nerses of Lambron revised the translation.¹³ The Armenian case illustrates that the edges of the New Testament remained open in some Eastern churches long after the councils of the fourth century.

Armenian canon lists, collected in the Armenian Book of Canons (Kanonagirk') attributed to Yovhannes Odznetsi (eighth century), give differing totals. The list ascribed to Yovhannes Sarkavag (twelfth century) mentions books such as the Repose of John and the Teaching of Peter among works read by some, while marking them as outside the ordinary collection.¹⁴ The Armenian Bible printed by Oskan Yerevantsi at Amsterdam in 1666–1668, the first printed Armenian Bible, adopted the order and contents of the Latin Vulgate in several respects, including Sirach and 4 Ezra, a sign of Western influence in the age of print.¹⁵

The Georgian Bible in More Detail

Georgian tradition associates the conversion of Iberia with Saint Nino in the fourth century, and the Georgian alphabet with the period shortly afterwards. The earliest Georgian biblical fragments, palimpsests of the fifth and sixth centuries known as khanmeti texts from a linguistic feature, show a translation made from Armenian or Syriac with later revision against Greek.¹⁶ In the tenth and eleventh centuries the monks of the Iviron monastery on Mount Athos, especially Euthymius (died 1028) and George the Hagiorite (died 1065), revised the Georgian New Testament against Byzantine Greek manuscripts and translated Revelation, completing the twenty-seven books.¹⁷ The Mtskheta manuscript of 1743 and the printed Moscow Bible of 1743 formed the standard Georgian Bible of later centuries, with an Old Testament following the Slavonic and Greek contents.

Coptic Lists and the Bohairic Canon

Coptic Christianity produced translations in several dialects, of which Sahidic (Upper Egypt) is the oldest and Bohairic (the Delta) later became the liturgical standard. Sahidic biblical manuscripts date from the third and fourth centuries; some, such as the Crosby-Schøyen codex (late third or early fourth century), contain 2 Maccabees, 1 Peter and Jonah together with other texts in one volume.¹⁸ The Coptic church received the Festal Letter of Athanasius in Coptic translation, and portions of that Coptic version survive.¹⁹ Medieval Coptic-Arabic canon lists, such as the one transmitted by the thirteenth-century scholar Abu'l-Barakat ibn Kabar, include the Apostolic Canons and the two letters of Clement alongside the twenty-seven books, illustrating that canonical and church-order literature could appear in the same list.²⁰

The Gothic Bible and Its Limits

Wulfila (about 311–383) devised the Gothic alphabet and translated the Bible from Greek. The ecclesiastical historian Philostorgius reports that he left the books of Kings untranslated because they were full of wars, and the Gothic nation was already fond of war.²¹ Whether or not this story is historical, it is the earliest report of a translator deliberately omitting part of the collection. The surviving Gothic texts are chiefly the Codex Argenteus, a sixth-century purple manuscript in silver and gold letters now at Uppsala, which contains portions of the Gospels in the "Western" order of Matthew, John, Luke and Mark, and the palimpsest Codices Ambrosiani in Milan, which preserve fragments of the Pauline letters and of Nehemiah.²²

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Chapter 19. The Ethiopian Canon

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church has the largest biblical canon of any Christian church. It includes books that survive complete only in Ge'ez, the classical Ethiopic language, including 1 Enoch and Jubilees, which were known and quoted in the Second Temple period and in early Christianity but dropped out of use elsewhere. The Ethiopian canon is the clearest illustration of the fact that the boundaries of the Bible were defined differently in different Christian communities.

The Conversion of Aksum

The kingdom of Aksum in the northern Ethiopian highlands adopted Christianity in the fourth century. According to the historian Rufinus, two young Syrian Christians, Frumentius and Aedesius, were captured and brought to the Aksumite court, where Frumentius became an influential official. He later travelled to Alexandria, where Athanasius consecrated him as bishop of Aksum, probably between 340 and 346.¹ Coins of King Ezana changed from pagan symbols to the cross during his reign, confirming the conversion. The Ethiopian church remained under the patriarchate of Alexandria, which appointed its metropolitans until 1959.

The Translation

The Bible was translated into Ge'ez from Greek, probably between the fourth and seventh centuries, with later revision from Arabic in the fourteenth century and after. Tradition credits the "Nine Saints", missionaries from the Roman empire who arrived in the late fifth century. The Garima Gospels, two Gospel books preserved at the monastery of Abba Garima near Adwa, have been dated by radiocarbon analysis to between about 330 and 650, making them among the oldest surviving illustrated Christian Gospel books.² The site's Journal has an article on the Garima Gospels of Ethiopia.

Enoch and Jubilees

1 Enoch is a composite work of five books, composed in Aramaic between the third century BCE and the turn of the era. Fragments of eleven Aramaic manuscripts of it were found at Qumran, which contained all the sections except the Parables (chapters 37–71). The Letter of Jude quotes it (Jude 14–15, quoting 1 Enoch 1:9) as a prophecy of "Enoch, the seventh from Adam". Early Christian writers including Barnabas, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian cited it, and Tertullian argued for its authority. Augustine and Jerome rejected it, and it disappeared from use in the Greek and Latin churches. Only Greek fragments survived outside Ethiopia.³

Jubilees, a retelling of Genesis and part of Exodus composed in Hebrew in the second century BCE, divides history into periods of forty-nine years. Fragments of about fourteen or fifteen copies were found at Qumran. The Damascus Document cites it by name.⁴ Like Enoch, it survives complete only in Ge'ez.

The Scottish traveller James Bruce brought three copies of Ethiopic Enoch to Europe in 1773, and Richard Laurence published the first English translation in 1821.⁵ The site's page on the Dead Sea Scrolls describes the Qumran manuscripts of these books.

The Ethiopian Canon of Eighty-One Books

The Ethiopian church counts eighty-one books in its Bible, but the count can be reached in different ways, and the lists differ in different sources. The "narrower canon" includes the following.⁶

Old Testament: the books of the Hebrew Bible, counted in various ways; the additional books of the Septuagint, including Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch with the Letter of Jeremiah, and additions to Esther and Daniel; and books unique to Ethiopia: 1 Enoch, Jubilees, 1–3 Meqabyan (three books of Ethiopian Maccabees, entirely different from the Greek Maccabees), 4 Baruch (the Paralipomena of Jeremiah) and 3 and 4 Ezra in some lists. The Prayer of Manasseh is usually included.

New Testament: the twenty-seven books, sometimes with additional church-order books in the "broader canon": the Sinodos (four sections), the Ethiopian Book of the Covenant (two parts), Ethiopian Clement and the Didascalia, totalling eight additional books and producing thirty-five New Testament books.⁷

The broader canon is said to contain books not used in the narrower, and the exact relationship of the two is not clear. Different scholars and Ethiopian authorities give different lists, and Ethiopian practice has not been fixed by a single council. The 1960s Amharic Bible authorised by Emperor Haile Selassie included the eighty-one books in a form that has been widely followed.

Meqabyan

The three books of Meqabyan are distinctive to Ethiopia. The first tells of a Benjaminite named Meqabis and his five sons who resisted a king named Tsirutsaydan; the second and third continue with moral exhortation and narratives. They have no direct connection with the Greek books of Maccabees beyond the name, and their date and origin are unknown; they may have been composed in Ge'ez in the medieval period, possibly drawing on earlier Arabic or Hebrew sources.⁸

Significance

The Ethiopian canon preserves a state of affairs that once existed more widely. In the Second Temple period and in early Christianity, Enoch and Jubilees were valued by some groups as revealed writings, and the Ethiopian church inherited this valuation through the Greek scriptures that it received in the fourth and fifth centuries, before the narrowing of the Greek and Latin canons was complete. Its broader canon also shows that the distinction between scripture and church order was not everywhere drawn in the same way.⁹

Frumentius and the Date of the Translation

The fourth-century historian Rufinus of Aquileia records that Frumentius, a Syrian Christian taken captive as a youth at the Aksumite court, was later consecrated bishop of Aksum by Athanasius of Alexandria, probably in the 340s or 350s.¹⁰ A letter of the emperor Constantius II to the Aksumite rulers Ezana and Sazana, preserved by Athanasius, confirms the connection with Alexandria.¹¹ The coins and inscriptions of King Ezana show a change from pagan to Christian symbols during his reign. The translation of the Bible into Ge'ez is usually placed between the fourth and the seventh centuries; Ethiopian tradition associates it with the "Nine Saints", monks who came from the Roman world, traditionally in the late fifth century. The Greek Septuagint was the principal source for the Old Testament, although Syriac influence has been detected in some books.¹²

The Garima Gospels

The oldest surviving Ethiopic manuscripts are the Garima Gospels, two Gospel books preserved at the monastery of Abba Garima near Adwa in Tigray. Radiocarbon tests published in the early 2010s placed the parchment of the two volumes between roughly the fourth and seventh centuries, although the precise range remains under discussion.¹³ If these dates hold, the Garima Gospels are among the oldest illuminated Christian books anywhere, and they show that the Ge'ez Gospels existed in finished, decorated form within a few centuries of the conversion of Aksum.

