How the Canon was Chosen

We have been coming back to this question since the first unit, and now we are finally going to address it head-on. Our library contains sixty-six books. Someone had to decide which writings belonged and which did not. How did that happen? Who made those decisions? And what gave them the authority?

This is what we call the study of the canon, and it is one of the most important topics in this course.

Let’s start with the word itself, because it has an interesting background. The word “canon” comes from an old word for a reed or a measuring rod, which was a straight stick used as a ruler or standard. Over time, it came to mean a rule, a standard, or a list of things that measure up.

So when we talk about the canon of Scripture, we mean the list of books that a community recognized as meeting the standard, carrying real authority, and belonging to the collection used to measure its faith and life. The canon is the official shelf, the approved library.

Now, I want to clear up a common misunderstanding. Many people think the canon was decided in one dramatic meeting, with church leaders voting on which books to include and then posting the final list.

That idea is mostly a myth, made popular by novels and rumors. In reality, the process was much slower and more natural, and in many ways, more interesting. The canon formed gradually over centuries, as communities read these writings, used them in worship, valued them, copied and shared them, and slowly reached a broad agreement about which ones truly mattered.

The official lists came at the end of this long process, confirming what communities had already recognized in practice.

So how did a book earn its place on the shelf? Communities did not follow a single written rulebook, but several basic criteria appeared again and again as decisions were made. One was age and connection to the source.

Writings closely linked to the founding events and figures – Moses and the prophets for the Old Testament, Jesus and his apostles for the New – were given special importance.

Another was widespread use. A book that was read, valued, and treated as authoritative in many different communities, not just one, had a strong case.

Consistency with the accepted faith was also important; a writing needed to fit with what was already believed and not contradict the core tradition.

Underneath all these, communities of faith believed these books had an authority they were recognizing. They saw themselves as discovering, not creating, this authority.

I want you to keep two truths in mind, and learning to hold them together is part of what this course aims to teach. First, the canon was recognized through a real human process, with debate, disagreement, and gradual agreement over time.

Second, the communities saw themselves as recognizing an authority already present in these writings, not giving them authority from nothing. Both views are honest.

In this unit, I will mostly share the human story of how this recognition happened, because it is often left out and is truly interesting. No matter what you think about the deeper question of authority, you should know how the canon actually took shape.

So remember the image of the measuring rod. A canon is a list of writings that a community decided measured up, gathered not in one afternoon but through a long, very human process of reading, using, debating, and recognizing.

Now let’s dive into the older part of the story: how the Hebrew Scriptures that became our Old Testament were formed. This process took a very long time. While scholars debate many details, the overall outline is fairly clear and important to understand.

Remember from Unit 2 that the Jewish Scriptures are divided into three sections: the Torah, the Nevi’im (Prophets), and the Ketuvim (Writings). These sections are more than just a way to organize the books.

Many scholars believe they show the order in which the collection developed. The Torah, or the five books of Moses, was recognized as authoritative first and became the foundation of Jewish life and worship. The Prophets were accepted as a group after that. The Writings, which include the Psalms, wisdom books, and others, were the last to be fully recognized.

So, the Hebrew canon grew in layers, starting with the Torah at the center and adding the other sections over time.

By the time of the New Testament, the Torah and the Prophets were largely established and respected in all Jewish communities. The exact boundaries of the Writings, however, were still being decided, with a few books still under discussion. This is why people often say the Jewish canon was mostly, but not completely, set by the first century. The core was solid, but the edges took longer to become fixed.

Now here is an important detail for the rest of our course, and it connects to what we learned about languages in Unit 3.

Centuries before Jesus, the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek for the large Jewish community living outside their homeland, especially in Egypt, where people spoke Greek every day. This well-known Greek translation is often called the Septuagint, or shortened to the Roman numeral for seventy, because of a story that about seventy translators worked on it.

Strictly speaking, the Septuagint began as a translation of the Torah alone. Both Philo and Josephus, following the Letter of Aristeas, describe the Alexandrian project as a rendering of the Mosaic law; the Prophets and Writings were translated later, by other hands, and the name “Septuagint” was only afterward applied to the whole collection.

These Greek translations became the Bible for many Greek-speaking Jews, and later, it was the version most used by early Christians, who also spoke and wrote in Greek. When New Testament authors quote the Old Testament, they often were relying on a Greek translation.

This confusion about what the Septuagint was, and the conflation of it beyond just the Torah, as it originally referred to, adds some complication here.

In modern copies of the Septuagint, there are extra writings that were not part of the Hebrew collection that Jewish communities later finalized. However, as we will dive into more later on, when these other Greek writings would be collected into something called the Septuagint is not certain. What can be pointed out, though, is that many of these extra works are what we call the Deuterocanonical books today.

