MIRACULOUS MIRACLES^™

Nobody sat down to write a Bible. The Gospel was preached, argued over, suffered for and celebrated at the altar for a generation before a line of the New Testament existed. The earliest surviving Christian writing is probably Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians, around AD 50 or 51 — and it is a letter, written to one troubled congregation about one set of problems, not a chapter of a planned volume.

The four Gospels were written across roughly the second half of the first century; the datings are argued and this site gives the range rather than a false precision. Every one of them was written to be read in a particular church, and every one of them circulated on its own before anyone bound them together.

So when the New Testament writers say "the scriptures", they are never talking about themselves. They mean the Old Testament. Which means the real question is not how the Church got the Bible. It is how the Church came to recognise which of her own writings were Scripture — and that took three hundred years, several arguments, and a good deal of disagreement between saints.

Different Jewish communities held different collections. The Sadducees are reported to have accepted only the five books of Moses. The community at Qumran copied Isaiah and Genesis and also kept Jubilees and Enoch, which no one holds as Scripture today except the Ethiopian Church. There was a settled core — the Law, the Prophets — and a fringe that was not settled.

Greek-speaking Jews read the Septuagint, the translation begun in Alexandria in the third century BC. It was wider than the collection the rabbis later fixed, and it is the version the New Testament writers overwhelmingly quote — sometimes in wording that exists in the Greek and not in the Hebrew. Matthew 1:23 reads Isaiah 7:14 as "a virgin shall conceive", following the Greek parthenos; the Hebrew almah is broader.

The popular idea that a Jewish council at Jamnia closed the canon around AD 90, and that Christians ought therefore to follow its list, does not survive contact with the sources. There is no record of such a council deciding any such thing. The phrase was coined by Heinrich Graetz in 1871 and the hypothesis was dismantled by Jack P. Lewis in 1964; what the rabbinic sources actually show is a school at Yavneh discussing whether certain books "defile the hands", which is not the same question.

Around 144 Marcion of Sinope was expelled from the church at Rome. He taught that the God of the Old Testament was a lesser and crueller being than the Father of Jesus Christ, and he acted on it: he produced a Bible with no Old Testament whatsoever, consisting of a shortened Luke and ten letters of Paul, edited to remove what he took to be Jewish corruption.

This forced a question nobody had needed to answer in writing. The Church's reply was not, at first, a rival list. It was an appeal to what the churches everywhere actually read aloud when they gathered — which is why the oldest surviving orthodox canon list, the Muratorian fragment, is concerned less with abstract inspiration than with what may be read publicly in church.

That fragment, a Latin manuscript preserving what is generally taken to be a Greek original of the late second century, already names four Gospels, Acts, thirteen letters of Paul, Jude, letters of John and the Apocalypse. It also does something we should notice: it names forgeries and refuses them by name.

Eusebius of Caesarea, writing his Church History, divided the Christian writings into the acknowledged, the disputed, and the spurious. In the first he put the four Gospels, Acts, the letters of Paul, 1 John and 1 Peter. In the second — disputed, though recognised by many — he put James, Jude, 2 Peter, and 2 and 3 John.

Those are, almost exactly, the books that would still be argued about twelve hundred years later. The Reformation did not invent doubts about James; it inherited them.

Eusebius could not place Revelation at all, and said so, listing it in one place among the accepted and in another among the rejected, "if it seem proper", according to whose opinion you followed. This matters for a reason that has nothing to do with Catholic or Protestant: Eusebius was present at the Council of Nicaea. If Nicaea had settled the canon, the man who was in the room would not have been writing this.

In 367 Athanasius of Alexandria sent out his thirty-ninth Festal Letter, and in it appears the first surviving list of exactly the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, no more and no fewer, that every Christian communion on earth now holds. It ends: "Let no man add to these, neither let him take ought from these."

But Athanasius should not be enlisted too quickly by either side, and this page will not do it. His Old Testament list is neither the Catholic one nor the Protestant one. He leaves Esther out of the canon entirely, placing it among books "not indeed included in the Canon, but appointed by the Fathers to be read" — alongside Wisdom, Sirach, Judith and Tobit. Anyone who cites Athanasius against the seven books has also cited him against Esther.

Augustine gave the rule that actually decided the matter, and it was not a theory of inspiration but a rule of evidence: follow the churches. Prefer what all the catholic churches receive; where they differ, weigh the number of the churches and their authority. Applied to the fourth-century Latin West, that rule produced the list the African councils then wrote down.