The Medieval Revision

After a period from which few manuscripts survive, the Ethiopic Bible was revised in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, partly against Arabic versions transmitted from the Coptic church of Egypt, which appointed the metropolitans of Ethiopia until 1959.¹⁴ Manuscripts of the later Middle Ages and early modern period make up the great majority of surviving Ethiopic biblical texts. The "Octateuch" (Genesis to Ruth) often circulated as a single volume, as did the Psalter with the biblical canticles, which remains the most widely copied book in Ethiopia.

The Narrower and Broader Canons

Ethiopian sources describe the canon as eighty-one books, but they do not agree on which books make up that number. One reckoning, sometimes called the "narrower canon", counts forty-six Old Testament books and thirty-five New Testament books, the latter including the eight books of the Sinodos (church order) and the Book of the Covenant, the Ethiopic Clement and the Didascalia alongside the twenty-seven books.¹⁵ Another reckoning treats the New Testament as twenty-seven books and fills the Old Testament with a larger set, including Enoch, Jubilees, the three books of Meqabyan, 4 Baruch (the Paralipomena of Jeremiah), Josippon and others.¹⁶ The printed Amharic Bible authorised by Emperor Haile Selassie (1960–1961) is generally described as presenting the eighty-one books in a form close to the broader reckoning of the Old Testament with twenty-seven New Testament books.¹⁷

Enoch as a Test Case

The Book of Enoch is known in full only in Ge'ez, though Aramaic fragments of most of its parts were found at Qumran, and portions survive in Greek.¹⁸ The letter of Jude quotes it (Jude 14–15, citing 1 Enoch 1:9). Several early Christian writers, among them Tertullian, regarded it as scripture, while others, such as Augustine and Jerome, treated it as apocryphal.¹⁹ Only the Ethiopian church retained it in the canon. Its survival in Ethiopia allowed European scholars, beginning with the manuscripts brought back by James Bruce in 1773, to read a work that had otherwise been lost in the West for more than a thousand years. Jubilees, a retelling of Genesis and part of Exodus, likewise survives complete only in Ge'ez, and Hebrew fragments of it were found at Qumran.²⁰

Ethiopian Practice

In practice, Ethiopian churches distinguish between books that are read in the liturgy and books that are studied. The canon of eighty-one is a traditional figure as much as a fixed list, and church scholars have explained it in more than one way. The Ethiopian case demonstrates more clearly than any other that the boundaries of the Bible were set by the received practice of particular churches, and that the same historical inheritance from Alexandria could result in a much larger Bible than in Rome or Constantinople.

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Chapter 20. The Medieval Bible in East and West

The thousand years between the African councils and the Reformation are sometimes treated as a period in which the canon was settled and nothing happened. In fact the medieval Bible remained varied in its contents, and the questions raised by Jerome and the earlier Greek lists continued to be discussed. Manuscripts included books outside the conciliar lists, scholars repeated Jerome's distinction between canonical and ecclesiastical books, and the first formal statement of the canon by a council claiming to speak for the whole Western church came only in 1442.

The Latin Bible Before Pandects

For much of the early Middle Ages the Bible circulated not as a single volume but as separate books or groups of books: Gospel books, Psalters, collections of the Pauline letters and so on. Complete Bibles, called pandects, were rare and costly. Cassiodorus (about 485–585), at his monastery of Vivarium in southern Italy, produced a great pandect, the Codex Grandior, and in his Institutions described three different lists of the books of the Bible: Jerome's, Augustine's and that of the "old translation", the Old Latin.¹ He did not attempt to choose between them but presented them side by side.

The Codex Amiatinus, written at the twin monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow in Northumbria before 716 and carried towards Rome by Abbot Ceolfrith as a gift to the pope, is the oldest surviving complete Latin Bible. It contains the Vulgate text and includes diagrams of the divisions of scripture according to Jerome, Hilary and Augustine, derived from Cassiodorus.² The site's Journal has an article on the Codex Amiatinus and on the Latin Vulgate and Jerome's translation of the Bible.

The Alcuin and Theodulf Bibles

Under Charlemagne, Alcuin of York at Tours and Theodulf of Orléans produced revised Vulgate Bibles in single volumes at the end of the eighth century. The Tours scriptorium produced numerous large Bibles in the ninth century, establishing the single-volume Bible as a standard form. Theodulf's Bibles were textually careful and included Hebrew-based corrections. These Bibles included the books of the African lists, and some included additional books such as 3 and 4 Ezra, the Prayer of Manasseh and the Letter to the Laodiceans.³

The Letter to the Laodiceans

The Letter of Paul to the Laodiceans is a short Latin pastiche of phrases from Philippians and Galatians, composed perhaps in the fourth century to fill the gap suggested by Colossians 4:16, where Paul tells the Colossians to read "the letter from Laodicea". It is found in more than a hundred Latin manuscripts of the Bible, including Codex Fuldensis of 546, written for Bishop Victor of Capua.⁴ Gregory the Great is said to have referred to Paul's fifteen letters, though this may refer to another count. Many medieval writers noted that it was not in the canon. It appears in the early printed German Bibles before Luther and in the Wycliffite English Bible. It disappeared from Bibles in the sixteenth century, the last major survival of a book that had been copied for a thousand years within the Latin New Testament without formal canonical status.

The Paris Bible

In the thirteenth century the University of Paris standardised the Bible in a small portable format for students and preaching friars. The Paris Bible arranged the books in an order close to that of modern Bibles, introduced the chapter divisions associated with Stephen Langton (about 1150–1228), archbishop of Canterbury, and included Jerome's prefaces and a dictionary of Hebrew names.⁵ It contained the books of the African lists, along with the Prayer of Manasseh and 3 Ezra and sometimes 4 Ezra. Thousands of copies survive. The Paris Bible's order and contents determined the arrangement of the printed Vulgates of the fifteenth century, and through them of most later Western Bibles.

Scholars and the Canon

Throughout the Middle Ages Jerome's prefaces were copied in Latin Bibles before the relevant books. The Prologus Galeatus, which states that Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, Tobit and the Shepherd "are not in the canon", stood at the head of the books of Kings, and the prefaces to Tobit and Judith repeated Jerome's hesitations. Medieval scholars therefore knew of the two traditions. Gregory the Great (pope 590–604) cited 1 Maccabees as "not canonical" but "published for the edification of the church".⁶ Hugh of St Victor (died 1141), Nicholas of Lyra (died 1349) and many others distinguished between books that were canonical and books that were read for edification. Cardinal Cajetan, in his commentary on the historical books dedicated to Pope Clement VII in 1532, wrote that the additional books "are not canonical, that is, they are not regular for confirming matters of faith", although "they can be called canonical, that is, regular for the edification of the faithful".⁷ The view of Jerome thus remained respectable within the Western church until the Council of Trent.

The Byzantine Church

In the Greek church the variety of lists ratified at Trullo in 692 remained authoritative. John of Damascus (about 675–749), in his Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, gave the Hebrew count of twenty-two books, then mentioned Wisdom and Sirach as "virtuous and noble but not counted", and listed the twenty-seven New Testament books with the Apostolic Canons of Clement added.⁸ The Stichometry of Nicephorus, a list associated with the ninth-century Patriarch Nicephorus of Constantinople, lists the canonical books, then the antilegomena (including the Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach, Psalms of Solomon, Esther, Judith, Susanna, Tobit, and Revelation), and then the apocrypha.⁹ Revelation was rarely included in Byzantine manuscripts of the New Testament; of the roughly 5,000 Greek New Testament manuscripts, only about 300 include it, and it was never added to the Greek lectionary.

The Council of Florence, 1442

The Council of Florence, which attempted to reunite the Greek and Latin churches and later negotiated unions with other Eastern churches, issued a Bull of Union with the Copts, Cantate Domino, on 4 February 1442. It contains a list of the books of the Old and New Testaments that matches the African list, including Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and 1–2 Maccabees, and the twenty-seven New Testament books.¹⁰ The bull professes that "one and the same God is the author of the Old and New Testaments", but it does not use the word "canon" or pronounce an anathema. It was the first list issued by a council regarded in the West as ecumenical, but it was an instruction to the Copts rather than a dogmatic definition, and its authority was debated. Cajetan's comment of 1532, for example, does not refer to it.

Medieval Jewish Bibles

The medieval Jewish Bible, which is the subject of the next chapter, was fixed in its contents but varied in its order, and it was transmitted in a form, the Masoretic codex, that came to define the Hebrew text for Jews and Christians alike.¹¹

Cassiodorus and the Three Lists

In the sixth century Cassiodorus (about 485–about 585), who founded the monastery of Vivarium in southern Italy, set out in his Institutions three different lists of the books of scripture: that of Jerome, that of Augustine, and that of the "ancient translation", the Old Latin Bible, as found in a nine-volume set and a great one-volume pandect he had made.¹² He did not choose between them, but described them as different arrangements of the same divine law. The Codex Amiatinus, written at Wearmouth-Jarrow in Northumbria before 716 and now in the Laurentian Library in Florence, is the oldest complete Latin Bible to survive; it was modelled in part on Cassiodorus' great pandect and contains, on an early leaf, diagrams of the three lists.¹³ The coexistence of three lists in a single codex shows that early medieval scribes were aware of the variety of earlier tradition and did not regard it as a problem to be solved.