This matters, but not in the way it is often described. You will frequently read that the Septuagint “contained extra books,” and that the early church, using the Greek Bible, inherited a longer canon as a package deal. That explanation is tidier than the evidence allows.

A few problems stand in the way. First, there was no fixed “Septuagint” in the early centuries; no bound volume with a table of contents. Greek-speaking Jews and Christians used collections of scrolls, and later codices, whose contents varied from place to place.

The great codices we lean on today – Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus – come from the fourth and fifth centuries; they disagree with one another about what to include, and none of them matches any church’s canon exactly. Not to mention, this sort of codex, one that contained the entire, or most of the Bible, was rare.

Instead, we generally find single works, or at most, just a couple of works, bound together.

As for modern printed editions of the Septuagint, they are scholarly reconstructions, not a snapshot of what any ancient congregation held to be scripture.

Second, inclusion in a Greek manuscript did not settle the question of canonicity. As Edmon Gallagher has argued in detail, early Christian writers regularly read, cited, and valued books that they did not count in their canonical lists.

Jerome, Athanasius, Origen, and others could quote such works while explicitly distinguishing them from the received books, often appealing to the shorter Hebrew list as the standard for the Old Testament. Presence in a codex tells us what someone found useful to copy and read; it does not tell us what they thought belonged in the canon.

Third, the alignment does not hold. The Catholic canon fixed at Trent does not include everything found in our modern Septuagint editions; 3 and 4 Maccabees, Psalm 151, and 1 Esdras sit outside it, though the Orthodox churches receive some of these. If the longer canons were merely inherited wholesale from the Greek Bible, we would expect a much closer match than we actually find.

So what does account for the difference between the Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Old Testaments? A longer and more human process: which books were widely read and preached in a given region, which were cited as authoritative by influential teachers, how the Latin tradition transmitted them in the West, and how those inherited habits were formally defined only under the pressure of later controversy.

It wouldn’t be until Trent that Catholics made an official ruling. At the same time, for Protestants it was more in confessions that set the disputed books aside as Apocrypha, valuable for edification but outside the rule of faith. The Orthodox churches, meanwhile, have generally been content with less precise boundaries.

This is the difference we promised to cover in Unit 1. The honest answer is not that one side kept the Greek Bible and the other kept the Hebrew one. It is that each tradition inherited a slightly different set of reading habits, and each drew its formal line at a different moment, for reasons of its own.

So the Old Testament canon developed in layers over centuries: first the Torah, then the Prophets, then the Writings. The core was settled early –  no Jewish or Christian community ever seriously disputed Genesis or Isaiah –  while the edges took much longer to harden, and in some traditions never fully did.

The disagreement that persists among Christians today is not a straightforward inheritance from the Greek translations. It grew out of something messier: books that were widely read, preached, and copied alongside the undisputed scriptures, without anyone in the early centuries agreeing on where exactly the line fell.

Some writers cited them freely as edifying; others named them useful but not canonical; the manuscripts kept transmitting them regardless. That unresolved middle ground was passed down for centuries and only became a hard boundary when later controversy forced each tradition to state a formal position; and each stated a slightly different one.

Remember this, because it shows how the Bible on your shelf reflects a long accumulation of reading habits, regional practice, and eventual formal decisions, rather than a single moment when someone chose a list.

Now, we can move on and look at how the New Testament came together. This story takes place over the first few centuries of the Christian movement and includes many interesting people and real debates. This is also where the myth of a single vote in one room is most common and most incorrect. Let’s dive in and see what really happened.

In the earliest years of Christianity, there was no New Testament. Christians used the Hebrew Scriptures, usually in Greek, as their Bible. They also shared memories and teachings about Jesus by word of mouth, as part of an oral tradition.

Over time, writings began to appear and spread; first Paul’s letters to different churches, then the Gospels, and then other letters and works. These writings were copied, shared among communities, and read aloud in worship.

This followed the same natural pattern as the Old Testament: authority was recognized through use, love, and wide acceptance, long before any official list was made.

Then something happened that pushed the church to define its collection of books. In the second century, a man named Marcion suggested a much shorter canon. He rejected all of the Hebrew Scriptures and kept only a shortened version of Luke’s Gospel and some of Paul’s letters, edited to fit his own ideas.

Marcion was eventually considered outside the faith, being declared a heretic, but his proposal had a big impact. By presenting his own narrow list, he forced the wider church to think carefully about which writings truly belonged. Sometimes, a community only figures out what it believes when someone challenges it, and Marcion did just that.

Now, we do need to make a note here. This view of Marcion and his impact on the canon is the consensus view. However, it’s a consensus that is a bit shaky around the edges. Some scholars suggest that Marcion may not have edited any of the works he used, and instead may have inherited them, including what may have been a proto-edition of Luke.

