Heresy

Flip to the front of almost any Bible and you’ll find a table of contents split into two halves. Old Testament, New Testament. Most of us never ask who decided there should be a second list at all, or why the first one stayed. The answer runs through a rich shipowner from the Black Sea coast named Marcion. In the second century he drew up the first Christian canon we know of, a short list of books he considered authentic. He left out the entire Jewish scripture on purpose, because he’d concluded it was the word of a different God. ...

In the spring of 367, the archbishop of Alexandria sent an Easter letter to the churches of Egypt, ordering believers to reject what he called illegitimate and secret books. His name was Athanasius, his letter contained the first known list of the New Testament exactly as we have it, and somewhere up the Nile, most likely at a monastery whose monks treasured the forbidden volumes, somebody responded by sealing a library in a jar instead of feeding it to a fire. ...