Bede and the Books "Outside the Canon"

Bede (673–735) wrote commentaries on Tobit as well as on books of the Hebrew canon, and quoted Wisdom and Sirach as scripture, while recognising, following Jerome, that they were not in the Hebrew canon.¹⁴ This double attitude, in which books were read and expounded in the church while their different standing was acknowledged by the learned, characterised much of the Latin Middle Ages. The Glossa Ordinaria, the standard glossed Bible of the twelfth century, included in its prologues Jerome's statements that Judith, Tobit, Wisdom, Sirach and Maccabees were not in the Hebrew canon, yet glossed them alongside the other books.¹⁵

Chapters and Order in the Thirteenth Century

The chapter divisions used in modern Bibles are generally attributed to Stephen Langton, who taught at Paris before becoming archbishop of Canterbury in 1207. They were adopted in the "Paris Bibles" of the thirteenth century, small portable one-volume Bibles produced in great numbers for students and friars.¹⁶ The Paris Bible also standardised the order of books: the Old Testament ran from Genesis to 2 Maccabees, with the Prophets before Maccabees, and the New Testament placed Acts after the letters of Paul and before the catholic letters, an arrangement found in many medieval manuscripts. A list of "interpretations of Hebrew names" was usually added at the end.¹⁷ The adoption of a fixed order and fixed chapters helped to make the Latin Bible a uniform book across Europe, even though no council had defined its contents. Verse numbers came later: Robert Estienne introduced them in his Greek New Testament of 1551 and his Latin Bible of 1555.¹⁸

Wycliffite Bibles

The English Bibles associated with John Wyclif and his followers (about 1380–1395) translated the Vulgate in full. The "General Prologue" to the later Wycliffite version, written about 1395, discusses the canon and, following Jerome, distinguishes the books of the Hebrew canon from the others, which it says may be read "for the edifying of the people" but not for confirming doctrine.¹⁹ The Wycliffite Bible included the additional books, but its prologue anticipated a distinction that would become central in the sixteenth century. The prologue was a scholarly restatement of Jerome, not a new theory.

Nicholas of Lyra and Cardinal Cajetan

The Franciscan Nicholas of Lyra (about 1270–1349), whose Postills on the whole Bible became the most widely read commentary of the later Middle Ages, also cited Jerome's view of the books outside the Hebrew canon in his prologue to Tobit.²⁰ As late as 1532, Cardinal Thomas de Vio, known as Cajetan, dedicated his commentary on the historical books to Pope Clement VII and stated that the books of Judith, Tobit, Maccabees, Wisdom and Sirach were not canonical in the sense of confirming matters of faith, though they were canonical in the sense of being read in the church, citing Jerome.²¹ Cajetan's distinction, written only fourteen years before Trent, shows that the medieval position was not a simple uniformity, and that the question remained open for discussion among learned Catholic writers until the conciliar decree.

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Chapter 21. The Masoretes and the Medieval Hebrew Bible

Although the twenty-four books of the Hebrew Bible had been recognised by the rabbinic period, as discussed in Chapter Six, their order, their division and the exact form of their text continued to develop. Between about the seventh and tenth centuries scholars known as the Masoretes, working chiefly in Tiberias and in Babylonia, devised systems of vowel signs, accents and marginal notes that fixed the reading of the consonantal text. The great Masoretic codices of the tenth and eleventh centuries are the earliest complete Hebrew Bibles to survive in a single volume, and they show what the medieval Jewish canon contained and how it was arranged.

The Talmudic Order

A baraita in the Babylonian Talmud gives an order for the books of the Prophets and the Writings:

Our rabbis taught: The order of the Prophets is Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, and the Twelve. ... The order of the Writings is Ruth, the Book of Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Lamentations, Daniel, the Scroll of Esther, Ezra, and Chronicles.¹

The passage goes on to discuss the authorship of each book: Moses wrote his own book and the portion of Balaam and Job; Joshua wrote his book and the last eight verses of the Torah; Samuel wrote his book, Judges and Ruth; David wrote Psalms "with the help of ten elders"; Jeremiah wrote his book, Kings and Lamentations; Hezekiah and his colleagues wrote Isaiah, Proverbs, the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes; the men of the Great Assembly wrote Ezekiel, the Twelve, Daniel and Esther; and Ezra wrote his book and the genealogies of Chronicles. These traditions about authorship are not historical evidence for the composition of the books, but they show how the rabbis understood the collection as a whole.

The order of the baraita differs from the order of the medieval codices, especially in placing Jeremiah before Isaiah and Ruth at the head of the Writings. Lists in medieval manuscripts show considerable variety in the order of the Writings, and Christian lists of the Hebrew canon, such as those of Melito and Origen, show yet other orders.

The Masoretes

The Masoretes (from masorah, "tradition" or "transmission") were families of scholars who preserved and annotated the text. The most famous were the ben Asher family of Tiberias, of whom five generations are known, ending with Aaron ben Moses ben Asher in the first half of the tenth century. A rival tradition associated with ben Naphtali differed from ben Asher in several hundred minor details of vocalisation and accentuation.² The Masoretes did not decide which books belonged to the Bible; that question had been settled long before. Their contribution was to preserve the text with an accuracy that made the Masoretic Text the standard for Judaism and, from the Renaissance onward, the basis for Christian translations of the Old Testament.

The site's pages and Journal treat this subject at length, for example the Tiberias Masoretes, the Tiberian Masorah and the schools of Ben Asher and Ben Naphtali, and the Masorah Parva and Masorah Magna.

The Aleppo Codex

The Aleppo Codex, called in Hebrew Keter Aram Tsova, the Crown of Aleppo, was written in Tiberias about 930. Its consonantal text was copied by the scribe Shlomo ben Buya'a, and the vowels, accents and Masoretic notes were added by Aaron ben Asher himself, according to a colophon now lost but recorded before its loss.³ Maimonides (1138–1204) used it as the model for the laws of writing Torah scrolls, describing it as "the codex known in Egypt, which includes the twenty-four books, which was in Jerusalem for several years, and was used to correct books".⁴

The Aleppo Codex placed the Writings in the order Chronicles, Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ruth, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, Esther, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, an order characteristic of Tiberian manuscripts. About two-fifths of the codex, including most of the Torah, was lost after riots in Aleppo in 1947; the surviving portion has been in Jerusalem since 1958 and is kept at the Israel Museum.⁵ The site's Journal has articles on the Aleppo Codex, the Aleppo Codex and the Tiberian standard and the Crown of Aleppo.

The Leningrad Codex

The Leningrad Codex (Firkovich B19A), now in the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg, was written in Cairo in 1008 or 1009 by Samuel ben Jacob, who states in a colophon that he copied it from corrected books prepared by Aaron ben Asher.⁶ It is the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible and is the basis of the standard modern scholarly editions, Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and Biblia Hebraica Quinta. It follows the same order of the Writings as the Aleppo Codex, beginning with Chronicles. The site's Journal has articles on the Leningrad Codex and the Westminster Leningrad Codex.

Later Orders and the Printed Hebrew Bible

In Ashkenazi manuscripts of the later Middle Ages, the Writings were often arranged differently, placing the five Megillot (Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and Esther) together in the order of the festivals on which they were read, and ending with Chronicles. This order was adopted in the Rabbinic Bible (Miqra'ot Gedolot) printed by Daniel Bomberg at Venice in 1516–1517 and again in 1524–1525, edited by Jacob ben Hayyim. The Bomberg Bibles also divided Samuel, Kings, Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah into two books each, following the Christian practice, and introduced Christian chapter numbers into the Hebrew Bible.⁷ The order of modern printed Hebrew Bibles largely derives from these editions.

The Relationship to Christian Bibles

The Christian Old Testament in its Protestant form contains the same books as the Hebrew Bible, but in a different order derived from the Septuagint and the Vulgate, and with a different count: thirty-nine books instead of twenty-four, because the Twelve Prophets are counted separately and Samuel, Kings, Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah are each divided. The Hebrew Bible ends with Chronicles and the edict of Cyrus allowing the return to Jerusalem; the Christian Old Testament ends with Malachi and the prophecy of the return of Elijah. The differences in order reflect the different ways in which the two communities read the same books.⁸

Ben Asher and Ben Naphtali

The Tiberian Masoretic tradition was shaped by families of scholars over several generations. The two best known are the Ben Asher family, of which Aaron ben Moses ben Asher (first half of the tenth century) was the last and most famous member, and the family of Moses ben David ben Naphtali. Medieval lists record several hundred differences between the two, most of them concerning small details of vocalisation and accentuation.⁹ Maimonides (1138–1204) praised a codex corrected by Ben Asher, then in Egypt, as the model for writing Torah scrolls, and this codex has long been identified with the Aleppo Codex.¹⁰ The prestige of Ben Asher's text is one reason why Tiberian manuscripts and the printed Hebrew Bibles derived from them came to dominate. The differences recorded concern the vocalisation of the text, not the selection of books; the Masoretes inherited a fixed collection and devoted their attention to its exact form.

