How the Lists Were Fixed, and by Whom

No council fixed a Christian Bible for all Christians. The Old Testament question was live from the start because the church read the Greek scriptures, which circulated with more books than the Hebrew collection. Jerome, translating the Latin Vulgate from about 382, insisted on the Hebrew as the standard and marked the extra books as edifying but not canonical; Augustine disagreed and carried the Western church with him. Regional synods at Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397 listed the wider canon, and Western practice followed them without ever treating the matter as formally closed.

That ambiguity held for a thousand years and broke at the Reformation. Luther's German Bible of 1534 printed the disputed books in a separate section; Trent responded in 1546 by defining the canon with its own list and attaching an anathema to anyone rejecting it. The Church of England took a middle position, and the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1571 kept the Apocrypha for reading as examples of life but not for establishing doctrine. The 1611 King James Bible printed the Apocrypha between the Testaments; the British and Foreign Bible Society resolved in 1826 to stop funding editions containing it, which is the immediate reason most English Bibles now lack it.

The Orthodox churches never held an equivalent to Trent. The Synod of Jerusalem in 1672 endorsed several of the wider books, but Orthodox canon lists remain somewhat fluid and are treated as a matter of received liturgical use rather than of conciliar definition. The New Testament shows the same pattern from the other direction: its 27 books were agreed across almost the whole church by the late fourth century, and no Christian body has since disputed them, but that agreement was reached by usage rather than by decree.