Two documents sit at the center of the claim that powerful men voted the New Testament into existence: a bishop’s Easter letter from 367 AD and the decision of a regional synod at Carthage in 397 AD. Read closely, neither shows anyone inventing a Bible. Both describe books the churches were already reading as Scripture. The pressure behind them was heresy and rival writings, and the books left out were mostly late texts with narrow circulation. The power-grab story fails on its central claims, though it carries one fair point and one serious objection worth facing.
The popular version bundles several assertions together, and each can be checked on its own. Dr. Jarvis Williams, who teaches New Testament interpretation and covers the formation of the canon in his course on hermeneutics, works through them on the Jude 3 Project podcast. He opens with a caution many defenders of the Bible skip: “the question of canon is extremely complicated and complex.” Then he adds, “I don’t think anyone has all of the answers to that question, but there are some answers that we can offer to that question.”
That caution is a fair standard for testing both sides of the argument.
The claim, and what would prove it
Stated fairly, the conspiracy version says five things:
- A council, or a few councils, decided which books belonged in the New Testament.
- Before that decision there was no real agreement, so the list was created at the table.
- The decision served power and control.
- Better or truer gospels existed and were suppressed.
- The people responsible were white men, so the Bible is a white man’s book.
If these claims were true, certain evidence should exist. The defining decisions would come early, before the churches had settled reading habits. The decisive body would be large and central, able to impose a list. The excluded books would be as early and as widely read as the included ones. And the key figures would come from the ruling centers of Europe.
What the two famous documents actually say
The first landmark is a letter, not a council. Bishop Athanasius sent an Easter letter in 367 AD naming the 27 books now called the New Testament. The wording carries the weight. In Williams’s reading, Athanasius was not announcing his own choices: “He wrote a letter suggesting that these are the 27 books that are recognized by the churches.” The books on his list had been in use before he wrote.
The second landmark is the Synod of Carthage in 397 AD, which Williams describes as “a relatively small regional council.” An agreed canon already existed before it met, he argues, and his summary of its work is blunt: “you don’t have them saying, this is what is canonical, and therefore the canon was created.” Carthage recognized what had already been recognized.
Size matters here. A small regional synod at the end of the fourth century makes a poor candidate for the moment a church-wide Bible was invented and imposed. It fits much better as a body ratifying a settled reality.
Williams is also candid about a gap in the record: “it’s not nicely and neatly laid out for us in history” which councils took part in these decisions. He points to earlier discussions of what counted as canonical, including an early list commonly known as the Muratorian canon, which predates Carthage. The tidy picture of one vote on one day is unavailable to either side of the argument. What survives is a long recognition, with a few documents reporting where it stood.
Recognition that began inside the New Testament
The earliest evidence sits inside the New Testament itself. In 2 Peter, the writer comments on Paul’s letters. The KJV of 2 Peter 3:16 says that in Paul’s epistles “are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.” To “wrest” is older English for twisting or distorting.
The key phrase is “the other scriptures.” It places Paul’s letters in the same category as the Scriptures false teachers were bending. Williams reads this as evidence that the New Testament writers understood their writings to stand alongside the Old Testament. The verse has limits. It shows how one New Testament writer regarded Paul’s letters, not a full list or the practice of every church. But it places the recognition of Christian writings as Scripture centuries before Athanasius or Carthage, and the conspiracy version needs that recognition to begin in the fourth century.
Between the apostles and the late lists, the letters and Gospels circulated. Church fathers such as Irenaeus cited them in their preaching and teaching. One way to trace the canon, in Williams’s account, is to look at what Christians just after the apostolic age were preaching in their churches. That is the kind of scattered evidence an investigator wants: many communities, over a long period, using the same books without one center dictating it.
Where politics enters the story
Here is the fair point in the conspiracy version. Williams grants it plainly: “in the ancient world, it was hard to separate religion from politics.” There was no modern line between church and state. Religion and politics were bound up in a person’s identity, and anyone who claims ancient Christians were politically pure is ignoring the period.
Political entanglement, though, does not prove that politics produced the canon. On that larger claim his judgment is direct: “I think that’s a bit misleading.” He argues instead that “there were massive theological reasons” behind the church’s decision.
Those reasons come down to a change after the apostles died. While they lived, they could answer false teaching with another letter. Afterward, the churches had only what the apostles left behind. As heresy pressed in, and as other gospels appeared that competed with what the churches taught, the churches had to decide consciously which writings carried authority. The Gospel of Thomas is the example Williams names.
