Why people ask this question
The question usually arrives with an edge on it, from one side or the other. Someone wants to show that the Bible is a committee product and may therefore be set down. Someone else wants to show that the Church made the Bible and therefore outranks it. The documentary record supports neither ambition particularly well, which is one good reason to tell the story carefully and let the dates do the work.
What follows is a summary of what can actually be shown, with the sources given at the end so that any reader can check them. Where the evidence is thin or genuinely contested, this article says so rather than smoothing it over.
First there was reading, not a list
For most of the second century there was no list and no felt need for one. Congregations read the letters they had been sent and the Gospels they had received, and they read them at the Eucharist. A book functioned as Scripture in practice long before anyone argued about whether it was Scripture in principle. Justin Martyr, writing around the middle of the second century, describes the memoirs of the apostles being read on Sunday alongside the writings of the prophets.
Pressure to be explicit came from two directions at once. Marcion, in the 140s, published a severely reduced collection consisting of one edited Gospel and ten letters of Paul. Meanwhile other groups were circulating new writings under apostolic names. Once a subtraction and an addition were both on offer, the churches had to say aloud what they had been doing quietly all along.
The Muratorian Fragment, a damaged Latin list discovered in the eighteenth century, is usually dated to the late second century, though a minority of scholars place it considerably later. On either dating it shows a community with a nearly complete New Testament, a firm core, and a handful of uncertainties around the edges.
Eusebius takes stock, around 325
The clearest early snapshot comes in the Church History of Eusebius of Caesarea, book three, chapter twenty-five. He sorts the books into groups. Acknowledged: the four Gospels, Acts, the letters of Paul, the first letter of John, the first of Peter and, in his careful phrase, “if it really seem proper”, the Revelation of John. Disputed but recognised by many: James, Jude, 2 Peter, and 2 and 3 John.
Rejected, in his third group, are the Acts of Paul, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Apocalypse of Peter, the letter of Barnabas, the Teaching of the Apostles, and again the Revelation of John, which some reject and others class with the accepted books. Revelation appears twice because Eusebius is reporting a live disagreement rather than resolving it. That is what the situation looked like three centuries after the Resurrection: a settled core, a contested margin, and no council on the subject.
Athanasius, Easter 367
Bishops of Alexandria sent out an annual festal letter announcing the date of Pascha and adding pastoral instruction. The thirty-ninth of these, sent by St Athanasius the Great in 367, contains the earliest surviving list of exactly the twenty-seven books of the New Testament as they stand today, with Revelation included. He calls them fountains of salvation and says that no one should add to them or take anything from them.
The letter is more interesting than its reputation. Athanasius adds a second category: books “not indeed included in the Canon, but appointed by the Fathers to be read” by those newly joining the Church. He lists the Wisdom of Solomon, the Wisdom of Sirach, Esther, Judith, Tobit, the Teaching of the Apostles and the Shepherd. Esther stands in the second list, not the first.
A tidy account in which 367 settles everything does not survive an actual reading of the letter. What Athanasius gives is one bishop's authoritative ruling for his own vast see, in a form that later proved persuasive elsewhere. That is considerable, and it is not the same thing as a universal decree.
The local councils
Councils then confirmed, region by region, what was already in use. The African councils at Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397 issued a list; the text most easily consulted today survives in the canonical collection of the Council of Carthage of 419, whose canon on the subject names Tobit, Judith, Esther, two books of Maccabees, the five books of Solomon and the Revelation of John, and closes by saying that these are the things received from the fathers to be read in church.
The Synod of Laodicea in Phrygia, in the fourth century, produced a list in its sixtieth canon which gives twenty-six New Testament books and omits Revelation. The standard English edition of the canons carries an editorial note that this particular canon is of questionable genuineness. Both of those facts belong in an honest account, and leaving either out would be a form of tidying.
In 692 the Council in Trullo, meeting in Constantinople, confirmed a long series of earlier canons, among them those of Laodicea and of Carthage together with the canonical letters of Athanasius, Gregory the Theologian and Amphilochius of Iconium. Those lists do not agree with each other at every point. The council ratified them together regardless, which says something about how the Church has carried the question.
