The Earliest List of the 27 Books of the New Testament Canon
October 19, 2015
In the study of the New Testament canon, the list of the 27 New Testament books in Athanasius’ Festal Letter (c.367A.D.), four decades after the 325 A.D. Council of Nicea, is assumed to be the first written list, in order to lend credence to crediting the New Testament text to church councils, rather than to God interacting with His called out "ecclesia" through the Holy Spirit, as promised by Jesus Christ.
"But when they hand you over, do not worry about how to respond or what to say. In that hour you will be given what to say.
For it will not be you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you." (Matthew 10:19-20)
First, the existence of the New Testament Canon is not measured by the presence of lists, but in the frequency with which these books were used by the early church fathers and among the local members of the body of Christ, by which it is made evident that there was a “core” collection of New Testament books already functioning as accepted Scripture in the early third century, over one hundred years before Athanasius' fourth century mention of them.
Second, “Origen of Alexandria’s List of New Testament Books in Homilies on Joshua 7.1, was also made over a century before Athanasius' list was made public. In his classic allegorical fashion, Origen used the story of Joshua to describe the New Testament canon:
"But when our Lord Jesus Christ comes, whose arrival that prior son of Nun designated, he sends priests, his apostles, bearing “trumpets hammered thin,” the magnificent and heavenly instruction of proclamation. Matthew first sounded the priestly trumpet in his Gospel; Mark also; Luke and John each played their own priestly trumpets. Even Peter cries out with trumpets in two of his epistles; also James and Jude. In addition, John also sounds the trumpet through his epistles [and Revelation], and Luke, as he describes the Acts of the Apostles. And now Paul, that last one comes, the one who said, “I think God displays us apostles last,” and in fourteen (including Hebrews) of his epistles, thundering with trumpets, he casts down the walls of Jericho and all the devices of idolatry and dogmas of philosophers, all the way to the foundations (Homilies, Joshua 7.1).
As one can see from the list above, all 27 books of the New Testament are included (Origen clearly counts Hebrews as one of Paul’s letters). The only ambiguity is a text-critical issue with Revelation, but there is good evidence from other sources that Origen accepted Revelation as Scripture (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 6.25.10).
The reliability of Origen’s canonical list finds additional support in the fact that it fits with what Origen says elsewhere. Origen enumerates all the authors of the New Testament in his Homilies on Genesis, and this is a remarkable match with his list of New Testament books:
Isaac, therefore, digs also new wells, nay rather Isaac’s servants dig them. Isaac’s servants are Matthew, Mark, Luke, John; his servants are Peter, James, Jude; the apostle Paul is his servant. These all dig the wells of the New Testament (Homilies, Genesis 13.2).
This list of authors (again in Origen's classical allegorical style) matches exactly with his list of books. They match with one another, in reflecting Origen’s understanding (before 250 A.D.) that these 27 books were the canon of the New Testament.
This is confirmed by comparing these two passages in Origen – the list of books in Homilies on Joshua and the list of authors in Homilies on Genesis – they are also evidence that (a) Christians were recording historical lists much earlier than had been supposed, (and thus cared and were paying close attention to which books were “in” and which were “out”); and (b) that the boundaries of the New Testament canon was always more stable than is typically theorized by speculative seminarians of today.
Origen does not offer his list as an innovation or as anything controversial, but mentions it in a natural and matter-of-fact way within the context of his sermon.
Thus, for Origen of Alexandria, the content of the New Testament canon was already settled.
Filed Under: Ancient Manuscripts, New Testament Canon - Tagged With: Athanasius, Canonical Lists, New Testament Canon, Origen
Michael J. Kruger, President and Samuel C. Patterson Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte, NC.
He earned his Ph.D. under one of the world’s leading text-critical scholars, Larry W. Hurtado, at the University of Edinburgh, where he had the honor of researching a parchment fragment of the apocryphal gospel, P.Oxy. 840. He graduated summa cum laude with a M.Div. from Westminster Seminary California, after receiving a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
He is the author of twelve books, most recently Surviving Religion 101: Letters to a Christian Student on Keeping the Faith in College (Crossway, 2021), and Christianity at the Crossroads: How the Second Century Shaped the Future of the Church (SPCK, 2017; IVP Academic, 2018). The latter was awarded “Book of the Year” by The Gospel Coalition in the category of history and biography.
Other publications include The Gospel of the Savior (Brill, 2005), The Heresy of Orthodoxy (Crossway, 2010, with Andreas Köstenberger), Canon Revisited (Crossway, 2012), and The Question of Canon (IVP Academic, 2013). He is also the editor of and contributor to A Biblical-Theological Introduction to the New Testament (Crossway, 2016) and co-editor of The Early Text of the New Testament (Oxford, 2012) and Gospel Fragments (Oxford, 2009).
Dr. Kruger has served as president of the Evangelical Theological Society (2019), the largest society of evangelical scholars in the world, where he is also the co-chair and co-founder of the New Testament Canon, Textual Criticism, and Apocryphal Literature study section. In addition, he is on the editorial board of the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society and the Bulletin for Biblical Research.
He is also a member of the Society of Biblical Literature, the Institute for Biblical Research, the American Academy of Religion, and was recently elected to the Society for New Testament Studies (Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas). During his 2009-2010 research sabbatical, he was a visiting scholar at St. Edmund’s College and Tyndale House at Cambridge University, England.
Dr. Kruger regularly speaks, lectures, and teaches throughout the United States and the world—including conferences such as The Gospel Coalition, Together for the Gospel, and the Ligonier Conference. In addition to his academic publications, his popular-level articles have appeared in places like Modern Reformation, Tabletalk Magazine, and The Gospel Coalition. He also blogs regularly on his own website, Canon Fodder.
Works About Origen of Alexandria
Title / Description
Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 11: New Mexico-Philip
Dictionary of Christian Biography and Literature to the End of the Sixth Century
Origen (c. 185-c. 254) (external)
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