| abstract
| - The Christian Biblical canon is the set of books Christians regard as divinely inspired and thus constituting the Christian Bible. Although the Early Church primarily used the Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures, the Septuagint or LXX, or the Targums among Aramaic speakers, the Apostles did not otherwise leave a defined set of new scriptures. Instead the "New Testament Canon" developed gradually over time. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia the idea of a complete Canon existing from Apostolic times, has "no foundation in history". The Canon of the New Testament, like that of the Old, was the result of debate, disputes and research, not reaching its final term until the dogmatic definition of the Council of Trent. The writings attributed to the apostles circulated amongst the earliest Christian communities. The Pauline epistles were circulating, perhaps in collected forms, by the end of the first century AD. Justin Martyr, in the early second century, mentions "memoirs of the apostles" as being read on Sunday alongside the "writings of the prophets". A four gospel canon (the Tetramorph) was asserted by Irenaeus, c. 180, who refers to it directly. By the early 200s, Origen may have been using the same 27 books as in the Catholic NT canon, though there were still disputes over the canonicity of Hebrews, James, II Peter, II and III John, and Revelation, known as the Antilegomena. Likewise the Muratorian fragment is evidence that perhaps as early as 200 there existed a set of Christian writings somewhat similar to the 27-book NT canon, which included four gospels and argued against objections to them. Thus, while there was a good measure of debate in the Early Church over the New Testament canon, the major writings are claimed to have been accepted by almost all Christians by the middle of the third century. In the 4th century, in his Easter letter of 367, Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, gave a list of exactly the same books as what would become the 27-book NT canon, and he used the word "canonized" (kanonizomena) in regards to them. The North African Synod of Hippo, in 393, approved the 27-book NT canon together with the OT Septuagint books, a decision that was confirmed by Councils of Carthage in 397 and 419. These councils were under the authority of St. Augustine, who regarded the canon as already closed. Pope Damasus I's Council of Rome in 382, if the Decretum Gelasianum is correctly associated with it, issued a biblical canon identical to that mentioned above, or if not the list is at least a sixth century compilation. Likewise, Damasus's commissioning of the Latin Vulgate edition of the Bible, circa 383, was instrumental in the fixation of the canon in the West. In circa 405, Pope Innocent I sent a list of the sacred books to a Gallic bishop, Exsuperius of Toulouse. Christian scholars assert that when these bishops and councils spoke on the matter, however, they were not defining something new, but instead "were ratifying what had already become the mind of the Church." Thus some claim, that from the fourth century, there existed unanimity in the West concerning the New Testament canon (as it is today), and that by the fifth century the Eastern Church, with a few exceptions, had come to accept the Book of Revelation and thus had come into harmony on the matter of the canon. Nonetheless, full dogmatic articulations of the canon were not made until the Council of Trent for Roman Catholicism, the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563 for the Church of England, the Westminster Confession of Faith of 1647 for Calvinism, and the Synod of Jerusalem of 1672 for the Greek Orthodox. McDonald and Sanders's The Canon Debate, 2002, Appendix B, lists the following most important primary sources for the "New Testament Canon".
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