Council of Nicaea and Scripture

The gathering of the New Testament documents began within the first century. Paul referred to Luke’s Gospel as ‘scripture’—graphè (1 Tim 5:18 cites both Deut. 25:4 and Luke 10:7 as such). Peter recognized that Paul’s writings were ‘scripture’—in 2 Peter 3:15–17 he refers to them as authoritative and then refers to ‘the other scriptures,’ and he warns his readers to beware of those who twist the meanings to their own destruction.

This process of recognizing the true and separating it from the false gained momentum in the second century when the heretic Marcion produced his own, very reduced, list of authorized books. Since the caricature always comes after the original, this implies that the main features of the NT collection were in place at that time. By the time of the Council of Nicaea in AD 325 (which Constantine convened, but it was the gathering of 318 bishops that made the decisions) the issue was not even debated. The deliberations of the Council focused on the deity of Christ, and the authority of the four gospels on that subject was taken for granted by all the bishops present. The final statements regarding formal recognition of the 27 books of the New Testament that we have today (what we call the Canon) were made at African synods (at Hippo and Carthage) in AD 393 and 397.2

It’s important to note that the Canon was decided by God and merely recognized by man. Leading NT scholar F.F. Bruce put it well:

‘The NT books did not become authoritative for the Church because they were formally included in a canonical list; on the contrary, the Church included them in her canon because she already regarded them as divinely inspired, …. [Church] councils [did] not impose something new upon the Christian communities but codif[ied] what was already the general practice of those communities.’3

One of the world’s greatest authorities on the Greek New Testament, Bruce Metzger, pointed out:

‘You have to understand that the canon was not the result of a series of contests involving church politics. … . You see, the canon is a list of authoritative books more than it is an authoritative list of books. These documents didn't derive their authority from being selected; each one was authoritative before anyone gathered them together.’