Who decided which books became the Bible?

Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, sent an annual letter announcing the date of Easter. In the one written for 367 he listed the books "handed down, and accredited as Divine", and the New Testament section names exactly the twenty-seven books that most Christian New Testaments contain today.

He also did something more revealing. He named a second group of books that were "not indeed included in the Canon, but appointed by the Fathers to be read" by new converts, which tells you that the line he was drawing was one people needed telling about. And he rejected a third group outright, the books he called apocryphal, as "an invention of heretics".

Regional councils in North Africa confirmed the same twenty-seven books, at Hippo in 393 and Carthage four years later. The African code that gathers their canons prints the list in full and then says what it thinks it is doing: “these are the things which we have received from our fathers to be read in church.” By then the Gospels had been read aloud at Sunday worship for more than two centuries, and Eusebius could call the letters of Paul undisputed.

The books that took longest to settle were the ones at the margins. Eusebius, writing before any of those councils, files James, Jude, 2 Peter and 2 and 3 John among the disputed writings “which are nevertheless recognized by many”, notes that some reject Hebrews on the ground that Paul did not write it, and cannot place Revelation at all: he lists it among the accepted books “if it really seem proper” and again among the rejected, “which some, as I said, reject, but which others class with the accepted books”. The long argument was about those. Gospels under other names were set aside with less of one: Eusebius dismisses those of Peter, Thomas and Matthias as the fictions of heretics, and a bishop of Antioch who had let one church read the Gospel of Peter withdrew the permission once he had read it himself.

Catholic and Orthodox Old Testaments include books that Protestant churches do not count as canonical, and either leave out of their Bibles or print apart as the Apocrypha. All three sides say so, in their own words and in opposite directions. The Council of Trent listed Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and two books of Maccabees among the sacred books in 1546. The Westminster Confession says the books “commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the canon of the Scripture”. And a Jerusalem synod of 1672 names much the same books, Wisdom, Judith, Tobit, Bel and the Dragon, Susanna, Maccabees and Sirach, and the act of calling them apocryphal, which it says was done “foolishly and ignorantly, or rather maliciously”. The disagreement is old: the African canon counts Tobit, Judith and two books of Maccabees as scripture, where Athanasius had set Judith and Tobit among the books to be read but not the canon. It was sharpened at the Reformation, and has never been resolved.

The New Testament differs at the edges too. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church counts thirty-five books in its New Testament and eighty-one in its Bible, and the Church of the East has traditionally read a New Testament without 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude and Revelation.

A Bible is therefore always a Bible according to some tradition. That is a fact about the book on the shelf, not a criticism of it.

Eusebius already applies three tests: whether a book came from an apostle, whether the church’s own writers had used it, and whether it agreed with what was already taught. How far tests like these decided anything, and how far they were reasons given for what congregations were reading anyway, is one of the questions still argued over.

Some of it ran the other way round. Eusebius did not count 2 Peter in the canon, but it had been read with the other scriptures because many found it useful, and both Athanasius’s list and the African one include it.

Early Christian writing that did not enter the canon survives unevenly, some of it only in fragments or quotations, some only because a collection of codices turned up in Egypt in 1945. What was circulating in the second century that we have no copy of, and no mention of, cannot be counted.

Three churches describe it in their own documents. The Catholic catechism says "It was by the apostolic Tradition that the Church discerned which writings are to be included in the list of the sacred books." The Synod of Jerusalem of 1672 says the Church "has delivered to us as genuine the Sacred Gospels and the other Books of Scripture". The Westminster Confession says the authority of Scripture "dependeth not upon the testimony of any man, or church; but wholly upon God". Each is a claim about what was happening through the history rather than an alternative account of it.