The Canon

It is tempting to file the canon under church history and move on. Resist that, because the boundary of the collection decides what counts as context, and context is the whole of this discipline. Every rule you have learned in this track assumes that a passage sits inside something larger. Which larger thing it sits inside is precisely what the canon question settles.

Take the concrete case you worked in the inquiry. Your Old Testament ends with Malachi, which promises Elijah before the day of the LORD. The next page begins Matthew, and by chapter 3 there is a man in camel's hair by the Jordan. The arrangement makes a claim. The Hebrew Bible, in the ordering the synagogue uses, ends with 2 Chronicles and Cyrus's decree to go up and build, leaving the reader standing on a road with a commission in hand. Both endings are ancient. Neither is neutral. A reader who has only ever seen one will not know that the other exists, and will mistake an editorial arrangement for the shape of revelation itself.

The same point holds inside the collection. Daniel sits among the Prophets in Christian Bibles and among the Writings in the Hebrew Bible, which changes the genre expectations a reader brings to it before a word is read. Ruth follows Judges in your Bible, which makes it a story about the period of the judges; in the Hebrew arrangement it sits among the Writings, often read at the Feast of Weeks, which makes it a story about harvest and loyalty and covenant inclusion. Nothing in the text changed. The neighbours changed.

And the practical stakes are not theoretical for your students. Many of them live where the Bible on the shelf next door has more books than theirs, or fewer. If they cannot give an honest account of why, they will either be silent or offer a caricature, and the caricature will be discovered. What follows tries to state each position as its own defenders state it, which means some of it will sound like an argument against the tradition you happen to belong to. That is the point of the exercise.

Start with the ordering, because it is the least contested and the most quickly useful. The Hebrew Bible has three divisions: the Torah, the Nevi'im or Prophets, and the Ketuvim or Writings, which is where the Hebrew acronym Tanakh comes from. It counts twenty-four books, because the Twelve are one book, Samuel is one, Kings is one, Chronicles is one, and Ezra and Nehemiah are counted together. Josephus, writing around AD 95 in Against Apion 1.37-43, counts twenty-two, gathering the same material differently, and says flatly that nothing has been added since the reign of Artaxerxes. The apocalypse now numbered 4 Ezra, written around AD 100, has God dictating ninety-four books of which twenty-four are to be published openly and seventy reserved for the wise, which tells you that the number twenty-four was in circulation.

The Christian Old Testament follows a different arrangement, broadly that of the Greek Bible as it came through the Latin Vulgate: law, then histories, then poetry and wisdom, then prophets. Be careful how you say this. There is no single Septuagint order. The great fourth and fifth century codices, Vaticanus, Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus, differ from one another in both order and contents, and they are Christian productions, so using them as evidence for what a first-century Greek-speaking Jew had on the shelf involves a step that has to be argued rather than assumed.

The threefold division is old. The prologue to the Greek translation of Sirach, written around 132 BC, speaks of the law and the prophets and the other books of our fathers. Luke 24:44 has the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms, and whether Psalms there means the Psalter or stands for the whole third division is debated. The Dead Sea Scrolls library at Qumran contains copies of nearly every book of the Hebrew Bible and also Jubilees, 1 Enoch and the community's own writings, and one text usually cited as 4QMMT refers to the book of Moses and the words of the prophets and of David. Whether the community had a canon in our sense is genuinely unsettled.

Now the piece of scholarship you most need to unlearn if you were taught it. Many older books, and a great many websites, say that a rabbinic council at Jamnia, or Yavneh, around AD 90 fixed the Hebrew canon, and some add that it did so in reaction to Christianity. That account originates with Heinrich Graetz in 1871 and it is now largely abandoned. Jack P. Lewis's 1964 article, asking what we actually mean by Jabneh, took the evidence apart, and subsequent work by Sid Leiman, Roger Beckwith, Gunter Stemberger and Lee Martin McDonald, scholars who disagree with each other about much else, has not restored it. What the rabbinic sources record, at Mishnah Yadayim 3:5 and Eduyot 5:3, are disputes about whether Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs render the hands unclean, which is the idiom for whether they are holy books. Those are arguments about two or three titles inside a collection already functioning, conducted in a rabbinic academy, not decrees of a council constituting a canon. There was no such council. Say so plainly, and note that abandoning Jamnia does not by itself tell you when the collection did close, which remains disputed, with serious cases made for the second century BC and for the second century AD.

That brings us to the books at issue: Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach or Ecclesiasticus, Baruch with the Letter of Jeremiah, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and the additions to Esther and Daniel. Catholics call them deuterocanonical, a term coined by Sixtus of Siena in 1566 meaning second-listed rather than second-rate. Protestants call them the Apocrypha. The naming is already an argument.

