The Formation of the Canon

How the Church came to recognize the twenty-seven books of the New Testament and the books of the Old as Scripture — not by a single decree but by a long discernment carried in the Fathers’ lists, the local and ecumenical councils, and, decisively, the books’ use in the Church’s worship. The word “canon” (kanōn, “rule, measuring-rod”) names the list of books received as the rule of faith.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

What “Canon” Means, and What It Does Not

The Greek kanōn means a rule or measuring-rod; applied to Scripture it names the authoritative list of books received by the Church as inspired and normative. The Orthodox account of how this list came to be differs in emphasis from the popular Western picture of a canon “decided at a council.” There was no single moment of decision. The canon was recognized over centuries — the Church discerning, through use and reflection in the Holy Spirit, which books bore the apostolic faith — and the conciliar and patristic lists are records of a discernment already largely accomplished in the Church’s life, above all in her worship (Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance, Oxford, 1987, on canon as recognition rather than imposition; Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 1993, “The Bible”). This is the concrete form of the principle that Scripture is the Church’s book: it was the Church that discerned her own Scriptures (see The Bible as the Church’s Book).

The New Testament: Core and Contested Books

By the mid-second century the four Gospels and the Pauline corpus were functioning as Scripture across the churches. The reaction to the heretic Marcion (c. 144), who cut the Christian Scriptures down to an edited Luke and ten Pauline epistles, and to the Gnostic pseudo-gospels, sharpened the Church’s need to name the books she truly received. The Muratorian Fragment — a Latin list usually dated to the late second century, though a minority of scholars argue for a fourth-century date — already names most of the New Testament, including the four Gospels, Acts, thirteen Pauline letters, Jude, two Johannine epistles, and the Apocalypse (Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament, 1987, ch. on the Muratorian Fragment; the fourth-century dating is argued by A. C. Sundberg and G. M. Hahneman).

Eusebius of Caesarea, writing his Ecclesiastical History around 325, gives the clearest early snapshot of the state of the question. He sorts the books into the acknowledged (homologoumena) — the four Gospels, Acts, the fourteen Pauline epistles (counting Hebrews), 1 John, 1 Peter, and (with a note of hesitation) the Apocalypse; the disputed (antilegomena) yet familiar to many — James, Jude, 2 Peter, and 2–3 John; and the spurious or rejected (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.25). The books that were long “disputed” in the East are precisely the shorter Catholic Epistles and, in a special way, the Apocalypse — a point that still marks Orthodox practice today.

The first surviving list of exactly the twenty-seven books of the present New Testament, and no others, is the 39th Festal Letter of St. Athanasius of Alexandria (AD 367). Athanasius names the twenty-seven, calls them alone “canonical” and “the springs of salvation,” and distinguishes them from a second class of books “appointed to be read” for edification and from the “apocrypha” of the heretics (Athanasius, Festal Letter 39 [PG 26:1436]; trans. NPNF II/4). Regional councils then ratified the emerging consensus: the Council of Laodicea (c. 363), and the North African councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397, reaffirmed 419), which list the New Testament canon. The Quinisext (“in Trullo”) Council of 692, received in the East as ecumenical in authority, did not compose a new list but confirmed the earlier canonical collections — including the Apostolic Canons (Canon 85), the Laodicean and Carthaginian lists, and the canonical letters of Athanasius, Basil, and others — thereby giving the Eastern Church a settled but composite conciliar warrant for the canon (Quinisext Council, 692, Canon 2, confirming the named prior canons; see The Seven Ecumenical Councils). No Ecumenical Council in the classic list of seven issued a stand-alone decree defining the biblical canon; the Orthodox canon rests on this convergence of patristic lists and conciliar confirmations rather than on a single dogmatic definition.

The Decisive Role of Liturgical Use

For the Orthodox account, the deepest criterion running beneath all these lists was use in the Church’s worship. A book was recognized as Scripture because the Church read it in her assemblies as the Word of God; the lists ratified what the liturgical life had already received. This is why the criteria the Fathers name — apostolic origin, orthodoxy of content (agreement with the Rule of Faith), and universal or widespread reception among the churches — all converge on the practice of reading in the Eucharistic assembly (Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament, 1987, on the criteria; Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993). Breck stresses that the canon is inseparable from the lex orandi, the Church’s praying: the books that shaped and were shaped by her worship are the books she knew as her own (Breck, Scripture in Tradition, SVS Press, 2001, ch. 1). The liturgical criterion also explains a striking peculiarity of Orthodox practice, described next.