Others question just how much influence he had on the canon. Was he truly responsible for kicking off a larger movement to define what was canonical or not? His influence may have been overstated. Either way, Marcion had some part to play here, and eventually, we will discuss that much more fully.

Over the next few centuries, the church worked toward agreement. One important early document is the Muratorian Fragment, a damaged ancient list of accepted New Testament books. This list shows that the collection was already taking shape long before any official decision. It looks a lot like our New Testament today, though not quite the same, which shows that the core books were agreed on early, while a few others were still being debated.

As with Marcion, we must also add a note here as well. While the Muratorian Fragment has generally been dated originally to the second century, there is some doubt about that. Some have suggested that it may instead be a third- or fourth-century document. Wherever its dating may truly land, though, what we do see during this second-century period is a move to producing lists of what books are worthwhile.

There were real debates about which books belonged at the edges of the New Testament. Some books that are now firmly included, like Hebrews, James, Second Peter, Second and Third John, Jude, and Revelation, were questioned for a time in some places.

On the other hand, some writings that were respected and widely read in certain communities did not end up in the final list. So, just like with the Old Testament, it took time for the boundaries of the New Testament to become clear, and there was real discussion about what should be included.

The lists that match our New Testament first appear in the late fourth century. Athanasius’s Festal Letter of 367 names the twenty-seven books exactly as we have them, and several regional councils, first in Rome in 382, and then in North Africa –  Hippo in 393, Carthage in 397 and again in 419 – affirmed the same collection. These were not ecumenical councils legislating for the whole church; they were local synods ratifying what their churches already read.

It is worth being careful about what this settled. These fourth-century lists did not create the canon from scratch. The core had been functioning as scripture for generations: the four Gospels, Acts, and the Pauline letters were essentially undisputed well before anyone wrote a list.

What the lists did was give formal shape to a consensus that had grown up through use, through what was actually read aloud in worship, copied, and appealed to in argument.

But it is equally worth being careful not to overstate the closure. Eusebius, writing only decades earlier, still sorted books into accepted, disputed, and rejected, and placed James, Jude, 2 Peter, and 2 and 3 John in the disputed column. The Syriac-speaking churches used the Peshitta, which omitted those rejected works along with Revelation, and some of them did so for centuries afterward.

Revelation itself remained contested in much of the Greek East long after Athanasius wrote; several later Byzantine lists leave it out, and it never entered the Eastern lectionary. Hebrews had the mirror-image problem, doubted in the West while accepted in the East.

Manuscripts also kept transmitting borderline material: Codex Sinaiticus includes the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas, and Alexandrinus carries 1 and 2 Clement.

So the accurate picture is neither a canon imposed by council decree nor one universally fixed by 400. It is a long process of consolidation in which the center held firmly and early, the margins stayed negotiable for a good while longer, and different regions arrived at the same twenty-seven books at noticeably different times.

Now, let’s talk openly about the books that were not included, since their existence often surprises or unsettles people.

Besides the writings that became our New Testament, the ancient world produced many other Christian texts: gospels, acts, letters, and apocalypses attributed to different figures. Some were sincere works of devotion, while others came from groups the wider church saw as outside the main path.

Scholars call many of these the New Testament apocrypha and the pseudepigrapha, which means writings under a false or borrowed name. You might have heard of some, like the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Judas.

These writings are worth knowing about, and we will examine several of them closely in the advanced course. For now, hold onto two things.

First, they are genuinely useful historical sources. They tell us what various Christian groups in the second, third, and fourth centuries were thinking, arguing about, and hoping to read; the Gospel of Thomas and the Acts of Paul and Thecla open windows onto real communities, whatever their relationship to the apostolic writings.

Second, and more important for our purposes: these books were not serious rivals to the twenty-seven. It is tempting to picture a large pile of candidates from which a committee selected the winners, but that is not what happened.

Most of these texts were written considerably later than the New Testament writings, circulated in limited regions or within particular groups, and were never widely read in the churches at large. The books that ended up in the canon were, for the most part, the ones already being read everywhere.

The contested cases- the ones we saw a moment ago, like 2 Peter, Jude, and Revelation – were disputes at the edges of the accepted collection, not contests between the canonical books and these outside writings.

The apocryphal texts illuminate the world around the New Testament rather than the process that produced it. That distinction is worth keeping straight.

So, here is what we have learned in Unit 5. The word canon means a measuring rod or standard, and the canon of Scripture is the list of books a community decided measured up. This list formed slowly, over centuries, through use and agreement, not through a single dramatic vote.

It was a much messier process than it is often portrayed. The edges would be debated for centuries.

In the coming sections, we will move on and show exactly how this story affects us today.