When Was the First Surviving List of the Books in the New Testament Written?
Some scholars place the first listing of the books of the New Testament in the year 367. The historical evidence begs to differ.
It’s a claim that’s been made over and over.
I heard it so often during graduate studies that I included it in some of my early books as an undisputed fact.
Here’s the claim: The first person to list the same twenty-seven books that we find in our New Testament today was Athanasius of Alexandria, in the year 367.
Sometimes, this claim is followed by a long leap to the conclusion that the New Testament canon was in utter flux until sometime in the late fourth century A.D. — but such claims are riddled with historical problems.
In the first place, simply because no list has survived doesn’t mean necessarily that the canon was in flux. A functional canon might have preceded the existence of any final or exclusive listing of texts. Furthermore, other lists that are no longer extant may well have circulated in the early church.
But those aren’t the questions on which I want to focus here. My goal is to focus on one specific issue related to the claim that the first surviving list originated with Athanasius of Alexandria.
Was Athanasius of Alexandria the First Church Leader to List the Twenty-Seven Texts that Became Known as the New Testament?
Here’s what a closer investigation of texts from the first three centuries of Christianity has revealed: The list from Athanasius of Alexandria almost certainly isn’t the earliest surviving list of the entire New Testament canon.
In Mark, Manuscripts, and Monotheism, Michael Kruger shows that Origen of Alexandria listed the same twenty-seven books that appear in our New Testament today. Origen made this list more than a century before the festal letter of Athanasius in 367. Here’s what Origen wrote in the mid-third century in one of his homilies on the book of Joshua:
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 letters, and Luke, as he describes the Acts of the Apostles. And now that last one comes, the one who said, “I think God displays us apostles last,” and in fourteen 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.
This text survives only in a Latin translation, completed in the fifth century by a monk named Rufinus. Some have argued that Rufinus altered the listing to fit his own presuppositions; however, Rufinus seems to have been, on the whole, a faithful editor and translator of Origen’s work. In short, there is no substantive historical evidence that would lead us to suspect that Rufinus altered this text.
It’s long past time to lay to rest the claim that Athanasius was the first individual to list the entire New Testament canon. There is every reason to recognize and to receive Origen’s list as the earliest surviving summation of the books in the New Testament canon. At the very least, the burden of proof has shifted, and any claim that Athanasius’s list is oldest requires careful qualifications, a robust defense, and textual evidence.
