Athanasius Lists the Twenty-seven Books of the New Testament

Each year the bishop of Alexandria wrote to the churches of Egypt to announce the date of Easter (Athanasius, Festal Letter Festal Index 39). In the letter for 367, his thirty-ninth, Athanasius took up the question of which books are Scripture. Some people, he says, were mixing books “termed apocryphal” with the inspired writings and misleading the simple by the likeness of their titles. He would therefore set down the books “included in the Canon, and handed down, and accredited as Divine” (Athanasius, Festal Letter 39.2–3).

He counts twenty-two books of the Old Testament, the number, he has heard, of the Hebrew letters. Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah are counted with Jeremiah, and Esther is not on the list (Athanasius, Festal Letter 39.4). The New Testament is the four Gospels, Acts, seven letters called catholic (James, two of Peter, three of John, Jude), fourteen letters of Paul, among them Hebrews, and the Revelation of John (Athanasius, Festal Letter 39.5). That makes twenty-seven. “These are fountains of salvation”, he writes. “Let no man add to these, neither let him take ought from these” (Athanasius, Festal Letter 39.6).

Athanasius then names a second group, not in the canon but “appointed by the Fathers to be read” by new converts: the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Esther, Judith, Tobit, the Teaching of the Apostles and the Shepherd. Apocryphal writings he rejects altogether as the invention of heretics (Athanasius, Festal Letter 39.7).

A generation earlier Eusebius had listed James, Jude, 2 Peter and 2 and 3 John as disputed and was unsure where to place Revelation (Eusebius, Church History 3.25.1–4). Athanasius wrote as one bishop to his own province, not as a council. For the lists drawn up by councils in Africa soon afterwards see African Councils List the Books of Scripture.

The same twenty-seven books are the New Testament listed by the Council of Trent (Council of Trent Session 4, decree on the canonical Scriptures), and the Church of England’s Articles receive the books of the New Testament “as they are commonly received” (Thirty-Nine Articles article 6). On the Old Testament the documents cited here do not all agree, and none of them follows his list exactly. The Council of Trent counts Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach and the books of Maccabees as canonical (Council of Trent Session 4, decree on the canonical Scriptures), and the Orthodox Confession of Dositheus does the same for the books it names (Confession of Dositheus question 3 (p. 155)). The Church of England’s Articles put those books in a second class, read “for example of life and instruction of manners” but not used to establish doctrine (Thirty-Nine Articles article 6), which is close to the distinction Athanasius drew.