The Masorah as a Guard on the Text

The Masoretes surrounded the text with notes, the Masorah. The Masorah parva, written in the side margins, records how often a word or form occurs, and marks places where the reading tradition (qere) differs from the written text (ketiv). The Masorah magna, in the upper and lower margins, gives longer lists of occurrences, and the Masorah finalis, at the end of books, gives totals of verses and the middle point of each book.¹¹ At the end of each book of the Pentateuch, for example, the Masoretes noted the number of verses; at Leviticus 8:8 they marked the middle verse of the Torah. These notes did not decide which books belonged to the Bible, but they provided an unusually precise apparatus for preserving the text of the books that did, and they presuppose that the twenty-four books were already a closed collection.

Babylonian and Palestinian Systems

Alongside the Tiberian system there were other systems of vowel signs. The Babylonian system placed its signs above the letters, and Palestinian vocalisation is known from fragments found in the Cairo Genizah.¹² The Tiberian system eventually replaced the others in almost all Jewish communities, but the existence of rival systems shows that the work of fixing the reading tradition was spread over several centres and generations, roughly between the seventh and the tenth centuries.

The Cairo Genizah

The storeroom (genizah) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat (Old Cairo) preserved more than two hundred thousand fragments of Jewish manuscripts, many of them biblical, which were brought to Cambridge and other libraries from 1896 onwards, notably through the work of Solomon Schechter.¹³ Among them were Hebrew manuscripts of Sirach, a book known until then only in Greek, Latin and Syriac; these fragments, from medieval copies, showed that the Hebrew Sirach had continued to be copied by Jews long after it was excluded from the twenty-four books.¹⁴ The Genizah also produced fragments of biblical texts with Babylonian and Palestinian pointing and of the Masorah itself, making it a principal source for the history of the Hebrew text.

The Order of the Writings in Manuscripts

Although the Babylonian Talmud (Bava Batra 14b) gives an order of the Writings beginning with Ruth, Psalms and Job, Tiberian manuscripts such as the Aleppo and Leningrad Codices begin the Writings with Chronicles, followed by Psalms, Job and Proverbs, and place the five scrolls (Ruth, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations and Esther) in a different sequence.¹⁵ Spanish and Ashkenazi manuscripts adopted other orders, and the order of the five scrolls in many Ashkenazi manuscripts follows the sequence of their reading at festivals: Song of Songs at Passover, Ruth at Shavuot, Lamentations on the Ninth of Av, Ecclesiastes at Sukkot and Esther at Purim. The order printed in most modern Hebrew Bibles, ending with Chronicles, derives from the early printed editions. These differences concerned sequence only; the contents of the twenty-four books are the same in all Masoretic manuscripts.

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Chapter 22. The Reformation and the Protestant Canon

The sixteenth century brought the most significant change to the Western canon since the fourth century. Humanist scholarship, the new technology of printing and the religious controversies of the Reformation combined to reopen questions that had been dormant for a thousand years. The result was a division of the Western church into communities with different Old Testament canons, and a brief but serious questioning of several New Testament books.

Humanist Scholarship and Printing

The printing of the Gutenberg Bible at Mainz about 1454–1455 began an era in which the contents of the Bible could be reproduced in identical copies. The Gutenberg Bible followed the Paris Bible in its contents, including the Prayer of Manasseh and 3 and 4 Ezra.¹ The study of Hebrew and Greek, promoted by humanists such as Johannes Reuchlin and Erasmus of Rotterdam, made scholars aware of the differences between the Latin Vulgate and the original texts. Erasmus published the first printed Greek New Testament in 1516. In his annotations he repeated the ancient doubts about the authorship of Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude and Revelation, noting for instance that the style of Revelation differed from that of John's Gospel, as Dionysius of Alexandria had observed.² He did not reject these books, but his discussion encouraged others to raise the question. The site's Journal has an article on the Gutenberg Bible.

Karlstadt

The first Protestant treatise on the canon was written by Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, Luther's colleague at Wittenberg, in 1520: De canonicis scripturis libellus. Karlstadt divided the books of the Bible into three ranks. In the Old Testament he placed the Torah first, the Prophets second and the Writings third, and classed the additional books as apocrypha, distinguishing among them Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, Tobit and 1–2 Maccabees, which were "outside the canon but holy writings", from 3–4 Ezra, Baruch, the Prayer of Manasseh and the additions to Daniel, which he thought should be rejected. In the New Testament he placed the Gospels first, the Pauline letters with 1 Peter and 1 John second, and the seven disputed books (Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2–3 John, Jude and Revelation) third.³ He defended James against Luther's criticism.

Luther

Martin Luther's German New Testament, the "September Testament" of 1522, translated from Erasmus' Greek text, printed the twenty-seven books, but with a distinctive arrangement. The first twenty-three books were numbered in the table of contents; then, after a gap, came Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation, unnumbered. In his preface Luther explained:

Up to this point we have had the true and certain chief books of the New Testament. The four which follow have from ancient times had a different reputation.⁴

In his preface to the New Testament of 1522 he called James "an epistle of straw" (eine recht stroherne Epistel) compared with the Gospel of John, Romans, Galatians and 1 Peter, "for it has nothing of the nature of the Gospel about it".⁵ This phrase was removed from later editions of the preface after 1537. In his preface to James he wrote that he did not regard it as the work of an apostle, but that it contained "many good sayings". He doubted that Hebrews was by an apostle, because of its denial of second repentance in chapter 6. He said of Revelation in 1522 that he could not detect that it was produced by the Holy Spirit; by 1530 he wrote a more positive preface. Luther's judgements were based partly on the ancient doubts recorded by Eusebius and Jerome and partly on his own theological criteria, especially whether a book "teaches Christ" (was Christum treibet).⁶ He did not remove any book from the New Testament, and the order of his German Bible, with Hebrews and James placed after 3 John, survives in German Lutheran Bibles today.

Luther's complete German Bible of 1534 gathered Judith, Wisdom, Tobit, Sirach, Baruch, 1–2 Maccabees, the additions to Esther and Daniel, and the Prayer of Manasseh into a section placed between the Old and New Testaments under the heading:

Apocrypha: that is, books which are not held equal to the Holy Scriptures, and yet are useful and good to read.⁷

3 and 4 Ezra were omitted entirely. This arrangement followed Jerome's distinction and the precedent of some earlier Bibles, such as the Zurich Bible of 1529–1531, which had already placed the additional books together. The site's Journal has an article on Luther's German Bible of 1534.

Zurich and Geneva

The Zurich Bible, produced by Huldrych Zwingli, Leo Jud and their colleagues, was published in parts from 1524 and complete in 1531. It gathered the apocrypha in a separate volume with a preface by Leo Jud stating that these books are not accepted as Scripture by the Hebrews but are read for edification. The French Bible of Pierre Robert Olivétan, printed at Neuchâtel in 1535 with a preface by John Calvin, placed the apocrypha between the Testaments with a similar note. Calvin, in his Antidote to the Council of Trent of 1547, argued that the church of the early centuries had not received these books as canonical and cited Jerome and Rufinus.⁸

The English Bible

William Tyndale's translations of the New Testament (1526) and parts of the Old Testament formed the basis of most later English Bibles. Tyndale followed Luther's order in his New Testament, setting Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation apart, but without Luther's critical prefaces. Miles Coverdale's complete English Bible of 1535 included the apocrypha in a separate section under a heading explaining that these books and treatises had not been reckoned by the early teachers of the church as of equal authority with the other books of the Bible. The Great Bible of 1539, the Geneva Bible of 1560 and the Bishops' Bible of 1568 all included the apocrypha in a separate section.⁹ The site's Journal has articles on the English Bibles between Tyndale and 1611 and where Tyndale learned Hebrew.

The Thirty-Nine Articles

The sixth of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, adopted in their final form in 1571, defines Holy Scripture as "those canonical Books of the Old and New Testament, of whose authority was never any doubt in the Church", lists the books of the Hebrew Bible, and then states:

And the other Books (as Hierome saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine.¹⁰

There follows a list: 3 and 4 Esdras, Tobit, Judith, the rest of Esther, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, the Song of the Three Children, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, the Prayer of Manasseh and 1–2 Maccabees. The New Testament books are listed as "all the books of the New Testament, as they are commonly received". The article explicitly invokes Jerome and preserves his threefold structure.

Reformed Confessions

The Reformed confessions defined the canon more strictly. The French Confession of 1559 and the Belgic Confession of 1561 listed the canonical books by name. Article 6 of the Belgic Confession states that the church "may read and take instruction from" the apocryphal books "so far as they agree with the canonical books", but that "they are far from having such power and efficacy as that we may from their testimony confirm any point of faith".¹¹ The Westminster Confession of Faith of 1647 went further:

The books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the canon of the Scripture; and therefore are of no authority in the church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings.¹²

The Westminster Confession lists the sixty-six books by name. This is the strongest statement of the exclusion of the apocrypha in a major Protestant confession, and it influenced the later practice of printing Bibles without them.

Lutheran Practice

The Lutheran confessional documents, collected in the Book of Concord of 1580, do not include a list of canonical books. Lutheran theologians in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as Martin Chemnitz, distinguished between the protocanonical (homologoumena) and deuterocanonical (antilegomena) books of both Testaments, including the seven disputed New Testament books in the second class. Chemnitz's Examination of the Council of Trent (1565–1573) used the evidence of Eusebius to argue that the disputed books should not be used to establish doctrine.¹³ This distinction among New Testament books faded in the seventeenth century, and later Lutheranism treated the twenty-seven books as equally canonical.

