How Scripture was formed

The Church did not vote the Bible into existence. Books were written, circulated, read in worship, quoted as authoritative, disputed, defended and eventually received. Lists appear only after the process is well advanced, and they record what has settled rather than settle it.

Follow the witness explorer to see each witness in turn — what it attests, and what it cannot tell us.

The Orthodox Old Testament follows the Greek transmission rather than the Hebrew canon, and includes the books Greek usage calls the anagignoskomena. Printed Orthodox Bibles differ in what they include and how they order it, which is a fact about the tradition rather than an embarrassment to be smoothed over.

Follow this theme through the archive

• Athanasius of Alexandria

  Bishop of Alexandria, exiled five times, whose defence of the Nicene confession held the line for half a century, and whose thirty-ninth festal letter contains the earliest surviving list of the twenty-seven New Testament books.

  Father or writer

• Eusebius of Caesarea

  The first Church historian, without whom the pre-Nicene Church would be largely unknown to us — and an interested party in the fourth-century disputes he narrates. He is not a canonised Father.

  Father or writer

• Irenaeus of Lyons

  Bishop in Gaul who had heard Polycarp as a boy; the first great theologian of Tradition, of the fourfold Gospel, and of salvation as the recapitulation of all things in Christ.

  Father or writer

• Nicaea did not choose the books of the Bible

  A direct answer to the most persistent myth about the councils, with the council's own documents open.

  Lesson