You have probably heard the story. In 325 AD the emperor Constantine called the bishops to Nicaea, and they voted on which books belong in the Bible. Some gospels made it. Others were cut. Novels, documentaries, and a thousand dinner-table arguments repeat some version of it. It may be the most repeated story about how the Bible was made.
Here is what the records that survive from Nicaea actually show.
What the council was called for
The bishops met over a different question: how to speak about the divinity of Jesus, against the teaching of a priest named Arius. The council's chief product was a creed, the ancestor of the Nicene Creed that many churches still recite.
God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God
The Creed of Nicaea, 325 AD
The council also set a common date for Easter and issued twenty rules for church life. That is the whole surviving output: a creed, a date, and twenty rules. In everything that comes down to us, the creed, the rules, the letters, and the accounts of people who were there, no discussion of which books belong in the Bible appears.
Where the list actually comes from
The first surviving document that names exactly the twenty-seven books of today's New Testament, no more and no fewer, is not a council decree. It is an Easter letter.
Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria, wrote one to his churches every year. His letter for 367 AD lists the twenty-seven. That is more than three hundred years after Jesus, and forty-two years after Nicaea. Regional councils at Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397 later affirmed similar lists. They were describing books their churches already read as much as choosing them.
The bookshelf was wider than that
The earliest churches read more books than your Bible holds. A church manual called the Didache. A visionary book called the Shepherd of Hermas. Letters under the names of Barnabas and Clement. Some of these were read aloud in worship. One of the oldest complete Bibles we have, a fourth-century manuscript called Codex Sinaiticus, keeps going after Revelation and binds in Barnabas and the Shepherd.
Around 320 AD the church historian Eusebius took inventory and sorted the books into three piles. Some were acknowledged everywhere: the four Gospels, Acts, Paul's letters. Some were disputed: genuinely read, genuinely questioned. And some the churches had set aside.
The disputed pile holds surprises. James. Jude. 2 Peter. 2 and 3 John. All of them are in every Bible printed today. Revelation was accepted early in the West and doubted for centuries in parts of the East. Being questioned and being included turned out not to be opposites.
You can watch it happening in the text
The New Testament itself shows the process underway. Luke opens by saying he is not the first to write.
Since many have undertaken to compile a narrative about the events that have been fulfilled among us,
Luke 1:1
A letter to Colossae asks to be swapped with another letter after it is read.
And when this letter has been read among you, have it read also in the church of the Laodiceans, and see that you read also the letter from Laodicea.
Colossians 4:16
And 2 Peter, one of the books Eusebius listed as disputed, already treats Paul's letters as scripture.
So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, speaking of this as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures.
2 Peter 3:15-16
Letters being copied, passed between churches, read aloud, and gradually spoken of as scripture. That is the mechanism.
A slower story
So how did the canon happen? By use, over generations. Books were read in churches week after week, copied, quoted, and slowly treated as scripture, church by church, until the lists converged. Historians find that harder to summarize than a vote, which may be part of why the vote version travels better.
Nothing here says the list is wrong, or right. It says how the list came to be, as far as the surviving documents can show. The four Gospels were settled by the late second century. The edges took longer. Nobody voted at Nicaea.
For further exploration
Three things to look at with the text open:
- Read Luke 1:1-4. Count how many earlier accounts Luke says existed. Ask what happened to them.
- Read 2 Peter 3:15-16. Notice a New Testament book calling other New Testament letters "scriptures." Ask when that could have been written.
- Look up the Shepherd of Hermas. It was popular enough to be bound into a fourth-century Bible. Ask why it is not in yours.
Sources
- Luke 1:1; Colossians 4:16; 2 Peter 3:15-16 (NRSVue)
- The Creed and canons of Nicaea (325 AD); Athanasius, 39th Festal Letter (367 AD); Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.25
- The New Oxford Annotated Bible, essay on the canon of the New Testament
- Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, on the great fourth-century manuscripts
- John Barton, A History of the Bible, on how the canon settled