The Apocalypse: Canonical but Not Read

The Revelation (Apocalypse) of St. John holds a distinctive place in the Orthodox New Testament. It is fully canonical, but it is the one New Testament book with no appointed place in the Byzantine lectionary — it is never read at the regular services (Hopko, The Orthodox Faith, vol. 1, “The Book of Revelation,” OCA, 1981). This is the long shadow of its “disputed” status in the East, where several major Fathers of the fourth century (and the influential Antiochene tradition) hesitated over it; it was among the last books to gain settled acceptance. A partial exception is the Athonite custom of reading the Apocalypse outside the lectionary cycle, for instance during the Holy Saturday vigil (see The Lectionary and the Cycles). The case neatly illustrates the Orthodox principle: canonicity and liturgical use are closely bound, and a book can be received as inspired Scripture yet not be appointed for public reading.

The Old Testament: Inheriting a Wider Bible

The Church did not construct her Old Testament from scratch; she inherited the Scriptures of Israel as she had received them — in Greek, in the Septuagint (LXX), the Bible of the Greek-speaking Jewish world and of the apostolic mission (see The Septuagint as the Church’s Old Testament). The New Testament authors overwhelmingly quote the Old Testament in its Septuagint form, and the Fathers used the LXX as their Old Testament. Because the Septuagint tradition carried a wider collection of books than the later rabbinic Hebrew canon — including Wisdom, Sirach, Tobit, Judith, the Maccabees, Baruch, and others — the Christian Old Testament was, from the beginning, broader than the Bible the rabbis fixed (Pentiuc, The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox Tradition, Oxford, 2014, on the LXX-based Christian Old Testament).

The precise boundary of this wider Old Testament, however, was never uniformly fixed in the East, and the Fathers’ Old Testament lists vary. Athanasius’ Festal Letter 39 (367) counts a stricter list of twenty-two “canonical” Old Testament books (following the Hebrew reckoning) while placing Wisdom, Sirach, Esther, Judith, and Tobit among the books “to be read” (Athanasius, Festal Letter 39; trans. NPNF II/4). Others — and the actual liturgical and patristic usage of the Church — treated the wider books as Scripture. The result is a genuine and enduring question about the edges of the Old Testament canon, which the next file treats in full (see The Wider Old Testament and the Anagignoskomena).

A Canon Received, Not Legislated

The upshot, for the Orthodox account, is that the canon was received rather than legislated. Its core — the four Gospels, the Pauline and Catholic epistles, Acts, and the Law, Prophets, and Writings of Israel — was firmly and universally held from an early date. Its edges — the once-disputed Catholic epistles and the Apocalypse in the New Testament, the wider anagignoskomena in the Old — were settled more slowly, by use and reflection, and in the case of the wider Old Testament remain to this day not perfectly uniform across the Orthodox Churches. This unhurried, un-dogmatic character is itself characteristic: the Church rests the authority of her Scriptures not on a single juridical act but on the Spirit-led life in which those Scriptures were written, gathered, read, and prayed (Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament, 1987; Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993; Pentiuc, The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox Tradition, 2014).

References

Athanasius of Alexandria. Festal Letter 39 (AD 367) [PG 26:1436]; trans. NPNF II/4. (The first list of the twenty-seven-book New Testament; the twenty-two-book Old Testament core; the books “to be read.”)
Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History 3.25 — the homologoumena, antilegomena, and spurious books.
Metzger, Bruce M. The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. (The Muratorian Fragment; the criteria; canon as recognition.)
Quinisext (in Trullo) Council, 692, Canon 2; Apostolic Canon 85; Council of Laodicea (c. 363), Canon 60; Councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397/419). (The conciliar confirmations of the canon.)
Breck, John. Scripture in Tradition: The Bible and Its Interpretation in the Orthodox Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001. (Ch. 1, canon and lex orandi.)
Pentiuc, Eugen J. The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. (The LXX-based Christian Old Testament and the varying Fathers’ lists.)
Hopko, Thomas. The Orthodox Faith, vol. 1: Doctrine and Scripture. New York: Orthodox Church in America, 1981. (“The Book of Revelation” and its non-use in the lectionary.)
Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993. (“The Bible.”)