Erasmus and the Humanist Questions

Desiderius Erasmus' Greek New Testament of 1516, the first published edition of the Greek text, raised questions about authorship that bore on the canon. In his annotations Erasmus repeated ancient doubts about Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude and Revelation, citing Eusebius and Jerome, and he doubted that Paul wrote Hebrews or that the apostle John wrote Revelation, while accepting these books as part of the New Testament because of the consensus of the church.¹⁴ His position distinguished between the question of who wrote a book and the question of whether it belonged to the canon, a distinction that had ancient precedents in Origen and Eusebius and that later scholars of all traditions would adopt.

The Complutensian Polyglot

The Complutensian Polyglot Bible, prepared at Alcalá under Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros and printed between 1514 and 1517, though not published until about 1520–1522, gave the Old Testament in Hebrew, Latin and Greek in parallel columns. For the books not extant in Hebrew it printed only the Greek and Latin. Its prologue, echoing Jerome, is reported to note that these books were received by the church "for the edification of the people" rather than for confirming doctrine.¹⁵ The Polyglot is a reminder that, before the Reformation divided the churches, the most ambitious Catholic biblical project of the age printed the Hebrew canon and the additional books in a way that made their different textual histories visible.

The Order of the Lutheran New Testament

Luther's arrangement of the New Testament, in which Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation were placed at the end without numbers in the table of contents, was followed in German Bibles for centuries and spread to translations made under Lutheran influence, such as the Danish Christian III Bible of 1550 and the Swedish Gustav Vasa Bible of 1541.¹⁶ Luther did not remove these books; they remained within the New Testament but in a separate position. His judgement was based on what he regarded as the ancient doubts recorded by Eusebius and the content of the books, and it was a statement of their relative weight, not an exclusion. Later Lutheran theologians, such as Martin Chemnitz in his Examination of the Council of Trent (1565–1573), revived the terms "homologoumena" and "antilegomena" from Eusebius to describe the two classes of New Testament books.¹³

Coverdale and the English Apocrypha

Miles Coverdale's English Bible of 1535, the first complete printed English Bible, followed the Zurich model by gathering the books outside the Hebrew canon into a separate section placed between the Testaments, under the heading "Apocrypha", with a prologue explaining that early Christian writers had not held them in the same esteem as the books of the Hebrew canon.¹⁷ The Matthew Bible of 1537 and the Great Bible of 1539, the first English Bible authorised for use in churches, continued this arrangement, though the Great Bible used the term "Hagiographa" for the section, in an unusual sense. The Geneva Bible of 1560 retained the Apocrypha with a prefatory note that the books were to be read "for the advancement and furtherance of the knowledge of the history, and for the instruction of godly manners", but not to confirm doctrine.¹⁸ Through these editions, the separate section of the Apocrypha, rather than its omission, became the normal form of the English Bible for the following century.

The French and Belgic Confessions

The French (Gallican) Confession of 1559 and the Belgic Confession of 1561 were the first confessions to enumerate the canonical books one by one. Article 6 of the Belgic Confession distinguishes the Apocrypha, which "the church may read and take instruction from, so far as they agree with the canonical books", from the canonical scriptures, which alone have the power to establish doctrine.¹¹ These articles stand closer to the position of the Thirty-Nine Articles than to the later Westminster formulation, and they show that the Protestant canon was defined in stages in the decades after 1520 rather than in a single act.

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Chapter 23. The Council of Trent, 8 April 1546

The Council of Trent, which met in three periods between 1545 and 1563 in the city of Trento in northern Italy, was the Roman Catholic Church's response to the Reformation. At its fourth session, on 8 April 1546, it issued the first decree on the canon of scripture by a council of the Western church with a binding anathema attached. The decree defined the books of the Bible, declared the Vulgate to be authentic for public use, and set out the relationship between scripture and tradition.

The Debate

The council had opened in December 1545 with only a small number of bishops. The question of the canon was discussed in general congregations in February and March 1546. Three positions were represented. Some bishops proposed simply to repeat the list of the Council of Florence. Others, including Cardinal Seripando, the general of the Augustinian order, argued that a distinction should be made, following Jerome, between the canonical books and those that were read for edification. A third group wished to examine the authority of each book. After debate, the council decided to adopt the Florentine list without discussing the distinctions, and to declare all the books, with all their parts, to be equally sacred and canonical.¹ A vote on whether to include a distinction between books was taken, and a majority opposed it.

The Decree

The Decree Concerning the Canonical Scriptures states that the council "receives and venerates with an equal affection of piety and reverence all the books both of the Old and of the New Testament, seeing that one God is the author of both", together with the traditions "received by the Apostles from the mouth of Christ himself, or from the Apostles themselves, the Holy Spirit dictating".² It then lists the books:

Of the Old Testament: the five books of Moses, to wit, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy; Josue, Judges, Ruth, four books of Kings, two of Paralipomenon, the first book of Esdras, and the second which is entitled Nehemias; Tobias, Judith, Esther, Job, the Davidical Psalter, consisting of a hundred and fifty psalms; the Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Canticle of Canticles, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Isaias, Jeremias, with Baruch; Ezechiel, Daniel; the twelve minor prophets ...; two books of the Machabees, the first and the second. Of the New Testament: the four Gospels, according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; the Acts of the Apostles written by Luke the Evangelist; fourteen epistles of Paul the apostle ...; two of Peter the apostle, three of John the apostle, one of the apostle James, one of Jude the apostle, and the Apocalypse of John the apostle.³

But if any one receive not, as sacred and canonical, the said books entire with all their parts, as they have been used to be read in the Catholic Church, and as they are contained in the old Latin vulgate edition; and knowingly and deliberately contemn the traditions aforesaid; let him be anathema.⁴

The phrase "with all their parts" (cum omnibus suis partibus) was intended to include the additions to Esther and Daniel and the disputed passages of the Gospels, such as the ending of Mark and the story of the woman taken in adultery in John. The Prayer of Manasseh and 3 and 4 Esdras were not included. The council's list attributes Hebrews to Paul and the catholic letters to the apostles whose names they bear, though later Catholic teaching has distinguished between canonicity and authorship.

The Vulgate

A second decree issued at the same session declared that "the old and vulgate edition, which, by the lengthened usage of so many years, has been approved of in the Church, be, in public lectures, disputations, sermons and expositions, held as authentic; and that no one is to dare, or presume to reject it under any pretext whatever".⁵ The decree called for an accurate printed edition. This led, after long delay, to the Sixtine Vulgate of 1590, issued by Pope Sixtus V, and then, after its withdrawal, to the Sixto-Clementine Vulgate of 1592 under Clement VIII. The Clementine edition printed the Prayer of Manasseh and 3 and 4 Esdras in an appendix after the New Testament, "lest they perish entirely", since they were quoted by some early Christian writers and found in some manuscripts.⁶ The site's Journal has an article on the Sixtine and Clementine Vulgates.

"Deuterocanonical"

The term "deuterocanonical" was introduced by Sixtus of Siena, a converted Jew who became a Dominican, in his Bibliotheca Sancta of 1566. He distinguished between protocanonical books, "of the first canon", whose authority had never been doubted, and deuterocanonical books, "of the second canon", whose authority had been doubted in the early church but which had been finally received by the church. He applied the term to the additional Old Testament books and to parts of the New Testament, including Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2–3 John, Jude and Revelation.⁷ The terms do not imply a difference in authority after Trent; they describe the history of reception. In Catholic usage they are now applied chiefly to the Old Testament books: Tobit, Judith, 1–2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and the additions to Esther and Daniel.

Assessment

The Tridentine decree did not introduce new books into the Bible. It adopted the list that had been used in the Latin church since the councils of Hippo and Carthage, and that had been repeated at Florence. What was new was its dogmatic form and its anathema, which closed the debate within the Catholic Church that had been possible since Jerome. Seripando's view, and Cajetan's, were no longer permitted. The decree also responded directly to the Protestant reformers' separation of the apocrypha, and it was followed by an increasingly sharp polemic between Catholic and Protestant theologians. The First Vatican Council in 1870 reaffirmed the Tridentine list.⁸

The Florentine Precedent

The decree adopted at Trent repeated, almost word for word, the list of books given in the Decree for the Jacobites (Cantate Domino), issued in 1442 at the Council of Florence as part of an agreement with the Coptic delegation.⁹ That decree had listed the books "inspired by the same Holy Spirit" without pronouncing anathemas or discussing the distinction made by Jerome. At Trent, the legates and the general congregation chose to reproduce the Florentine list rather than to compose a new one, and to add a formal sanction to it. The decision was therefore presented by the council as a confirmation of an existing list rather than an innovation.

