Chapter 5 — Hippo and Carthage

Late in the fourth century, the North African church held a series of regional councils — Hippo in 393 AD, Carthage in 397 and again in 419 AD — that did something no single bishop or theologian, however respected, had the standing to do alone: they issued a formal, conciliar list of the books received as Scripture in the churches of that region, Old Testament and New Testament together.

Augustine, bishop of Hippo, was present and influential at these councils, and his own settled position shaped their outcome directly: the fuller Old Testament, forty-six books, including the seven this book's next three chapters will treat in detail — Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch, and both books of Maccabees, along with the Greek additions to Esther and Daniel. On the New Testament side, the councils confirmed the twenty-seven books already functioning as Scripture across the wider church, the same list Athanasius had named in his 39th Festal Letter a generation earlier in Alexandria — two regions, working somewhat independently, arriving at the same New Testament shape.

It is worth being precise about what Hippo and Carthage actually did, because the claim is easy to overstate in both directions. They did not invent a canon from nothing, imposing a novel list on churches that had never heard of it. Nor did they simply rubber-stamp a question that had never been disputed. What they did was formalize, for one significant region of the church, a working practice that had developed unevenly over the preceding two centuries — and their Old Testament list, in particular, became the effective standard for the Western church for the next eleven hundred years, all the way to the Reformation.

That last point is the hinge this whole part of the book turns on. Hippo and Carthage's New Testament list has never seriously been disputed since; every major branch of Christianity today agrees on those twenty-seven books. Their Old Testament list did not achieve the same lasting, universal agreement — and the next two chapters exist to tell an honest, undecided reader exactly why not, without pretending the disagreement is smaller, or more recent, or more one-sided than it actually is.