Council of Hippo
“But prove all things. Hold fast to what is good;” — 1 Thessalonians 5:21
Background: The Question of the Canon
Christians held many writings — Gospels, epistles, apocalypses, and a body of suspect works circulating under apostolic names. Through the first three centuries, what the churches read in worship depended largely on accumulated practice and tradition, not formal institutional decision.
The question went deeper than “which books may be read in worship.” It reached the bedrock of faith: where is the word of God? When a presbyter produced a “letter of Paul” or a “Revelation of Peter,” how were the faithful to judge? Behind every dispute lay the sustained historical pressure of Gnostics and Marcionites, who had long used trimmed canons to prop up their heresies — the church had to make clear which writings were divinely inspired Scripture.
By the third century, East and West had reached broad agreement: the four Gospels, Paul’s thirteen epistles, 1 Peter, and 1 John were nearly undisputed; Hebrews, James, Revelation, and several shorter letters still divided different regions. By the fourth century, as the imperial church stabilized, formal canonical lists began to appear. In 367 AD, Athanasius of Alexandria, in his Easter Letter, listed the same twenty-seven books of the New Testament recognized today — the earliest known list in complete agreement with the present canon.
The Event: 393 AD, Hippo
In 393 AD, the bishops of North Africa convened a council at Hippo Regius (modern Annaba, Algeria). This is the earliest documented instance of a church council formally approving a list of books as the biblical canon. (Wikipedia: Synod of Hippo)
Canon 36 of the council listed the Old and New Testament books the assembly recognized. For the New Testament, it enumerated exactly twenty-seven: the four Gospels, Acts, fourteen epistles of Paul (including Hebrews), two epistles of Peter, three epistles of John, James, Jude, and Revelation. This list is identical to the New Testament of every Protestant Bible today. (4marksofthechurch.com: Biblical Canon of the Synod of Hippo)
For the Old Testament, the council adopted the broader list that included the deuterocanonical books (the “Apocrypha,” or additional books of the Septuagint) — Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Sirach, Wisdom, and others. This became the historical starting point for the later dispute between Catholic and Protestant Old Testament canons.
The council also stipulated that the canonical list “must first be confirmed with the church of Rome — the brethren across the sea” before taking effect. This language reveals an important theological reality: no single council was sufficient to settle the matter. The authority of the canon rested on the recognition of the whole church. (Wikipedia: Synod of Hippo)
Key Figures
Aurelius of Carthage — The bishop of Carthage who presided over the North African conciliar process, maintaining continuity of decision-making between the Council of Hippo and the subsequent Council of Carthage.
Augustine of Hippo (354–430 AD) — Present at the council as a local presbyter. In De Doctrina Christiana, Book II, Chapter 8, he listed a canon identical to Hippo’s and articulated the principle for recognizing it: “follow the judgment of the greater number of Catholic churches; and among these, of course, a high place must be given to such as have been thought worthy to be the seat of an apostle.” Augustine’s theological account of the process proved more lastingly influential than the canon itself. (New Advent: Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, Book II)
Outcome and Legacy
The canonical list from Hippo was adopted verbatim by the Third Council of Carthage in 397 AD, then reaffirmed by the Council of Carthage in 419 AD. These three councils together form the historical foundation on which the Western church’s recognition of the biblical canon rests.
The list of twenty-seven New Testament books gained formal standing across the Latin West through this sequence of councils. When John Wycliffe translated the Bible into English in 1382, when Erasmus compiled his Greek New Testament in 1516, when William Tyndale translated the New Testament from the original languages in 1526 — the textual foundation for all that translation work and Reformation activity was this same twenty-seven-book New Testament canon.
The dispute ultimately came down to the Old Testament. During the Reformation, Martin Luther aligned with the Hebrew canon of Jewish tradition and removed the deuterocanonical books. The Council of Trent in 1546 responded, establishing the seventy-three-book canon including the deuterocanonicals as the authoritative Catholic Bible. The difference between Protestant and Catholic Old Testaments today traces directly back to this history.
Connection to the Lord’s Recovery
Brother Witness Lee, in the Level 6 lesson on “The Bible — The Word of God” in the Truth Lessons, explicitly adopted the sixty-six-book Protestant canon. He cited Josephus (37 AD) and Cyril (315 AD) as historical witnesses to the Old Testament Hebrew canon, and specifically noted that the Council of Laodicea in 363 AD formally rejected the authority of the deuterocanonical books. He also identified the Council of Trent in 1546 as the historical moment when the Catholic Church officially incorporated the deuterocanonicals into its canon. (bibleread.online: Truth Lessons Level 6, Chapter 4)
Brother Witness Lee did not name the Council of Hippo directly, but his overall teaching on the biblical canon falls entirely within this historical framework: the word of God was inspired and written by the Holy Spirit; the church recognized and received these books through a historical process — it did not create them.
The Lesson: The Church Recognized, Not Created
The most important theological lesson of the Council of Hippo is regularly buried under technical debates about canonization: the church did not create Scripture; the church only recognized it. Those twenty-seven books of the New Testament had already been tested across more than two centuries of the church’s reading, citation, resistance to heresy, and confession of faith before Hippo convened. What the council did was put that shared recognition into writing.
When Augustine spoke of “following the judgment of the greater number of Catholic churches,” he was not pointing to a bishop’s decree or a council vote. He was pointing to the consensus the whole church had displayed across time. That is exactly the ground today’s believers need to stand on when anyone claims an “authoritative interpretation”: the authority of the word of God rests in the word of God itself, not in any institution that acknowledges it.
“Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” — Psalm 119:105