The Muratorian List of New Testament Books

The text is named after Ludovico Antonio Muratori, who printed it in 1740 from a manuscript in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. It fills three pages of a codex of the late seventh or eighth century that otherwise contains works of Eucherius, Ambrose and others (Muratorian Fragment, Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, I 101 sup., fols. 10r–11r). The text begins in the middle of a sentence (Muratorian Fragment, section 1). Because the author speaks of Rome simply as “the city”, the list is usually thought to come from there (Muratorian Fragment, section 2).

What survives opens with the end of a remark about one Gospel and then calls that of Luke “the third book of the Gospel” and that of John, “one of the disciples”, the fourth, so the lost beginning dealt with two others. John, it says, wrote at the urging of his fellow disciples and bishops after a fast and a revelation to the apostle Andrew. The Gospels differ in what they teach, but “there is no difference as regards the faith of believers”, since one Spirit declares in all of them the Lord’s birth, passion, resurrection and two comings (Muratorian Fragment, section 1).

Next come the Acts of the Apostles, written by Luke (Muratorian Fragment, section 2), and the letters of Paul. He wrote to seven churches by name, as John did in the Apocalypse, and so addressed the one church spread through the world; with the letters to Philemon, Titus and Timothy this makes thirteen. Letters to the Laodiceans and Alexandrians are rejected as forgeries in Paul’s name connected with the heresy of Marcion, “for it is not suitable for gall to be mingled with honey” (Muratorian Fragment, section 3).

The list then names Jude, two letters of John, the Wisdom of Solomon, and the Apocalypses of John and of Peter, “though some among us will not have this latter read in the Church”. The Shepherd of Hermas may be read, but not publicly among the prophets or the apostles, because it was written recently. The writings of Valentinus, Basilides, Marcion’s followers and the “Cataphrygians” are refused (Muratorian Fragment, section 4). Hebrews, James and the letters of Peter are not mentioned.

The fragment shows a church that already treated four Gospels, Acts and thirteen letters of Paul as settled, while the edges of the collection were still open. It tests a book by whether it comes from the apostles’ time and whether it is read in the whole church. For a list of exactly the twenty-seven books of the later New Testament, see Athanasius Lists the Twenty-seven Books of the New Testament, of the year 367.