The stronger objection: winners keep the record
The sharpest version of the power argument does not depend on a single vote at all. It says the side that won later controlled which books were copied and which were not. Church authorities did at times condemn writings as heretical, and condemned books were far less likely to be copied and kept. On this view, the record looks like broad agreement because the losing voices did not survive to object.
That objection deserves a direct answer, and the evidence answers part of it. Selective survival can explain why rival texts faded from later use. It cannot explain why the recognition shows up so early, in a New Testament writer calling Paul’s letters Scripture, or why preachers across scattered churches were citing the same books long before any fourth-century list. Those observations come from before the supposed winners had the power to enforce anything. A later council can bury a book. It cannot reach back and change what earlier churches were already reading.
The objection still marks a real limit. Silence in the record is not proof that no one held a different view, and some voices from the early centuries are lost. What the evidence supports is narrower and firmer: the books that ended up on the lists were the ones with the earliest and widest use, and condemnation of rivals came after that pattern was set, not before it.
Why some gospels stayed out
To test the claim that truer gospels were hidden, it helps to know what standards the churches applied. Williams describes three.
First, a book had to come from an apostle or from someone who knew the apostles. Luke was not an apostle, but Acts shows him traveling with Paul, and he had access to eyewitnesses of Jesus. The logic of this test is about time: a church “cannot consider a document that was written after people who knew the apostles were dead.”
Second, a book could not contradict the teaching in the writings the churches already recognized. A second-century document challenging the resurrection of Jesus, to use his example, would fail twice: it came after the apostolic age, and it contradicted the apostolic writings on a central point.
Third, a book had to be used widely across the churches of the Mediterranean world. The Gospel of Thomas failed here. It “was a gospel that was not used by a widespread group of Christians,” Williams explains, but by a small sectarian community distinct from the rest of the Christian movement. He also warns against tidy labels. People often call that community Gnostic, but scholars debate whether the term fits, so “Gnostic gospels” should not be treated as one neat category with one theology.
These criteria are Williams’s summary of how the churches reasoned, and the churches did not publish them as a checklist in advance. The clearer statements came as the questions grew pressing. Even so, the standards describe what the evidence shows the churches doing: preferring early writings, widely read, consistent with what the apostles taught. On that account, the excluded books were left out because they were late, local, or contrary to the earliest writings, the reasons any community would give when separating its founding documents from later claims to speak for it.
Whose project was it?
Lisa Fields raises the last claim because it comes up often in African American communities. The answer comes without a hedge: “It is absolutely incorrect to say that white people are the ones who created the New Testament canon.”
The evidence is in the people involved. Augustine of Hippo was African. Athanasius, the bishop whose 367 letter named the 27 books, carried the nickname the Black Dwarf. Williams handles that nickname carefully: “it’s not clear exactly what the particular person meant by Black.” Many take it as a reference to skin color, he reports, but he does not claim certainty. His broader point does not rest on one nickname. Some of the most influential figures in early Christianity, he argues, were African, and that includes the bishop most closely tied to the 27-book list.
He then makes a different kind of claim. The canon, in his words, “finds its ultimate roots in God and in God’s character who is not a white man.” He believes God inspired the prophets and apostles and guided the early churches to recognize what was authoritative. That is a statement of faith, and it should be read as one. History can show who wrote the lists and when. It cannot prove divine guidance. It can show that the human process looked like recognition across many communities rather than invention by one ruling group, which fits his belief without proving it.
What stays open
Some details remain his judgments rather than settled facts. He holds that the Old Testament canon was already fixed in Jesus’ day, and that Galatians may be the earliest New Testament letter, written possibly in 48 AD. Readers can test those positions against fuller histories of the period. The roles of particular councils are also less documented than either side would like.
The main pattern holds without those details. Recognition began within the New Testament, continued through the preaching of the churches, and was reported by the late lists rather than created by them. Lisa Fields puts the core distinction simply: the councils affirmed what the early church already accepted, and “they didn’t make up this list out of nowhere.”
That leaves the conspiracy version with its question turned around. The question was never whether bishops in the fourth century had power. Some did. The question is whether the Bible’s authority began with them, and the evidence places it earlier, with churches that were already reading these books as Scripture before anyone wrote a list.