The Roman Catholic case, as Catholic writers make it. The Church received a wider collection from the beginning and used it in worship for a millennium and a half. The apostles quote the Greek Bible far more often than the Hebrew. Augustine defended the wider list, and the regional councils of Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397 and 419 published it. The canon is not determined by the decisions of the post-Christian synagogue, and the Reformers' appeal to the Hebrew collection amounts to letting a non-Christian authority settle a Christian question. The Council of Trent, in its fourth session on 8 April 1546, listed forty-six Old Testament books and attached an anathema, but Catholic writers insist Trent defined rather than invented, and they point out that Trent also excluded books that had circulated in Vulgate manuscripts, namely 3 and 4 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh, which is hard to explain if the council were simply maximising.

The Orthodox case, as Orthodox writers make it. The canon is a liturgical and ecclesial fact before it is a list, and the books the Church reads are the books the Church has. That is not an evasion; it is a claim about what kind of thing a canon is. A list is a late question and a largely Western one, and the churches were reading and preaching these books for centuries before anyone felt the need to fix their number, so a tradition that never produced a list has not failed to answer a question, it has declined a question it did not ask. Eastern Orthodoxy receives the same additions as Rome and generally more: 1 Esdras, Psalm 151, the Prayer of Manasseh, 3 Maccabees, with 4 Maccabees often in an appendix; the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo canon is wider still and includes Jubilees and 1 Enoch. The Synod of Jerusalem in 1672, under Dositheus, affirmed the wider collection against the Calvinising confession that had been circulated in 1629 under the name of Cyril Lucaris. Orthodox theologians frequently observe that no ecumenical council ever settled the matter and treat that as fitting rather than as an embarrassment, since the Church's reading practice is the reality a list can only approximate.

The Protestant case, as the Reformers made it. Three arguments, and none of them is the one most often attributed to them. First, the collection entrusted to Israel is the standard, and Paul in Romans 3:2 says the Jews were entrusted with the very words of God. Second, and they leaned on this hardest, Jerome had already drawn the distinction: in his prologues to the Vulgate he separated the canonical books from books the Church reads for edification but does not use to establish doctrine. The Reformers were claiming a precedent inside the Latin tradition, not inventing a novelty. Third, these books are nowhere cited as scripture in the New Testament. The early Protestant conclusion was modest. Luther's 1534 Bible gathered them between the Testaments under a heading saying they are not held equal to the scriptures but are useful and good to read, and Article VI of the Thirty-nine Articles follows Jerome almost word for word. Only later does the line harden, as at Westminster in 1646, where the Confession says at 1.3 that they are no part of the canon and of no authority in the Church of God. Protestantism is not of one mind here either.

Each of the three positions has a fact it has to handle rather than deploy, and a teacher who names only one of the three is not teaching. The Protestant position must handle two. Jude 14-15 quotes 1 Enoch as prophecy, and no Western church receives 1 Enoch, so New Testament citation cannot be a sufficient criterion for anybody. And Hebrews 11:35 draws on martyrdoms recorded in 2 Maccabees and nowhere in the shorter Old Testament, so a New Testament writer knew and used a book the Protestant canon excludes. There is a Protestant reply to the second, that using a story is not the same as treating a book as scripture, but you should notice that the reply is a reply and not a datum.

The Catholic position has to handle Athanasius and Cajetan. Athanasius, whose list of the New Testament in 367 is the one the whole Church later kept, put Esther, Wisdom, Sirach, Judith and Tobit outside the canon in the same letter, among books to be read by those coming to instruction; so a father and doctor of the Church drew a line the Catholic position does not draw. And Cardinal Cajetan, the Dominican who had examined Luther at Augsburg, wrote at the end of his commentary on the historical books of the Old Testament, published in 1532 and dedicated to Clement VII, that the judgement of councils and of doctors on these books is to be reduced to the correction of Jerome. The narrower view was a Catholic option held by a cardinal in good standing until Trent closed it, which is awkward for any account in which the wider canon was simply the Church's settled mind all along.

The Orthodox position has to handle its own variety. If the canon is what the Church reads, then the criterion has produced different collections in churches that all claim it: the Greek, Slavonic and Ethiopian Bibles do not contain the same books, and the Ethiopian Church, reading Jubilees and 1 Enoch, is applying exactly the same rule with a different result. A criterion that yields several boundaries has not yet yielded a boundary, and a boundary is the thing the interpretive question needs. Orthodox writers answer that the question is wrongly posed, which is a real answer; but it is an answer, and the reader should see that it is doing work.

The first thing to say is that there was no moment. No council convened to decide, no vote was taken, and the twenty-seven books were in use for generations before anyone wrote the list we now have. The process was gradual, regional, and untidy, and the evidence for it is fragmentary enough that the dates of the key witnesses are themselves argued about.

