Scripture and Canon

36 eventsShow on the timeline

How the Bible was written, collected, copied and translated: from the law read by Ezra to the Septuagint, the Vulgate, the printing press and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The Bible is a library formed over more than a thousand years. This thread traces which books were received as Scripture and when, the great translations that carried them into Greek, Latin, Gothic, Slavonic, German and English, and the discoveries of ancient manuscripts that show how the text was handed down. It also marks where the churches differ on the limits of the Old Testament.

The thread from start to finish

c. 1446 or c. 1260 BC, traditional date
The Covenant at Sinai
In Exodus Israel hears the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai and accepts a covenant sealed with blood. While Moses is on the mountain the people make a golden calf; after his intercession the tablets of the law are written again.
c. 1406 or c. 1220 BC, traditional date
The Farewell and Death of Moses
In the plains of Moab Moses renews the covenant with the generation born in the wilderness, writes down the law and hands the leadership to Joshua. He sees the promised land from Mount Nebo and dies there without entering it.
622 BC, estimated date
Josiah’s Reform and the Book of the Law
During repairs to the temple in Josiah’s eighteenth year the high priest Hilkiah finds a book of the law. The king consults the prophetess Huldah, renews the covenant, destroys the shrines of other gods throughout the land and keeps a great Passover.
458 BC, estimated date
Ezra Brings the Law to Jerusalem
The priest and scribe Ezra comes from Babylon with a commission from the Persian king, confronts marriages with foreign wives, and reads the law of Moses aloud to the assembled people, who bind themselves to keep it.
about 250 BC, estimated date
The Hebrew Scriptures Are Translated into Greek
Jews in Egypt translate the law of Moses into Greek, by tradition at Alexandria under Ptolemy II, and the other books follow. This version, the Septuagint, is the form in which most early Christians read the Old Testament.
about 150 BC to AD 68, estimated date
The Community of the Dead Sea Scrolls
Caves at Qumran, by the Dead Sea, preserve biblical scrolls and the writings of a Jewish movement that lived under a strict common rule. Most scholars identify it with the Essenes described by Josephus and Pliny; some dispute this.
about AD 50 to AD 60, estimated date
The Letters of Paul
In the course of his missions Paul writes letters to the churches he has founded and to others. On the usual dating they are older than the Gospels. They came to be collected and read alongside the Scriptures.
about AD 65 to AD 100, estimated date
The Four Gospels Are Written
Four accounts of the words, deeds, death and resurrection of Jesus are written, on the usual dating, in the later first century. None names its author; the names Matthew, Mark, Luke and John come from second-century testimony.
about AD 95, estimated date
John’s Revelation on Patmos
A Christian prophet named John, on the island of Patmos, writes down visions addressed to seven churches of Asia. They show Christ in glory, the fall of the city the book calls Babylon and a new Jerusalem, and become the last book of the New Testament.
about AD 144, traditional date
Marcion Breaks with the Roman Church
Marcion of Pontus teaches at Rome that the God of the Jewish scriptures is not the Father of Jesus, and gives his followers one Gospel and ten letters of Paul. By his opponents’ account the Roman church expels him; his followers form churches of their own.
about AD 180, estimated date
Irenaeus Sets Out the Rule of Faith
Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon, writes five books against the followers of Valentinus and Marcion. Against their claim to a secret tradition he sets three public tests: the faith the churches confess, the four Gospels, and the succession of bishops from the apostles.
c. AD 170–200, estimated date
The Muratorian List of New Testament Books
A Latin fragment, copied in a manuscript now in Milan, lists the books received in the church as it knew it. It counts four Gospels, Acts and thirteen letters of Paul. If it dates from the late second century, it is the oldest such list to survive.
about AD 203 to AD 254, estimated date
Origen and the School of Alexandria
Origen takes charge of Christian teaching at Alexandria as a young man and spends fifty years on the text and meaning of Scripture, first there and then at Caesarea. He compiles the Hexapla, writes a systematic account of Christian teaching, and dies after torture under Decius.
about AD 341, estimated date
Ulfilas Translates the Bible for the Goths
Ulfilas, bishop of the Christian Goths for forty years, is credited by ancient historians with an alphabet for Gothic and a translation of the Scriptures. He held the Homoian creed, which Nicene writers called Arian. A sixth-century copy of the Gothic Gospels survives at Uppsala.
AD 367, firm date
Athanasius Lists the Twenty-seven Books of the New Testament
In his Easter letter for 367 the bishop of Alexandria sets out which books are Scripture. His New Testament names twenty-seven books, the same that the Council of Trent later listed. He adds a second group of books that are read but are not in the canon.
c. 382–405, estimated date
Jerome Translates the Latin Vulgate
At the request of Pope Damasus, Jerome revises the Latin Gospels against the Greek. At Bethlehem he then translates the Old Testament from Hebrew, book by book, over more than a decade. His version became the common Bible of the Latin West.
AD 393 to AD 397, firm date
African Councils List the Books of Scripture
The bishops of Roman Africa, meeting at Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397, rule that only canonical Scripture may be read in church and list its books: a New Testament of twenty-seven books and an Old Testament that includes Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach and Maccabees.