The Debate in the General Congregations

The acts of the council, edited in the Concilium Tridentinum series of the Görres-Gesellschaft, record that between February and April 1546 the council members discussed several questions: whether the list should simply be received, whether the books should be examined individually, and whether a distinction should be drawn between two classes of books, as Jerome and Cajetan had done.¹⁰ Girolamo Seripando, prior general of the Augustinians, was among those who favoured noting a distinction between the books "canonical" in the strict sense and those that were "ecclesiastical". The majority decided against any such distinction. Preliminary votes taken in March 1546 recorded divided opinions on whether to discuss the matter further, and the final decree was approved on 8 April by a large majority, though not unanimously.¹¹

The Text of the Decree

The decree, known from its opening words as Sacrosancta, lists the books of the Old Testament as follows: the five books of Moses, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, the four books of Kings (that is, 1–2 Samuel and 1–2 Kings), two of Paralipomenon (Chronicles), the first book of Esdras and the second "which is called Nehemiah", Tobit, Judith, Esther, Job, the Psalter of David with 150 psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Isaiah, Jeremiah with Baruch, Ezekiel, Daniel, the twelve minor prophets, and two books of Maccabees. The New Testament list contains the twenty-seven books.¹² The decree declares anathema on anyone who does not receive "these entire books with all their parts, as they have been accustomed to be read in the Catholic Church, and as they are contained in the old Latin Vulgate edition" as sacred and canonical.

The words "with all their parts" were intended to include the Greek additions to Esther and Daniel, as well as the Letter of Jeremiah, which in the Vulgate forms chapter six of Baruch. The phrase "as they are contained in the old Latin Vulgate" served to identify the books precisely, but it also raised the question of the status of texts printed in some Vulgate editions but absent from the decree's list, such as the Prayer of Manasseh and 3 and 4 Esdras.

The Sixto-Clementine Vulgate and the Appendix

The council had also ordered that the Vulgate be printed "as correctly as possible". The edition issued under Sixtus V in 1590 was quickly withdrawn after his death, and the revised edition published under Clement VIII in 1592, known as the Sixto-Clementine Vulgate, became the standard Catholic Latin Bible until the twentieth century.¹³ Its preface explained that the Prayer of Manasseh and 3 and 4 Esdras, which had not been included in the Tridentine list, were printed in an appendix after the New Testament, "lest they perish altogether", because they were quoted by some early Christian writers and found in some printed and manuscript Bibles.¹⁴ The appendix demonstrates how the decree drew a sharper line than the manuscripts had done.

Reception After Trent

The Tridentine list was reaffirmed at the First Vatican Council in 1870, in the dogmatic constitution Dei Filius, which added that the church holds these books to be sacred and canonical not because they were approved by the church after being composed by human effort, but because they were written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.¹⁵ The canon itself was unchanged. From a historical point of view, the importance of Trent lies in the fact that, for the first time in the Latin church, a list was attached to a solemn conciliar decree with a sanction, closing a question that had been allowed to remain open in theory throughout the Middle Ages.

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Chapter 24. The Orthodox Churches and the Synod of Jerusalem

The Eastern Orthodox churches never defined the canon of scripture at an ecumenical council. They inherited from the Byzantine church the collection of lists ratified at the Council in Trullo in 692, which differed among themselves, and from the Septuagint a Greek Old Testament that included several books not in the Hebrew Bible. In the seventeenth century, in the course of controversies with Protestants and Catholics, Orthodox synods made statements about the canon. These statements did not settle every question, and Orthodox practice still varies between national churches.

The Byzantine Inheritance

As described in Chapters Nine, Fourteen and Twenty, the Greek church knew several lists: the Hebrew count of twenty-two books given by Athanasius, Cyril, Gregory of Nazianzus and John of Damascus, with or without Esther; the list of the Apostolic Canons, which included three books of Maccabees, Judith and Sirach; and the list of Carthage, which included Wisdom, Sirach, Tobit, Judith and Maccabees. All were ratified at Trullo. In practice the Greek church read from the Septuagint, which contained the additional books, and the lectionary used readings from Wisdom, Sirach and other books at vespers and on feast days. The theoretical lists and the practical Bible were thus not identical.¹

Cyril Lucaris

The issue came to a head through the career of Cyril Lucaris (1572–1638), patriarch of Alexandria and later of Constantinople, who had studied in Venice and Padua and corresponded with Protestant theologians. A Confession of Faith published under his name at Geneva in 1629 (Latin) and 1633 (Greek) was strongly Calvinist in tone. Its answer to the third question states that the canonical books are those listed by the Council of Laodicea, and that the books "called by us apocrypha" are so called "because they have not the same authority from the Holy Spirit as the canonical books".² The authenticity of the confession was disputed; Cyril's opponents treated it as his, and his supporters denied it. Cyril was put to death by the Ottoman authorities in 1638, and the confession was condemned by Orthodox synods at Constantinople in 1638, Iași in 1642 and Jerusalem in 1672.

Peter Mogila

The Orthodox Confession of Peter Mogila, metropolitan of Kiev, approved at the Synod of Iași in 1642 and by the four Eastern patriarchs in 1643, did not give a list of books. It cited the additional books, such as Wisdom and Tobit, as scripture in support of doctrine. It was a response to Lucaris' confession.³

The Synod of Jerusalem, 1672

In March 1672 a synod gathered at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem under Dositheos II, patriarch of Jerusalem, a learned man who later wrote a history of the patriarchs of Jerusalem. The synod issued a statement known as the Confession of Dositheos, which answered the Confession of Cyril point by point. In its answer to the third question it says:

Following the rule of the Catholic Church, we call Sacred Scripture all those books which Cyril collected from the Synod of Laodicea, and also those which he foolishly and ignorantly, or rather maliciously, called Apocrypha; to wit, "The Wisdom of Solomon", "Judith", "Tobit", "The History of the Dragon", "The History of Susanna", "The Maccabees", and "The Wisdom of Sirach". For we judge these also to be with the other genuine Books of Divine Scripture genuine parts of Scripture.⁴

The synod argued that "ancient custom, or rather the Catholic Church, which hath delivered to us as genuine the Sacred Gospels and the other Books of Scripture, hath undoubtedly delivered these also as parts of Scripture", and that rejecting them would amount to rejecting the others. The list does not mention 1 Esdras, the Prayer of Manasseh, Psalm 151 or 3 Maccabees, all of which are found in Greek Bibles. The synod did not give a complete list of books, and its statement has been understood as accepting the additional books in general rather than as defining a closed number.⁵

The Russian Church

In the Russian church the influence of Western scholarship led in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to a renewed emphasis on the Hebrew canon. The catechism of Philaret, metropolitan of Moscow, approved by the Holy Synod in 1839, follows Athanasius and the list of twenty-two books, and says that the additional books are not included "because they do not exist in the Hebrew". Philaret added that they were nevertheless read for edification. The Russian Synodal Bible of 1876 included the additional books, marked as non-canonical in some editions. The Russian church thus maintained the distinction between canonical and "non-canonical but read" books (anagignoskomena, "books to be read").⁶

Orthodox Bibles Today

The Greek Orthodox Church uses a Bible based on the Septuagint that includes 1 Esdras, Tobit, Judith, the additions to Esther, 1–3 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh, Psalm 151, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, the Letter of Jeremiah and the additions to Daniel, with 4 Maccabees in an appendix. Some Orthodox scholars call these books anagignoskomena, but they are printed and read with the rest of the Old Testament. The Russian and other Slavonic Bibles include 2 Esdras (corresponding to 4 Ezra in Latin, called 3 Esdras in Slavonic) as well. The Georgian Bible includes 4 Maccabees. The New Testament of all the Orthodox churches has twenty-seven books, but Revelation is still not read in the liturgy.⁷

The Orthodox position may be summarised as follows: the churches accept a wider Old Testament than the Hebrew Bible, based on the Septuagint, but they have never fixed its limits by an ecumenical decree, and different churches and theologians describe the status of the additional books differently.

The Canons of Laodicea and the Apostolic Canons

The Byzantine church inherited several lists that did not agree in every detail. Canon 60 of the Synod of Laodicea, of the later fourth century, lists the books of the Old Testament following the Hebrew canon with Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah, and the New Testament without Revelation, though the authenticity of canon 60 has been questioned because it is absent from some early manuscripts.⁸ The eighty-fifth of the Apostolic Canons, a compilation of about 380, lists among the books of the Old Testament three books of Maccabees and recommends Sirach for the young, and includes in its New Testament the two letters of Clement and the eight books of the Apostolic Constitutions, while omitting Revelation.⁹ The Council in Trullo of 692 ratified both of these together with the lists of Athanasius, Gregory of Nazianzus and Amphilochius, without resolving the differences among them.

John of Damascus and the Byzantine Middle Ages

John of Damascus (about 675–749), in his Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, gave a list of twenty-two Old Testament books on the Hebrew model and described Wisdom and Sirach as "virtuous and noble" but not counted among the twenty-two.¹⁰ His list, like that of Athanasius, places the additional books in a second category. Byzantine manuscripts of the Septuagint, however, continued to contain those books, and they were read in the liturgy. Revelation was rarely copied in Byzantine Greek manuscripts and is never read in the Byzantine lectionary, though it came to be included in printed editions of the Greek New Testament and accepted as canonical.¹¹

The Confession of Dositheus

The Synod of Jerusalem of 1672, under Patriarch Dositheus II of Jerusalem, adopted a confession of faith in eighteen decrees, with four questions and answers attached. In the third question it addressed the canon directly, naming as "genuine parts of scripture" the books of Wisdom, Judith, Tobit, the history of the Dragon (Bel and the Dragon), the history of Susanna, the Maccabees and Sirach, and rejecting the claim that they were apocryphal.¹² The synod's response was directed against the Confession attributed to Cyril Lucaris, published in Latin in Geneva in 1629, which had treated these books as apocryphal in the Reformed manner.¹³ The synod did not issue a complete numbered list of all the books.