Marcion is where most accounts begin. He came to Rome around 140 and broke with the church there about 144. He rejected the Old Testament and its God entirely and published a Bible consisting of an edited Luke, which his followers called the Evangelion, and ten letters of Paul, the Apostolikon. Adolf von Harnack argued in his 1921 study that Marcion effectively invented the idea of a Christian canon and forced the church to answer with one of its own. Others, John Barton among them, argue that gospels and Paul were already functioning authoritatively and that Marcion accelerated a process rather than starting it. Two cautions. Everything we know about Marcion's text comes from hostile witnesses, chiefly Tertullian's five books against him and Epiphanius, so reconstructions are inference. And the fact that Marcion had to cut things shows that something was already there to cut.

Irenaeus, writing Against Heresies around 180, treats the fourfold gospel as settled and argues for it theologically, in a famous passage at 3.11.8 that appeals to the four zones of the world and the four winds. The argument is not persuasive by modern standards. Its value as evidence is that by 180 in Lyon the four gospels are a given, and an author defending them reaches for cosmology because he does not need to reach for documents.

The Muratorian fragment is the earliest surviving list, and it is also the most disputed piece of evidence in the field. It is eighty-five lines of poor Latin in a codex at the Ambrosian Library in Milan, published by Ludovico Antonio Muratori in 1740. The traditional date, roughly 170 to 200, rests on the fragment's remark that the Shepherd of Hermas was written very recently, in our own times, while Pius was bishop of Rome; Pius died around 154. Albert Sundberg in 1973 and Geoffrey Mark Hahneman in 1992 argued for a fourth-century Eastern origin instead, and while most scholars have kept the second-century date the question is genuinely open, so quote the fragment with the date flagged as contested. Its beginning is lost and the surviving text starts mid-sentence, describing Luke as the third gospel, so four gospels are implied. It has Acts, thirteen letters of Paul, Jude, two letters of John, the Wisdom of Solomon, the Apocalypse of John, and the Apocalypse of Peter with a note that some will not have it read in church. It omits Hebrews, James, and 1 and 2 Peter. It excludes the Shepherd from public reading while allowing private use, and it names outright forgeries.

Eusebius, around 325, gives the most useful snapshot because he sorts rather than simply lists. In Ecclesiastical History 3.25 he divides the books into the acknowledged, the homologoumena; the disputed but widely known, the antilegomena, where he puts James, Jude, 2 Peter and 2 and 3 John; the spurious; and heretical fabrications. Revelation he handles awkwardly, mentioning it on more than one side of his own scheme, which is itself evidence of how divided opinion was.

Athanasius, in his thirty-ninth Festal Letter at Easter 367, gives the earliest surviving list of exactly the twenty-seven books we have, using a participle from the same root as canon for the books that are included. Before you cite him as the man who settled it, read the rest of the letter. His Old Testament list has twenty-two books, and he puts Esther not among them but among books to be read by those coming to instruction, along with Wisdom, Sirach, Judith and Tobit. Athanasius's Bible is neither the Protestant one nor the Catholic one.

After Athanasius the regional councils publish lists: Hippo in 393, Carthage in 397 and again in 419, the latter asking that the ruling be confirmed by the church across the sea. The Synod of Laodicea, around 363, restricts public reading to canonical books, though the list attached as its sixtieth canon, which omits Revelation, is of doubtful authenticity. Keep the scale of these in view. They are regional synods ratifying what was already in use in their region. Be precise about what came later, because this is a point a knowledgeable Catholic reader will check. No ecumenical council of the first Christian millennium defined the New Testament canon. A later one did list it: the Council of Florence, in the bull Cantate Domino of 4 February 1442, gives the canonical books, and Catholic theology treats that as a definition by an ecumenical council, catalogued at Denzinger 1334. What Trent added in 1546 was a solemn definition with an anathema attached, which is a different and stronger act, and that is the claim to make rather than the claim that Trent was first.

The disputed books, taken one at a time, tell you what the arguments were about. Hebrews was doubted in the Latin West because its authorship was uncertain and it was not obviously Pauline. Revelation was doubted in the Greek East, where Dionysius of Alexandria argued on stylistic grounds that the apostle John did not write it; the Syriac Peshitta, from the early fifth century, has twenty-two books, omitting 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude and Revelation, and some Syriac churches still use a twenty-two book New Testament; Revelation is to this day not read liturgically in the Byzantine rite. James, Jude, 2 Peter and 2 and 3 John are Eusebius's antilegomena, small letters with thin early attestation. And on the other side, Codex Sinaiticus includes the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas, while Codex Alexandrinus includes 1 and 2 Clement, which means that the great Bibles of the fourth and fifth centuries were not all bound the same way.

