Constantine changed the Bible

In 313 Constantine and his co-emperor Licinius granted Christians legal toleration. Constantine then favored the church with money, buildings, and privileges, and in 325 he summoned bishops from across the empire to Nicaea, in what is now Turkey. He wanted a divided church to agree, and he used his authority to get that result.

Eusebius, a bishop who knew Constantine personally, records that the emperor asked him to have fifty copies of the Scriptures prepared for the churches of his new capital, Constantinople (Life of Constantine 4.36). So Constantine did pay for Bibles.

Constantine changed the political situation of Christianity; that is true. That he decided what the Bible contains, or altered what it says, needs its own evidence. Ordering fifty copies of a book shows that the book already existed and that the emperor wanted more of it.

Nicaea’s creed and its twenty canons, or rules, survive, so we know what it discussed (First Council of Nicaea). The council met because a priest in Alexandria named Arius taught that the Son of God was a created being, and the bishops wrote a creed rejecting that view. The canons deal with practical matters: how bishops are appointed, how clergy who lapsed under persecution are to be received back, and similar questions of discipline. The council also sought a common date for Easter.

Nowhere do these documents list the books of the Bible, vote on any book, or order any book burned. No ancient writer who describes the council, including Eusebius, who attended it, reports anything of the kind.

The council’s business is otherwise well documented. Had Nicaea chosen the New Testament, that would have been the most consequential thing it did, and it would be strange for every record to leave it out. No fourth-century source says it did; the story is a much later retelling.

If the New Testament had been assembled in 325, earlier Christians would show no settled sense of which books mattered. They do show one.

Irenaeus, a bishop in Lyon writing around AD 180, argues that there are four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and no more (Against Heresies 3.11). He is not proposing a new list. He is defending one his readers already used, against groups who preferred other writings. Constantine was born nearly a century later.

The Muratorian Fragment, a Latin list of accepted writings usually dated to the late second century (some scholars place it later), names the same Gospels and most of Paul’s letters.

Eusebius himself, writing his church history during Constantine’s reign, sorts Christian books into groups: those accepted everywhere, those disputed but used by many, those rejected, and those he calls heretical (Ecclesiastical History 3.25). The four Gospels, Acts, and Paul’s letters are in the first group. A few short letters, such as James, 2 Peter, and Jude, are in the second. That is a report of what churches across the empire had been doing for generations, and it shows the debate was not over in his day.

The first surviving list that matches today’s 27-book New Testament exactly comes from Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, in a letter he wrote for Easter in 367 (Festal Letter 39). That is more than forty years after Nicaea and thirty years after Constantine’s death.

Athanasius is an awkward figure for the story of an emperor dictating to the church. He was exiled five times, by Constantine and by later emperors, for refusing to bend on what he believed. His list was not an imperial decree. It was one bishop telling his churches which books they read, and it confirmed a collection that, as Eusebius shows, was already mostly agreed.

The lists of books that churches accepted as Scripture are called canon lists. Scholars who study them, such as Edmon Gallagher and John Meade in their Oxford collection of early canon lists, describe a long and public process carried out across many regions. Churches asked whether a writing came from the apostles or their close associates, whether it was read widely, and whether it agreed with what they had been taught. You may think those were the wrong questions, or that some books were wrongly judged. Either way, the judging was done by churches, not by an emperor.

A second version of the claim is that the words of the Bible were changed under Constantine. This can be tested, because some copies of the New Testament are older than him.

P75, a papyrus book now in the Vatican Library, was copied in the early third century and contains large parts of Luke and John. P52, a small fragment of John, is usually dated to the second century. Other papyri from before 325 preserve portions of the Gospels and Paul’s letters. When scholars compare these early copies with later ones, they find the ordinary differences of hand copying, such as spelling, word order, and occasional added or missing phrases. They do not find a different Gospel before Constantine and a new one after.

Bruce Metzger and Bart Ehrman’s standard textbook, The Text of the New Testament, sets out how this comparison works. Ehrman is an agnostic and a sharp critic of how Christians handle the Bible. Even so, his field reconstructs the text by comparing manuscripts from many places and centuries, and the earliest of them were already scattered across the Mediterranean before Constantine was born. No emperor could recall and rewrite them all.

“Books were taken out” usually means one of three things, and each has a different answer.

• Other gospels, such as the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Truth. Most are dated later than the four Gospels, and many come from movements that taught a different view of God and the world. Irenaeus, around 180, already rejected writings of this kind, naming the Gospel of Truth used by one such group, so they were set aside long before Nicaea, not at it. You can read them today, and many scholars find them valuable for understanding early Christian diversity.
• The Apocrypha, or deuterocanonical books, such as Tobit and the books of Maccabees. This is a real disagreement about the Old Testament, between Catholic and Orthodox churches on one side and Protestants on the other. The sharpest form of it dates from the sixteenth century, not the fourth.
• Changes to the wording of books we have. That is a question about copying, addressed above.

None of these is a book that was in the Bible before Constantine and missing after him. If you have a particular book in mind, it is worth asking when it was written, who used it before 325, and what record shows it being removed.