AD 731, firm date
Bede Completes His Ecclesiastical History
At Wearmouth-Jarrow the monk Bede finishes a history of the English church in five books, dated by years from the birth of Christ and built on named sources. He lists his other works, mostly on Scripture, and dies four years later while translating John’s Gospel.
AD 789, firm date
Charlemagne’s Reform of Church and Learning
In the General Admonition of 789 Charlemagne orders the clergy of his kingdom to keep the canons, preach the faith, sing the Roman chant, open schools and copy books correctly. With Alcuin and other scholars he has the text of the Bible revised.
AD 863 to AD 885, estimated date
Cyril and Methodius among the Slavs
Two brothers from Thessalonica, sent from Constantinople to Moravia, give the Slavs an alphabet, the Scriptures and the liturgy in their own language. Rome’s attitude to the Slavonic liturgy shifts from approval to prohibition and back, and ends in a ban.
about 1382, estimated date
Wycliffe and the First English Bible
The teaching of the Oxford theologian John Wycliffe is condemned at London in 1382. A hostile chronicler says that he put the Gospel into English; the whole Bible is translated in those decades, and a constitution of 1409 forbids such versions without a bishop’s approval.
c. 1454–1455, estimated date
Gutenberg Prints the Bible
At Mainz in the mid-1450s the Latin Bible is printed from movable metal type in an edition of well over a hundred copies, the first large book so made in Europe. A visitor who saw sheets of it in 1454 reported that every copy was sold before the work was finished.
1516, firm date
Erasmus Publishes the Greek New Testament
In 1516 the Basel printer Johann Froben issues Erasmus’s Novum Instrumentum, the New Testament in Greek with a revised Latin version and notes, dedicated to Pope Leo X. Its preface wishes Scripture translated into every language.
1522 to 1534, firm date
Luther Translates the Bible into German
In hiding over the winter of 1521–22, Luther translates the New Testament into German; it is printed at Wittenberg in September 1522. The Old Testament follows in parts, and the complete Bible appears in 1534.
1526, firm date
Tyndale’s English New Testament
William Tyndale, unable to work in England, has his English New Testament printed at Worms in 1526. The bishop of London bans it and Thomas More writes against it. Tyndale is strangled and burned at Vilvoorde in 1536.
1545 to 1563, firm date
The Council of Trent
In twenty-five sessions spread over eighteen years, the Catholic bishops assembled at Trent define their church’s teaching on Scripture and tradition, justification and the sacraments, and decree a reform of the clergy.
1611, firm date
The King James Bible
A new English translation of the Bible, asked for at the Hampton Court conference of 1604 and made by companies of scholars at Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge, is published in London in 1611 by command of James I and appointed to be read in churches.
22 June 1633, firm date
The Trial of Galileo
The Roman Inquisition judges Galileo vehemently suspected of heresy for holding that the earth moves round the sun, bans his Dialogue and makes him abjure. He is confined to his house near Florence, where he dies in 1642.
9 July 1706, firm date
The Tranquebar Mission
Two German Lutherans trained at Halle, sent under the protection of the king of Denmark, land at Tranquebar in South India in July 1706. They learn Tamil and Portuguese, baptize converts, build a church, open schools and begin to translate and print the New Testament in Tamil.
2 October 1792, firm date
William Carey and the Modern Missionary Movement
The English Baptist minister William Carey argues in 1792 that Christ’s command to teach all nations still binds the churches. A missionary society is formed at Kettering that October, and in 1793 Carey sails for India. In 1805 the Serampore mission sets down its principles.
7 March 1804, firm date
The British and Foreign Bible Society
Moved by the want of Bibles in Wales, Christians of several denominations meet in London on 7 March 1804 and found a society with one object, the wider circulation of the Scriptures without note or comment, at home and abroad.
1844 to 1859, firm date
Tischendorf and the Codex Sinaiticus
On three visits to St Catherine’s Monastery the German scholar Constantin von Tischendorf finds a Greek Bible of the fourth century and takes it away, first in part and then on loan. He and the monastery tell the story differently.
1910 to 1925, firm date
The Fundamentals and the Modernist Controversy
Twelve volumes called The Fundamentals are sent free to Protestant ministers from about 1910. In the 1920s a dispute between Fundamentalists and liberals over the Bible, miracles and modern knowledge divides American churches and reaches a courtroom at Dayton.
about December 1945, estimated date
The Nag Hammadi Library Is Found
Papyrus books in Coptic, holding over fifty religious texts including the Gospel of Thomas, come to light near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt. The first reaches the Coptic Museum in 1946; the story of the find was gathered from villagers thirty years later.
1947, estimated date
The Dead Sea Scrolls Are Discovered
Bedouin bring seven ancient scrolls from a cave near Qumran to dealers in Bethlehem. A Syrian Orthodox archbishop and a Hebrew University professor buy them, and scholars find Hebrew manuscripts about a thousand years older than any biblical text then known.
1962 to 1965, firm date
The Second Vatican Council
From 1962 to 1965 the Catholic bishops of the world meet in St Peter’s. Called by John XXIII and concluded by Paul VI, the council issues texts on the liturgy, the church, revelation, religious freedom, other Christians and the Jewish people.