Printed Greek Bibles

The printed Greek Old Testament used by the Orthodox churches derives from editions such as the Moscow edition of 1821 and the Athens edition of 1928 issued with the approval of the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece, which follow the Septuagint and include 1 Esdras (Esdras A), 3 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh, and Psalm 151, with 4 Maccabees printed in an appendix.¹⁴ The contents of these editions reflect long liturgical practice rather than a single conciliar list. The Greek Orthodox Old Testament therefore contains more books than the Catholic one, though the precise boundary, especially concerning 4 Maccabees, is treated differently by different editions.

The Slavonic Bible and Russian Discussion

The first complete Church Slavonic Bible was the Gennadius Bible, compiled at Novgorod in 1499 under Archbishop Gennady, which drew on the Latin Vulgate for books not yet available in Slavonic, including 3 Esdras (corresponding to 2 Esdras in English Bibles).¹⁵ The Ostrog Bible, printed in 1581, and the Elizabeth Bible of 1751, which became the standard Slavonic text, retained this broad collection, including 3 Esdras, a book not found in Greek Bibles.¹⁶ In the nineteenth century, Russian theologians such as Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow distinguished between the canonical books and the books he called "non-canonical", following the older Greek lists, while still accepting them for reading in the church. The Russian Synodal Bible, completed in 1876, contains the additional books, and later editions mark them as non-canonical in a note.¹⁷ The Russian and Greek practices therefore give different answers to the same inherited question.

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Chapter 25. The King James Bible, the Apocrypha and the Bible Societies

The Protestant Bible of sixty-six books, without the apocrypha, became the standard form for most English-speaking Protestants only in the nineteenth century. For most of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Protestant Bibles in English, German, Dutch and other languages included the apocrypha in a separate section. The disappearance of the apocrypha from Protestant Bibles was a gradual process, driven partly by confessional principle and partly by the practical decisions of Bible publishers and societies.

The King James Bible of 1611

The translation authorised by King James I and published in 1611 was made by six companies of translators meeting at Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge. The second Cambridge company translated the apocrypha. The 1611 edition placed the apocrypha between the Old and New Testaments under the heading "Apocrypha", and included 1 and 2 Esdras, Tobit, Judith, the rest of Esther, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch with the Epistle of Jeremiah, the Song of the Three Children, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, the Prayer of Manasseh and 1 and 2 Maccabees.¹ The calendar of lessons at the front of the 1611 edition directed readings from the apocrypha on many days, and its marginal references cross-referenced the apocrypha to the Old and New Testaments.

Early Omissions

As early as 1599 some printings of the Geneva Bible omitted the apocrypha, though the volumes were sometimes bound with the omitted section. In 1615 George Abbot, archbishop of Canterbury, forbade the binding of Bibles without the apocrypha on pain of a year's imprisonment, which suggests that the practice existed.² The Westminster Confession of 1647 declared the apocrypha "no part of the canon", and the Long Parliament in 1644 ordered that the apocrypha should not be read in public worship. In the American colonies, the first English Bible printed in America, by Robert Aitken at Philadelphia in 1782, omitted the apocrypha, and most later American Protestant Bibles followed.³

The British and Foreign Bible Society

The decisive change came with the British and Foreign Bible Society, founded in London in 1804 to distribute Bibles "without note or comment". The society, supported by Anglicans and Nonconformists, distributed Bibles in many languages across Europe, including Bibles with the apocrypha for the Lutheran and Catholic churches of the Continent. Scottish members, influenced by the Westminster Confession, objected that the society's funds were being used to circulate books that they regarded as human writings. The "Apocrypha controversy" of 1821–1826 divided the society, and several Scottish auxiliaries seceded. On 3 May 1826 the committee resolved that no funds should be applied to the printing or circulation of Bibles containing the apocrypha, and that only Bibles "without the Apocrypha" would be issued by the society.⁴ The American Bible Society adopted the same policy in 1827.

Since these societies produced a large proportion of the Bibles distributed in the nineteenth century, the decision made the sixty-six-book Bible the familiar form for Protestants in Britain, America and the mission fields. Commercial publishers often continued to print editions with the apocrypha, and the Church of England's lectionary still prescribed readings from them, but the general Protestant public came to regard the apocrypha as foreign to the Bible.

The Revised Version and After

The Revised Version, published in England in 1881 (New Testament), 1885 (Old Testament) and 1895 (Apocrypha), included a separate revision of the apocrypha. The American Standard Version of 1901 did not. In the twentieth century the Revised Standard Version (1952) published the apocrypha separately in 1957, and from 1977 an expanded edition included 3 and 4 Maccabees and Psalm 151 for the use of Orthodox readers. The New Revised Standard Version (1989) and its update (2021) are published in editions with and without the apocrypha, including all the books accepted by Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches.⁵

Ecumenical Bibles

In the later twentieth century Bible societies changed their policy again. The United Bible Societies and the Vatican's Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity agreed in 1968 (revised 1987) on Guidelines for Interconfessional Cooperation in Translating the Bible, which provided that Bibles intended for Catholic and Orthodox use could include the deuterocanonical books, normally printed as a separate section before the New Testament.⁶ Interconfessional Bibles such as the Good News Bible with Deuterocanonicals/Apocrypha (1979) and the German Einheitsübersetzung (1980) followed these guidelines.

The Number of Books

The variety of modern Bibles can now be summarised:

• The Jewish Bible contains twenty-four books (thirty-nine by the Christian count) in three sections: Torah, Prophets and Writings.
• The Protestant Bible contains sixty-six books: thirty-nine in the Old Testament and twenty-seven in the New, with the apocrypha either omitted or printed separately.
• The Roman Catholic Bible contains seventy-three books: forty-six in the Old Testament and twenty-seven in the New.
• The Orthodox Bibles contain between about seventy-six and seventy-nine books, depending on the church.
• The Ethiopian Orthodox Bible contains eighty-one books.
• The Syriac churches use a New Testament of twenty-two or twenty-seven books.⁷

The final chapter sets out these canons in detail.

The Translators and Their Rules

The King James translation was commissioned after the Hampton Court Conference of January 1604. Some fifty scholars were organised in six companies, two each at Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge. The second Cambridge company was assigned "the Prayer of Manasses and the rest of the Apocrypha".⁸ The rules issued by Archbishop Richard Bancroft required the translators to follow the Bishops' Bible of 1568 "as little altered as the truth of the original will permit", and to consult earlier English versions, including Tyndale, Coverdale, Matthew's Bible, the Great Bible and the Geneva Bible.⁹ The translation of the Apocrypha was made principally from the Greek, with reference to the Latin for 2 Esdras, which survives in full only in Latin and other versions, not in Greek.

The Apocrypha in the 1611 Edition

In the folio of 1611 the Apocrypha was printed between the Old and New Testaments, under its own heading, with the following books: 1 and 2 Esdras, Tobit, Judith, the rest of Esther, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch with the Epistle of Jeremiah, the Song of the Three Children, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, the Prayer of Manasses and 1 and 2 Maccabees.¹⁰ The Church of England's Sixth Article (1563, revised 1571) had stated that "the other books (as Hierome saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine", and listed them.¹¹ The 1611 Bible also included marginal cross-references between the Apocrypha and the other books, a feature criticised by some Puritans. The lectionary of the Book of Common Prayer appointed readings from the Apocrypha for weekdays.

The Westminster Confession

The Westminster Confession of Faith, completed in 1646 and adopted by the Church of Scotland in 1647, listed the sixty-six books by name and, in the words quoted in Chapter Twenty-Two, declared that the Apocrypha was "no part of the canon of the Scripture".¹² This statement was sharper than the Thirty-Nine Articles, and it influenced Presbyterian and other Reformed churches in Britain and America. The difference between the Anglican and the Westminster formulations marks a division within Protestantism over the use, rather than the canonical status, of the Apocrypha.

Printers and the Disappearance of the Apocrypha

English Bibles printed without the Apocrypha appeared as early as the 1599 Geneva Bible issues, some of which omitted it despite its listing in the table of contents, and the practice grew in the seventeenth century.¹³ Archbishop George Abbot is reported to have threatened in 1615 a year's imprisonment for printers who issued Bibles without the Apocrypha, which suggests the practice was already common. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cheap Bibles printed in Britain and America often omitted the Apocrypha for reasons of cost as well as conviction.