Revelation, and the books long argued over
The Apocalypse took longest. It was doubted across much of the Greek-speaking East for centuries, in part because groups appealing to it had drawn strange conclusions from its imagery. The Syriac Peshitta, the standard Bible of the Syriac churches from the early fifth century, contains twenty-two New Testament books: it omits 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude and Revelation. That was not rebellion. Those were simply the books that community had received.
Even now Revelation is the one New Testament book with no appointed place in the Byzantine lectionary. It is fully canonical in the Orthodox Church and it is not read at the public services. That combination looks odd if the canon is imagined as a list voted through in a single session, and looks entirely ordinary if the canon grew out of what was actually read.
The disputed letters, James and Jude and 2 Peter and the shorter letters of John, were argued over for something like three hundred years before the argument quietly stopped. Hebrews was doubted in the West for a long period on grounds of authorship. None of these books was contested because anyone disliked what it taught; the uncertainties were about origin and circulation.
More than one Old Testament
The Old Testament is where real differences persist to this day. The Greek-speaking Church used the Septuagint, which contains Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, the books of Maccabees and longer forms of Daniel and Esther. Jerome, translating into Latin around 400, preferred the shorter Hebrew reckoning and described the additional books as useful for edification rather than for establishing doctrine, while continuing to translate them.
Reformation Bibles followed Jerome's instinct and printed the disputed books separately as the Apocrypha; most later Protestant editions dropped them. The Council of Trent defined the longer list for Roman Catholics in 1546. The Orthodox Church did neither. She has continued to print and read those books, calling them anagignoskomena, things that are read, and has never treated their exact enumeration as requiring a definition of that kind.
Variation runs wider still. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church receives a broader canon that includes 1 Enoch and the Book of Jubilees. Nobody in this history is being careless. Each community is transmitting what it actually received, and the differences sit almost entirely at the margins rather than at the centre.
Why 'the Church decided' is a simplification
It is the usual Orthodox shorthand and it is not quite right. Nobody in the fourth century imagined that a synod could make a book apostolic. The bishops and councils were doing something more modest and rather more interesting: they were reporting, and then ratifying, what the churches had found themselves unable to stop reading.
Recognition is the better word. A congregation discovered over generations that certain books fed it, matched the faith it had been taught and carried the ring of the apostles. Where that experience was uniform, agreement came quickly. Where it was patchy, as with Revelation in the East and Hebrews in the West, agreement took centuries. The shape of the process is not legislative. It is closer to the slow way a household learns which books never leave the table.
Fr. Seraphim Rose, an American convert who spent his life republishing neglected Orthodox sources, thought that going back and looking at what was actually there was the central task of his own time. Writing about St Paisius Velichkovsky, the eighteenth-century monk whose disciples produced the Optina revival, he located his importance precisely there.
he redirected the attention of Orthodox Christians to the sources of Holy Orthodoxy
Fr. Seraphim Rose, Introduction to Blessed Paisius Velichkovsky: The Man Behind the Philokalia (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1994 [1976])
What this implies, and what it does not
The implication Orthodox Christians draw is limited but real. If the Scriptures reached us through the reading, worship and discernment of a concrete community over several centuries, then that community is not an optional accessory to the Bible. The same tradition that carried the books also carried a way of reading them: the creed, the liturgy, the commentaries of the Fathers.
What does not follow is that the Church stands above Scripture, or may correct it, or holds some reserve of information withheld from the text. Orthodoxy claims none of those things, and Orthodox writers who reach for a stronger claim are overreaching. The relation is closer to that of a witness than of an author. Nothing in the fourth-century record will bear more weight than that.
It is also worth saying that the arguments at the edge of the canon have never been the load-bearing ones. Every community named in this article read the same four Gospels and the same Paul. Luther, who placed Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation at the end of his New Testament and wrote slightingly of James in his preface of 1522, printed all four books. The canon has proved a good deal more durable than the disputes about it.
If this history makes you want to look at how the Orthodox Church reads the book she received, rather than at what she says about herself, that would be the right next step. Fr. Seraphim, speaking to an American audience in 1980 about why Protestants were becoming Orthodox, put the burden of proof where this parish thinks it belongs.
If we have the true Christianity, there should be something in our midst that someone who sincerely loves the truth will see and want.
Fr. Seraphim Rose, lecture 'Orthodoxy in the USA', The Orthodox Word no. 94 (1980), in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works (St. Herman Press, 2003), ch. 86