Councils & the Bible
The councils that framed the faith and in the same movement produced the divisions between the churches — and the long road by which the Bible became a book.
General further reading, not citations to specific pages.
Which councils a church accepts is precisely what places it among the church families: the Church of the East stops at two, the Oriental Orthodox at three, and the rest continue to seven.
325 · Nicaea (İznik), Anatolia
Every church, without exception.
381 · Constantinople
Every church — and the last council on which all three families agree.
431 · Ephesus, Anatolia
The Chalcedonian and Oriental Orthodox churches.
The Church of the East does not accept this council and stops at the first two. Its independence begins here — as does the label “Nestorian”, which it rejects for itself.
451 · Chalcedon (Kadıköy), across from Constantinople
The Eastern Orthodox, the Catholics and the Protestants.
The Coptic, Syriac and Armenian churches do not accept it, and the Oriental Orthodox family takes shape. This is the division with the widest consequences in the region: after it, the Byzantine state lost the loyalty of much of Egypt and Syria for two centuries before the conquest.
553 · Constantinople
The Chalcedonian churches only.
680–681 · Constantinople
The Chalcedonian churches only.
787 · Nicaea (İznik)
The Eastern Orthodox and the Catholics. The Latin councils after it are accepted by Catholics alone.
These divisions have been revisited over the last sixty years, and in most cases the parties concluded they had been divided over terminology more than over faith.
1965
Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras lifted the mutual anathemas dating from 1054 — without restoring communion.
1971 onwards
Joint statements between the Chalcedonian and Oriental Orthodox churches concluded that both hold the same faith in different formulations, and that the dispute had been more about terminology than content.
1994
The Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East signed a joint declaration on Christology, in effect closing a division that went back to the Council of Ephesus in 431.
The Bible was not handed down ready-made. It settled over centuries, at different times and in different languages — and it has never fully settled.
3rd–2nd century BC
The Jewish scriptures were translated into Greek at Alexandria. This — not the Hebrew — is the “Old Testament” the early Church read and the New Testament writers quoted.
The Septuagint includes books absent from the Hebrew Bible — the very books that would be disputed eighteen centuries later at the Reformation.
c. AD 50–110
Paul's letters were written first, the Gospels after them. None of these writers was composing “a Bible”: they were writing letters to particular communities, and accounts of Christ to be read in them.
c. 144
Marcion rejected the whole Old Testament and most of the New, keeping one shortened Gospel and ten letters of Paul. It was his rejection that forced the Church to state plainly what its scriptures were.
c. 170–200
The earliest surviving list of New Testament books. Close to the list that later settled, but not the same as it.
c. 325
In the Ecclesiastical History, Eusebius of Caesarea divides the books into the accepted, the disputed and the rejected. That a “disputed” category existed for the Church's first historian shows the boundary had not yet closed.
367
The first surviving list matching the twenty-seven books of the New Testament as we know them, written by the patriarch of Alexandria for his church.
The definitive New Testament list therefore came out of Egypt, more than three hundred years after its earliest books were written.
Mid-4th century
A complete Bible from that very period which contains, alongside the familiar books, the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas. The boundary was still soft when it was copied.
5th century
The Syriac New Testament in the Peshitta contains twenty-two books, not twenty-seven: it omits 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude and Revelation.
The Church of the East holds to that canon still. To say that “the Bible” is one agreed thing is therefore not accurate — and the exception is not marginal: it is the canon of one of the oldest churches of the East.
393 and 397
Two local councils in North Africa fixed the list of books for the Latin West. None of the seven ecumenical councils ever legislated on the canon.
16th century
Protestants set aside the Old Testament books absent from the Hebrew Bible, calling them the Apocrypha; the Council of Trent affirmed them as canonical for Catholics in 1546. That is why the Old Testament still differs between Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Bibles.
The number of books differs between churches, and the difference is not marginal: the Church of the East's New Testament has twenty-two books, not twenty-seven.
| Church | Books |
|---|---|
| Protestant churches | 66 books 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New, without the deuterocanonical books. |
| The Catholic Church | 73 books Includes seven deuterocanonical books in the Old Testament. |
| The Orthodox churches | 76 books or more The count varies from church to church; some include 3 and 4 Maccabees and Psalm 151. |
| The Church of the East | 22 books in the New Testament Following the Peshitta canon, without 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude and Revelation. |
| The Ethiopian Orthodox Church | 81 books The widest canon in Christianity, including books such as Enoch and Jubilees found in no other. |