The Apocrypha Controversy of 1825–1827

The British and Foreign Bible Society, founded in 1804, initially allowed continental auxiliary societies to circulate Bibles containing the Apocrypha, in keeping with local Lutheran and Catholic practice. Objections from Scottish supporters, led by the Edinburgh Bible Society and Robert Haldane, produced a dispute known as the Apocrypha Controversy.¹⁴ In 1826 the committee of the Society resolved that its funds should not be applied to printing or circulating Bibles containing the Apocrypha, and in 1827 it confirmed that it would circulate only Bibles without them.¹⁵ The American Bible Society adopted a similar rule. The resolution had wide consequences, since Bible societies became the principal distributors of scripture in many languages during the nineteenth century, and many translations into African, Asian and Pacific languages were printed without the Apocrypha. The rule was relaxed in the twentieth century, and the Guidelines for Interconfessional Cooperation in Translating the Bible, agreed between the United Bible Societies and the Vatican Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity in 1968 and revised in 1987, provided for editions containing the deuterocanonical books.¹⁶

The Revised Version Apocrypha

When the English Revised Version was published (New Testament 1881, Old Testament 1885), a revised Apocrypha followed separately in 1895. In the United States the Revised Standard Version Apocrypha appeared in 1957, and the New Revised Standard Version (1989) was issued in editions with an expanded section including 3 and 4 Maccabees and Psalm 151 for the use of Orthodox readers.¹⁷ These editions show that, in the modern period, decisions about the contents of printed Bibles have been taken by publishers and translation committees working for different communities, rather than by any single body.

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Chapter 26. The Canons Today

The preceding chapters have followed the processes by which communities recognised, developed and chose their scriptures over some two and a half thousand years. This final chapter sets out the results as they stand today, comparing the contents of the principal canons. The tables simplify a complicated picture; manuscripts, editions and authorities within each tradition vary, and the notes indicate the main uncertainties.

The Common Core

All Jewish and Christian Bibles share the books of the Hebrew Bible. All Christian Bibles share the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, except the lectionary Bible of the Assyrian Church of the East and some Syriac traditions, which use twenty-two. This common core, the thirty-nine books of the Hebrew Bible in the Christian count and the twenty-seven of the New Testament, accounts for the great majority of the text in every Bible. The differences concern a group of books and additions of Jewish origin preserved in Greek, and a small number of books preserved in Ethiopia and in Syriac and Slavonic traditions.

The Old Testament Compared

The following table compares the main Old Testament canons. "Yes" means that the book is part of the canonical Old Testament in that tradition; "App." means that it is printed in an appendix or a separate section; "No" means it is not included.

The table counts the Protestant apocrypha as they appear in the King James Version and in the Thirty-Nine Articles; many Protestant Bibles omit them entirely. The Catholic appendix refers to the Clementine Vulgate; modern Catholic Bibles do not usually print it. The Ethiopian list follows the most common modern form of the narrower canon and varies between sources. The Slavonic Bible's counting of the Ezra books differs from the Greek and Latin: what is 2 Esdras in English Bibles is 3 Esdras in Slavonic.¹

The New Testament Compared

The Order of Books

The canons differ in the order of books as well as in their contents. The Jewish Bible ends with Chronicles; the Christian Old Testament with Malachi. Within the Christian Old Testament, the Catholic Bible places Tobit and Judith after Nehemiah, Wisdom and Sirach after the Song of Songs, Baruch after Lamentations, and 1–2 Maccabees at the end. Protestant Bibles that include the apocrypha place them between the Testaments. The Greek Orthodox Old Testament follows the Septuagint order, placing the Twelve before Isaiah. In the New Testament, most Bibles place the Pauline letters before the catholic letters, but Greek manuscripts and some modern editions follow the order Gospels, Acts, catholic letters, Pauline letters, Revelation, as in the letter of Athanasius.²

What the History Shows

The history traced in this page suggests several conclusions that are widely shared among historians of the canon, whatever their own convictions.

First, the canon was formed over a long period, by a gradual process of recognition rather than by a single act. No early Jewish council fixed the Hebrew Bible, and no early Christian council fixed the New Testament. The lists of the fourth century describe a consensus that had largely formed already.

Second, the core of each Testament was recognised early. The Torah was recognised by the fifth or fourth century BCE, the Prophets by the second century BCE, and most of the Writings by the first century CE. The four Gospels and the letters of Paul were recognised as authoritative by the late second century.

Third, the edges remained open for a long time. The status of Esther, the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes was discussed by the rabbis; the status of Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2–3 John, Jude and Revelation was debated by Christians for centuries; and the additional books of the Greek Old Testament were treated differently by different authorities.

Fourth, the canons were shaped by use. The books read in worship, quoted by teachers and copied by scribes became the canon. Lists and councils confirmed what was already in use more often than they introduced change.

Fifth, the differences that persist today, between the Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, Ethiopian and Syriac Bibles, are the result of different choices made at different times from a shared inheritance, especially the choice between the Hebrew collection and the wider Greek collection for the Old Testament.³

The Site's Related Pages

The site's existing pages on the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Greek Septuagint, the development of the Greek Bible canon and Codex Bezae explore aspects of this history in more detail, as do the Journal's articles on the Septuagint and the Letter of Aristeas and the Muratorian Fragment.

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Timeline

The dates below are approximate where marked "about"; many are disputed, as discussed in the chapters.

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Glossary

Anagignoskomena. Greek, "books to be read": the Orthodox term for the books of the Greek Old Testament not found in the Hebrew Bible.

Antilegomena. Greek, "spoken against": Eusebius' term for the disputed books of the New Testament.

Apocrypha. Greek, "hidden things". In ancient use, secret or spurious books; in Protestant use, the additional books of the Greek and Latin Old Testament; in Catholic use, books outside the canon altogether, which Protestants call pseudepigrapha.

Baraita. A rabbinic tradition from the period of the Mishnah that was not included in the Mishnah itself.

Canon. Greek kanōn, "measuring rod": first a rule of faith, and from the fourth century a list of books recognised as scripture.

Codex. A book made of folded leaves bound at one edge, as distinct from a scroll.

Deuterocanonical. "Of the second canon": the term introduced by Sixtus of Siena in 1566 for books whose canonical status was doubted in the early church but later accepted.

Diatessaron. "Through four": Tatian's harmony of the four Gospels.

Festal Letter. The annual Easter letter of the bishops of Alexandria.

Ge'ez. The classical language of Ethiopia and the Ethiopian Bible.

Hexapla. Origen's six-column edition of the Old Testament in Hebrew and Greek.

Homologoumena. Greek, "agreed upon": Eusebius' term for the accepted books.

Masoretes. Jewish scholars of the seventh to tenth centuries who added vowels, accents and notes to the Hebrew text.

Megillot. The five scrolls read at Jewish festivals: Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and Esther.

Notha. Greek, "spurious": Eusebius' term for rejected books.

Pandect. A complete Bible in a single volume.

Peshitta. The standard Syriac version of the Bible.

Protocanonical. Books of the first canon, never disputed.

Pseudepigrapha. Books written under a false name, especially Jewish writings of the Second Temple period outside both the Hebrew and the Greek canons.

Septuagint. The Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, named after the seventy (or seventy-two) translators of the legend.

Stichometry. A list of books with the number of lines (stichoi) in each.

Tanakh. The Jewish Bible, an acronym of Torah, Nevi'im (Prophets) and Ketuvim (Writings).

Vulgate. The Latin Bible associated with Jerome, the standard Bible of the medieval Western church.

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Suggestions for Further Study

The works below are recommended as starting points for readers who wish to pursue the subject. They represent a range of perspectives and approaches; all are historical in method.

General Surveys

• Lee Martin McDonald, The Formation of the Biblical Canon, 2 vols. (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017). The fullest modern survey of both Testaments.
• Lee Martin McDonald and James A. Sanders, eds., The Canon Debate (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002). Essays by leading scholars on all aspects of the question.
• Edmon L. Gallagher and John D. Meade, The Biblical Canon Lists from Early Christianity: Texts and Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Every early Christian canon list in the original language and translation.
• Timothy H. Lim, The Formation of the Jewish Canon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).

The Hebrew Bible and Old Testament

• Roger Beckwith, The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church (London: SPCK, 1985).
• Sid Z. Leiman, The Canonization of Hebrew Scripture (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1976).
• Eugene Ulrich, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Developmental Composition of the Bible (Leiden: Brill, 2015).
• Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012).
• Jack P. Lewis, "What Do We Mean by Jabneh?", Journal of Bible and Religion 32 (1964): 125–32.

The New Testament

• Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
• Harry Y. Gamble, The New Testament Canon: Its Making and Meaning (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985).
• F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1988).
• Geoffrey Mark Hahneman, The Muratorian Fragment and the Development of the Canon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
• Charles E. Hill, Who Chose the Gospels? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

Particular Traditions

• Sebastian Brock, The Bible in the Syriac Tradition, 2nd ed. (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2006).
• Eugen J. Pentiuc, The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
• Bruce M. Metzger, An Introduction to the Apocrypha (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957).
• Hubert Jedin, A History of the Council of Trent, vol. 2 (London: Nelson, 1961).
• Bruce M. Metzger, The Early Versions of the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).

Primary Sources Online

• Sefaria, the Mishnah, Talmud and Maimonides in Hebrew and English.
• Christian Classics Ethereal Library, including Schaff's Creeds of Christendom.
• Papal Encyclicals Online, the decrees of the councils of Florence and Trent.
• The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library, images of the scrolls.

Questions for Study

• How far do the internal references in the Hebrew Bible to written texts indicate a process of canon formation?
• Does the evidence of Qumran support the existence of a fixed collection of Writings in the first century BCE?
• Why did the four Gospels, and no others, come to be accepted, and how early?
• What criteria did ancient writers apply when judging a disputed book, and how consistent were they?
• How did the different decisions of the sixteenth century about the Old Testament relate to the earlier debates of Jerome and Augustine?

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