The Muratorian Fragment

The fragment is the second item in a parchment codex of 77 leaves that the Biblioteca Ambrosiana dates to between 676 and 750 and records as having entered the library in 1606. The rest of the volume holds works of Eucherius of Lyon, Ambrose and John Chrysostom, and several short creeds. The list has no title and no author. Its beginning is lost, the copyist’s Latin is full of errors, and many scholars think that it was translated from Greek.

It is evidence of two different things. The manuscript shows what a scribe of the late seventh or eighth century thought worth copying. The list itself shows which Christian writings its author’s church accepted, which it allowed to be read privately and which it refused, and it gives short reasons for each. It names Luke and John as the third and fourth Gospels, Acts, thirteen letters of Paul, Jude, two letters of John, the Wisdom of Solomon and the Apocalypses of John and Peter, and it excludes the Shepherd of Hermas from public reading as a recent work.

Everything turns on the date. The remark that Hermas wrote “very recently in our times”, when Pius was bishop of Rome, has usually been taken to place the list in the later second century. A minority of scholars read the phrase more loosely and date the list to the fourth century. See the Muratorian List of New Testament Books.