The Canon of Scripture
F. F. Bruce
A more approachable history of the same question, from an evangelical scholar.
git log --canon
Nobody voted on the Bible in one room. It was edited for 1,700 years, by a lot of people, and some of them never agreed. Here is the log.
- - removed or demoted
- + added or kept
- ~ moved or disputed
Two different collections in circulation
- Kept or added:Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1-2 Maccabees (Greek collections)
- Kept or added:1 Enoch and Jubilees (copied and kept at Qumran)
There was no single printed "Old Testament" yet. Greek-speaking communities read books that later Hebrew lists left out, and the Qumran library held many copies of Enoch and Jubilees.
Go deeperFirst known fixed list. A hard fork.
- Removed:the entire Hebrew Bible
- Removed:Matthew, Mark, John
- Moved or disputed:one edited Luke and ten letters of Paul
Marcion rejected the God of Genesis and published a short list of his own. Mainstream churches excommunicated him, and then had to start saying which books they did accept.
Locks the gospel count at four
- Kept or added:Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and only those
- Removed:Gospel of Judas (condemned by name)
In Against Heresies, Irenaeus argues there can be exactly four gospels, as there are four winds and four corners of the earth. Many other gospels were in circulation when he wrote this.
Go deeperlate 2nd century (date debated)
Earliest surviving list close to ours
- Kept or added:Wisdom of Solomon, inside the New Testament list
- Moved or disputed:Apocalypse of Peter (some will not have it read in church)
- Moved or disputed:Shepherd of Hermas (read it privately, not in church)
A Latin fragment that lists most of what became the New Testament. It also shows how much was still open.
Go deeperSorts the books into accepted, disputed and rejected
- Moved or disputed:James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John (disputed)
- Moved or disputed:Revelation (listed as accepted and as spurious)
- Removed:Shepherd of Hermas, Barnabas, Didache (spurious)
- Removed:Gospels of Thomas, Peter, Matthias (rejected)
Church History 3.25 is a survey, not a ruling. It shows books we now take for granted still under argument three centuries after Jesus.
Did not vote on the Bible
- no files changed
Nicaea dealt with Arius, the date of Easter and church discipline. No surviving canon of the council touches the list of books. The story that it chose the Bible is much later legend, and novels spread it further.
Go deeperA complete Bible still ships the extras
- Kept or added:Epistle of Barnabas, after Revelation
- Kept or added:Shepherd of Hermas, after Revelation
One of the two oldest near-complete Bibles in existence includes both books. You can read it online, page by page.
Go deeperFirst list of exactly our 27 New Testament books
- Kept or added:the 27 books of the New Testament, in one list
- Moved or disputed:Shepherd of Hermas, Didache (for new converts only)
- Removed:every other book, called the invention of heretics
His 39th Festal Letter went out to churches across Egypt. It was one bishop's instruction, not a universal decree, and other lists kept circulating for centuries.
Go deeperThirteen books buried in a jar
- Moved or disputed:Thomas, Philip, Apocryphon of John and others, moved to underground storage
Papers reused in the bindings date the codices to the mid-fourth century. Linking the burial to Athanasius is an attractive guess and nobody can prove it. Someone chose burial over burning.
Go deeperRegional councils approve a list
- Kept or added:the 27 New Testament books
- Kept or added:Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, 1-2 Maccabees
North African bishops, with Augustine involved, recognize the list. These are the councils people usually mean, and they were regional.
Flags the extra books, translates some anyway
- Moved or disputed:books outside the Hebrew list, marked as non-canonical in his prefaces
Jerome preferred the Hebrew list and said so. His Latin Bible, the Vulgate, carried those books for the next thousand years regardless.
Long-running branch that never merged the cuts
- Kept or added:1 Enoch
- Kept or added:Jubilees
While the Greek and Latin worlds let these books go, Ethiopia copied them in Ge'ez. That is why we have complete texts at all.
Go deeperMoves books to a new section called Apocrypha
- Moved or disputed:Tobit through Maccabees, grouped between the testaments
- Moved or disputed:Hebrews, James, Jude, Revelation, moved to the back of the New Testament
Luther kept them in his Bible and called them useful and good to read. The reordering is still visible in German Bibles.
Catholic list made binding
- Kept or added:Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1-2 Maccabees, as canon
- Removed:1-2 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh, outside the canon
This is the first time the Catholic Church defined its list with that level of finality. The rejected books were later printed in an appendix to the official Latin Bible.
Go deeperPrints the Apocrypha between the testaments
- Kept or added:the Apocrypha, including 1-2 Esdras
The original King James Bible included them. Readers who think of the KJV as the Bible without the extras are thinking of later printings.
Go deeperCarries Enoch back to Europe
- Kept or added:1 Enoch, Ethiopic manuscripts, returned to Western readers
The Scottish traveler brought copies home from Ethiopia. Richard Laurence published an English translation in 1821, and Western readers could finally check what Jude had been quoting.
Go deeperStops funding Bibles with the Apocrypha
- Removed:the Apocrypha, from most English Protestant Bibles
No council did this. A funding policy did. Mass-distributed Bibles stopped carrying the books, and within a few generations most English readers had never seen them.
Buys a codex with the Gospel of Mary
- Kept or added:Gospel of Mary, ten pages missing
The Berlin Codex was not published until 1955. Pages 1-6 and 11-14 of the gospel are gone.
Go deeperDigs up the jar
- Kept or added:Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Philip, Apocryphon of John and about 50 more
Texts scholars knew mostly from the people condemning them, in their own words at last.
Go deeperThe Dead Sea Scrolls surface
- Kept or added:Aramaic fragments of 1 Enoch
- Kept or added:Book of Giants, about 15 copies of Jubilees
Hebrew manuscripts a thousand years older than any previously known. Also proof that Enoch was read in Judea long before Jude quoted it.
Go deeper
What the log shows
Read it top to bottom and three things stand out. There was no moment when it all got decided. The people doing the editing disagreed with each other, and some of those disagreements, such as the one with Ethiopia, never ended. And the most recent big change in the English-speaking world came from a funding policy, not a council.
Three lists exist today, and each is a real community's answer. If this makes you trust the Bible less, sit with that. If it makes you trust it more because so many hands had to agree, sit with that too.
Common questions
Who decided which books are in the Bible?
No single person or council did. Books came into use across churches over about three centuries, Athanasius listed the 27 New Testament books in 367, regional synods approved the list in the 390s, and the Catholic Church formally defined its full list only at Trent in 1546.
When was the Bible canon finalized?
It depends on the tradition. The Catholic canon was formally fixed in 1546. Protestant Bibles dropped the Apocrypha in practice only after 1826. The Ethiopian Orthodox canon is larger still and includes 1 Enoch and Jubilees.
What was removed from the Bible?
Strictly, there was never one agreed Bible to remove things from. The closest thing to removal is the Protestant Apocrypha, printed in the 1611 King James and dropped from most English Bibles in the 1800s.
To go further
The Canon of the New Testament
Bruce M. Metzger
The reference on how the list actually formed, from a scholar who spent a lifetime on it.
Lost Christianities
Bart D. Ehrman
The story behind the texts: who wrote them, who lost the argument, and how the winners told it afterward.
These are plain store links. We earn nothing from them. How this works.
One lost book a week
What it says, why it was cut, and which edition is worth your money. Plus the full reading list today.