The criteria that were actually applied can be reconstructed from how the arguments were conducted, and there are four or five. Apostolicity: written by an apostle or by a close associate, which is how Tertullian defends Mark through Peter and Luke through Paul. Conformity to the rule of faith: agreement with what the churches already confessed. Catholicity: received across the churches rather than by one region or one sect. Antiquity: not recent, which is what rules out the Shepherd on the Muratorian fragment's own reasoning. And use in public worship, which is less a criterion than the evidence the others were weighed against. Notice which criterion is absent. Inspiration is not used as a test, because every contender claimed it, and a criterion that does not divide the field is no criterion at all.

Here is the question underneath all of it. When the churches settled on these books, were they recognising an authority the books already had, or conferring authority on them? The answer you give determines what you think you are doing when you open the book.

Four answers follow, and each carries the difficulty its own abler defenders concede, because a position presented without its cost has not been presented. The Catholic answer denies that the question is a real alternative. The Church recognises and then authoritatively declares; it does not create the authority of what it declares, any more than a court creates the law it states. The Second Vatican Council's Dei Verbum and the Catechism both frame it this way, and the force of the argument is simple and hard to get round: the canon is not itself a biblical list, so a Christian who receives a canon has already received something from the Church's tradition, whether he admits it or not. The difficulty: the declaration came very late, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and it drew a line that Athanasius, Jerome and Cajetan had each drawn differently, so the account has to explain how the Church's mind could be settled while its doctors were divided.

The Reformed answer is recognition. Calvin takes this up in the Institutes at 1.7, answering the Roman appeal to a line of Augustine's, from his work against a Manichaean letter, that he would not believe the gospel unless the authority of the church moved him. Calvin's reply is that scripture is self-authenticating, autopistos in the Greek term he borrows, and that certainty about it comes from the inward witness of the Spirit rather than from the church's verdict. The Westminster Confession follows at 1.4 and 1.5: the authority of scripture depends on God alone, and full persuasion comes from the inward work of the Spirit. The difficulty, which its abler defenders concede, is that this yields assurance about the books one has while supplying no public procedure for adjudicating a disputed one. That is why a phrase like a fallible collection of infallible books, used by R. C. Sproul in describing the Protestant position, has both defenders and sharp critics within Protestantism itself.

The Orthodox answer is that the canon is neither recognised by the individual nor conferred by a decree, but lived. Scripture is what the Church prays and preaches, and it is inseparable from the liturgy in which it is read and from the tradition that carries it; the Church and the scriptures are given together, so asking which authorises the other misdescribes the relation. Orthodox writers add that this is not a softer version of the Catholic answer but a different one, because it does not locate the act in a magisterial definition at all, and that the absence of a dogmatic list is therefore appropriate rather than an unfinished task. The difficulty is the one set out in section 2: lived reception has in fact produced different collections in different Orthodox churches, so the answer explains what scripture is without telling you where it stops.

A fourth answer reframes the question rather than answering it. Herman Ridderbos argued in Redemptive History and the New Testament Scriptures that the canon is a function of the history of redemption itself: it closes with the apostolic foundation of the church, not by anybody's decision, so the church's recognition is a consequence of something that had already happened. In a different key, Brevard Childs and James Sanders shifted attention from how the list formed to what it means to read a text in its canonical form, and Childs's Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture in 1979 is where to start. The difficulty is that neither proposal tells you what to do about a book whose apostolic foundation is exactly what was disputed, which returns you to the question you were trying to reframe.

The historical-critical answer is that the canon is the contingent outcome of conflicts that could have gone otherwise, and that the winners wrote the account. Walter Bauer's Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, published in 1934, is the classic statement, and recent versions appear in the work of Bart Ehrman and David Brakke. The difficulty is that the strong form has taken heavy criticism, particularly for projecting fourth-century conditions back onto the second, and for inferring from the fact that a process was contested that its outcome was arbitrary, which does not follow. The weak form, though, is just what the sources show: the process was political as well as theological, some good books were nearly lost, and some lost books were not obviously worse than the ones that survived. A Christian account of the canon has to be able to say that without flinching, because the sources say it.

What does all this actually change about your reading? Four things. First, you now know that where the collection ends is an editorial decision with interpretive force, so you will notice when a reading depends on a book's neighbours rather than on the book. Second, you will distinguish arguing from a book from arguing about a book. If your hearer does not receive Sirach, a doctrine built on Sirach is not an argument to her; and if she receives it and you do not, then an argument that assumes her Bible is the wrong size is not an argument to her either. Naming the difference is courtesy, not compromise. Third, you will handle the disputed books with a proper mixture of confidence and care, since Hebrews, James, 2 Peter and Revelation were all doubted somewhere and are all now read as scripture by every major tradition, which is a fact that cuts against both an easy triumphalism and an easy scepticism. Fourth, and most usefully, you will stop treating the canon as an embarrassing question to be got past quickly. It is a question about how God gives a book to a community over time, which is the same question the rest of this module has been asking, only asked about the covers instead of the contents.