Who Decided the New Testament Had 27 Books? (Hint: Not Constantine)

Ask a room of churchgoers who decided which books belong in the New Testament, and someone will usually mention Constantine and the Council of Nicaea — the idea, popularized by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, that the emperor and a room of bishops voted on which gospels to keep in 325 CE. It’s a great story. It’s also not true. Nicaea produced twenty canons (rulings on church discipline), and not one of them concerns the New Testament’s contents. The council’s actual business was the Arian controversy — whether the Son is of the same essence as the Father. So who did settle the shape of the New Testament, and when? The honest answer is nobody, on one day. It was a consensus that built up over roughly two centuries.

The Muratorian Fragment: our oldest list, and an incomplete one

The earliest surviving candidate for a New Testament list is the Muratorian Fragment, an 85-line Latin manuscript discovered in Milan’s Biblioteca Ambrosiana by the Italian scholar Ludovico Antonio Muratori, who published it in 1740. The manuscript itself dates from the seventh or eighth century, but its content is widely believed to translate a much older Greek original. The traditional argument for an early date rests on an internal clue: the fragment describes the Shepherd of Hermas as having been written “quite recently, in our times” by Hermas, brother of Pius, bishop of Rome — which points to a composition date around 170 CE.

That date is genuinely contested. Albert C. Sundberg (1973) and, building on his work, Geoffrey Mark Hahneman (1992) argued the fragment actually comes from a fourth-century eastern source rather than second-century Rome. Their case hasn’t persuaded most scholars — Everett Ferguson’s rebuttal was judged by Bruce Metzger to have “all but demolished” the fourth-century thesis — but the debate isn’t fully settled, and it’s worth saying so plainly rather than pretending the second-century date is beyond question.

Whichever date is right, the content is the more interesting story. The Muratorian Fragment names most of today’s 27 books but has no mention at all of Hebrews, James, 1 Peter, or 2 Peter. It does, however, include the Apocalypse of Peter — with the qualifier that “some of us do not want it read in church” — and the Wisdom of Solomon, a book that later tradition placed in the Old Testament Apocrypha, not the New Testament. Whatever moment in the second through fourth centuries this list reflects, the boundary of “the New Testament” was still visibly unsettled.

The Muratorian Fragment, held at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan (Cod. J 101 sup.) · Public Domain (PD-old-100-expired). A photograph of the actual manuscript preserving the earliest known candidate for a New Testament list.

The moment today’s 27 books first appear together

The earliest surviving document that lists exactly the 27 books we now call the New Testament — in their familiar order — is a pastoral letter, not a council decree. Every year, the bishop of Alexandria sent churches a festal letter announcing the date of Easter. In his 39th such letter, dated January 7, 367 CE, Athanasius of Alexandria used the occasion to also lay out his understanding of the Old and New Testament canons. His New Testament list matches ours exactly, which is why scholars generally treat this letter as the first authoritative statement of the 27-book canon as it stands today.

What followed were regional councils — Hippo in 393, and Carthage in 397 and 419 — that formally affirmed this same list. The key word is affirmed, not decided. These councils weren’t voting a canon into existence from scratch; they were putting a stamp of institutional agreement on a consensus that had already been forming for generations, church by church, as congregations read certain texts in worship and gradually stopped reading others. No emperor ordered it, and no single vote settled it. It was the slow convergence of how the church was already using its texts.

References

• Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987)
• Geoffrey Mark Hahneman, The Muratorian Fragment and the Development of the Canon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)
• Albert C. Sundberg, “Canon Muratori: A Fourth-Century List,” Harvard Theological Review 66.1 (1973): 1–41
• Athanasius of Alexandria, Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter (367 CE)
• Michael J. Kruger, The Question of Canon: Challenging the Status Quo in the New Testament Debate (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2013)

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