Athanasius lists the 27 NT books, AD 367

**An Easter letter that settled a question no council had settled — and the archive holds the letter, and two of the books it excludes.**

Every year the bishop of Alexandria wrote to the Egyptian and Libyan churches to announce the date of Easter. **In 367 Athanasius used the letter to enumerate scripture**, and the list of the New Testament he gives is exactly the twenty-seven books the church has held ever since: the four Gospels, Acts, the seven catholic epistles, the fourteen of Paul including Hebrews, and the Revelation of John. **It is the first surviving list that matches.**

## The sentence that did the work

**“These are fountains of salvation, that they who thirst may be satisfied with the living words they contain. In these alone is proclaimed the doctrine of godliness. Let no man add to these, neither let him take ought from these.”** No council is invoked; no emperor. A bishop states a canon and closes it.

## The Old Testament list is not the one a modern reader expects

**Twenty-two books, on the Hebrew reckoning** — “for, as I have heard, it is handed down that this is the number of the letters among the Hebrews” — with Kings, Chronicles and Ezra each counted as one book, the twelve prophets as one, and **Jeremiah counted together with Baruch, Lamentations and the epistle.**

**And Esther is not in it.** Athanasius puts Esther in a second class, with the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Judith, Tobit, **“that which is called the Teaching of the Apostles, and the Shepherd”** — books “not indeed included in the Canon, but appointed by the Fathers to be read by those who newly join us”. **Baruch inside, Esther outside**: the archive states that plainly, because it is the clearest evidence that a fourth-century canon list is not a modern table of contents.

## Two of the excluded books are on these shelves

**The *Teaching of the Apostles* is the Didache and the *Shepherd* is Hermas**, and this library holds both. So the record can do something unusual: link the canon list to the very texts it demotes, and let a reader see what a book “appointed to be read” actually looked like. **The Muratorian fragment, also held, had already excluded the Shepherd two centuries earlier** — on the different ground that it was written too recently, “while his brother Pius sat in the chair of the church of Rome.”

## ⚠ Three cautions

**The text is a reconstruction.** The Greek survives in fragments; the fullest witness is Coptic, with Syriac supplementing. What is quoted above is secure, but the letter as a whole is assembled from pieces.

**And its own editors flag a problem with one piece.** The NPNF editor notes that the opening section is preserved in the Coptic *Life of Theodore* — the Pachomian abbot the archive holds as a figure — and that **if Theodore died in 364 he cannot have received a letter of 367**, so that section may be his biographer’s composition rather than Athanasius’s. **The archive records the editor’s doubt rather than the tidy attribution.**

**It was one bishop’s letter, not legislation.** Its enumeration became binding for the Latin West thirty years later, at the Council of Carthage of 397 — which this archive holds as its own event. **Athanasius set the list; a council made it law**, and Jerome’s prefaces argue the same twenty-two-book Hebrew reckoning from the other end of the Mediterranean.