How We Got the Bible: Athanasius' 39th Festal Letter
According to Christianity Today’s “Today in Christian History”, on this date in 367 CE, the early Christian leader Athanasius wrote a famous letter known as the “39th Festal Letter” where, among other things, he lists the books he considers canonical for the “Old Testament” and “New Testament”. This is not the first attempt to create a canonical list of the books of the Bible, but it is the first that contains the same list of books for the New Testament that Christians accept today. As such, it serves as good marker in the history of the development of the Christian “canon” - the list of books that are considered officially part of the Bible.
The history of the canon is quite complicated and often misunderstood. The most common misconception, popularized by, among other things, the Da Vinci Code, is that the canon of the Bible was set at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. In fact, the topic doesn’t really seem to have come up at that council. There was an order to produce multiple copies of the Bible, but exactly which books were included or excluded from those Bibles is not clear.
We have a number of early Bibles that survive from the early Church, and they disagree as to which books should be included or excluded from the canon. Wikipedia has a helpful chart that shows the differences:
As you can see, the 4th century Codex Sinaiticus and the 5th century Codex Alexandrinus are very close to the modern list of books in the New Testament, although they each include two books which are excluded from the modern canon - the Shepherd of Hermas and the Epistle of Barnabas for the Codex Sinaiticus and 1 Clement and 2 Clement for the Codex Alexandrinus. All four of these books are thoroughly orthodox works (in fact, Athanasius in his Festal Letter encourages the reading of the Shepherd of Hermas, although he does exclude it from the canon), they are just not considered part of the formal New Testament by modern Christians.
Athanasius’ list of “Old Testament” books is a little different than either the modern Christian “Old Testament” or the Jewish Tanakh. The differences center around a collection of books that are often called the “deuterocanon”. These are books that were read by Jews in the Second Temple Period and, in many cases, were included in the Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures known as the Septuagint, but which were later excluded from the official Hebrew canon during the early years of Rabbinic Judaism. Because these books were included in the Septuagint, which was the version of the Jewish scriptures used by most early Christians, they were familiar in the early Church. But because they were not accepted by Jews as being canonical, their status as “scripture” was disputed in the early Church. Every list of canonical books in the early Church seems to include some of the deuterocanon and exclude other parts of it, with very little consistency between lists. The books in question generally include:
Tobit
Judith
Baruch
Sirach
1 Maccabees
2 Maccabees
Wisdom
Parts of Esther, Daniel and Baruch
Athanasius, for instance, includes Baruch and a text called the “Letter of Jeremiah” but excludes Esther. In his list of books that aren’t canonical but that still should be read, he includes Wisdom, Sirach, Esther, Judith and Tobit.
By the 5th and 6th centuries, the Church seems to have largely embraced the deuterocanonical books, and they were included in the Bibles produced after that era. However, during the Renaissance and Reformation, scholars began to question the appropriateness of including the deuterocanon in the Old Testament. This is why most Protestant Bibles either exclude those books or put them in a special section of their own labeled “apocrypha”. Catholics, however, never abandoned the deuterocanon, and these books still appear in Catholic Bibles today.
If you have any questions about the history of the Bible or the canon, please let me know in the comments below. And if there are any special topics in the history of esotericism or religion, let me know in the same place!