The Council of Hippo in 393 and the Third Council of Carthage in 397 put it in a canon of church law, framed exactly as the practical question it was: what may be read aloud in church under the name of the divine Scriptures. Carthage was reaffirmed in 419. Its list of the Old Testament includes Tobit, Judith, and the two books of Maccabees, and its "five books of Solomon" takes in Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus.

A Council of Rome under Pope Damasus in 382 is often cited as the first to fix the list. This page treats that with caution. The list attributed to it survives in the Decretum Gelasianum, a document most scholars now judge to be a private compilation made in Italy or Gaul in the early sixth century rather than the act of Damasus. The African councils are the firm ground; Rome 382 is not.

Jerome learned Hebrew, went to Bethlehem, and translated the Old Testament from the Hebrew rather than the Greek — the version that became the Vulgate and the Church's Bible for a thousand years. And in his prologues he stated, repeatedly and without hedging, that the books outside the Hebrew collection were not canonical. On Wisdom and Sirach he wrote the sentence that would be quoted against Rome for the next twelve centuries.

There is no honest way around it: on this question the Church did not follow her greatest scholar. She followed Augustine, and the councils followed Augustine, and Jerome lost.

The complication — and it is a real one, not a debating point — is that Jerome did not behave like a man who thought these books were rubbish. He translated Judith anyway, in a single night's work, and said in the preface that he did it because the Council of Nicaea was reckoned to have counted the book among the sacred Scriptures. That claim is itself doubtful, since no surviving canon of Nicaea says anything of the kind, and this page does not pretend otherwise. But it tells us what Jerome thought he was deferring to.

He defended the Greek portions of Daniel against Rufinus with the question of a man who knew the argument was not his to win alone: "What sin have I committed in following the judgment of the churches?"

And there is a last irony worth stating plainly, because it is the hinge of the whole story. When the Church of England settled the question in the opposite direction in 1563, it did not appeal to a Reformer. Article VI cites Jerome by name — "as Hierome saith" — and reproduces almost exactly the formula from his prologue to the books of Solomon. Both settlements are quoting the same man.

The medieval Latin Bible carried the disputed books as a matter of course. It also carried Jerome's prologues, which is worth noticing: the doubt was never suppressed. Any monk copying an Old Testament could read, in the front matter of his own Bible, the translator's opinion that some of what followed was not canonical. The argument was preserved inside the very manuscripts that transmitted the books.

In 1442, a hundred and four years before Trent and seventy-five before Luther posted his theses, the Council of Florence issued the bull Cantate Domino for the Copts. It professes that one and the same God is the author of both Testaments, and then does something plain and decisive: it lists the books. Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch and the two books of Maccabees are all there, by name, in a papal bull of a general council, before the Reformation existed to react to.

This is the fact that settles the most common accusation. Whatever Trent did in 1546, it did not invent the list.

Luther's German Bible of 1534 did not burn the seven books. It moved them. He gathered them out of the Old Testament into a separate section placed between the Testaments and headed Apocrypha, and went on printing them. He also rearranged the New Testament, shifting Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation to the end — the four he doubted, and about which, as Eusebius shows, there had been ancient doubt. Of James he wrote in 1522 that it is "a perfect straw-epistle compared with them, for it has in it nothing of an evangelic kind".

Trent answered on 8 April 1546, in the fourth session. It listed the books, said it received them all "with an equal affection of piety, and reverence", and — this is what was genuinely new — attached an anathema to the list. The Catholic Church had held these books for centuries; what she had never done before was make holding them a test of communion. She did it in response to their removal.

Four centuries later the Second Vatican Council said the same thing without the anathema, and said where the list comes from. Dei Verbum, in 1965, does not argue for the seven books; it states the principle this whole page has been tracing, that the canon is a fact of the Church's living memory before it is a fact of any council: "Through the same tradition the Church's full canon of the sacred books is known, and the sacred writings themselves are more profoundly understood." That is Augustine's answer to Jerome, restated by the Church's last council.

The Church of England's Article VI in 1563 took the middle road and took it from Jerome: the canonical books are those "of whose authority was never any doubt in the Church", and the others the Church reads "for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine". It then names them — Tobias, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, the Maccabees, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon and the rest — and keeps them in the book.

The Westminster Confession of 1646 refused the middle road. The apocryphal books are "no part of the canon of the Scripture, and therefore are of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings". That is the sharpest statement any side made, and it is the one most Protestants inherited in practice.

In practice, though, the printing lagged the theology by two centuries. Protestant Bibles generally continued to include the Apocrypha as a matter of course — the King James Bible of 1611 contained it. What removed the books from the Protestant Bible most English-speakers have held was not a council or a confession but a funding decision: after a two-year controversy the British and Foreign Bible Society resolved in 1826 to stop paying for any Bible that contained them.