One of the common claims made against non-Trinitarians is that we somehow owe our New Testament to Trinitarians: “After all,” they say, “Trinitarians compiled the canon, so how can you reject the Trinity while accepting their Bible?”
Historically, however, that argument badly twists what actually happened. There was no single day, council, emperor, or group of theologians who sat down and “created” the New Testament. The canon emerged gradually as early Christian churches copied, circulated, read and recognized apostolic writings as authoritative Scripture.
First, the fully developed doctrine later called the Trinity—God as one Being in three Persons—is nowhere taught in Scripture. Any historian or dictionary worth their salt will tell you that God as Trinity developed over centuries. So-called Church Fathers such as Ignatius in the early second century, Justin Martyr in the mid-second century, and Tertullian represent important early stages and are often claimed by Trinitarians as witnesses to their later doctrine. Yet even their formulations are not identical to those of the later fourth and fifth centuries. Tertullian, for example, did use the Latin term trinitas and spoke of Father, Son and Spirit but his formulation was still not the fully developed Trinitarianism later seen in writers like the so-called Cappadocian Fathers of later centuries. Modern scholarship likewise describes the major theological debate over how to conceptualize God as Trinity as developing particularly after the fourth century.
Even the original Nicene Creed of AD 325 does not use the later Athanasian formula of “one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity.” It begins: “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible,” and concludes simply, “and [we believe] in the Holy Ghost.”
At the same time, it calls the Son “true God from true God” and homoousios—“of one substance”—with the Father. But the creed was not yet the later fully elaborated definition of God as Trinity found in the so-called Athanasian Creed. Despite its name, Athanasius did not write this document. Its authorship remains unknown, it originated in the Latin West, and it is generally dated to the late fifth or early sixth century AD.
Second, there is the fanciful yet popular claim that Emperor Constantine personally selected the books that became our New Testament—or that the Council of Nicaea in AD 325 did so. There is simply no historical evidence for this. Nicaea issued twenty disciplinary canons dealing with matters such as clergy, ordination, church jurisdiction and reconciliation of the lapsed; none establishes a list of New Testament books. Constantine did later commission Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, to prepare fifty copies of “the sacred Scriptures” for churches in Constantinople, but commissioning copies is obviously not the same thing as deciding which books were Scripture.
Long before Constantine, most of the books that would eventually make up our New Testament were already circulating and many were widely recognized. Around AD 180 Irenaeus explicitly defended the fourfold Gospel—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—as the Church’s four Gospels. By the early fourth century Eusebius could distinguish between books already widely accepted—such as the four Gospels, Acts and Paul’s letters—and a smaller group still disputed, including James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2–3 John and Revelation. Even though the exact 27-book New Testament was not finally settled before Constantine, there is zero evidence showing that the Council of Nicaea, let alone Constantine personally, was involved in “picking the books.” The fact is that the canonical process was already centuries old by Nicaea, and most of our NT writings had been read and recognized by Christian communities for generations. That is also why major Trinitarian canon scholars such as Bruce M. Metzger and F.F. Bruce describe canonization as a long, gradual process involving apostolic connection, widespread church usage and consistency with the churches’ received faith—not as a decision made one afternoon by Constantine or a fourth-century council.
The fact is the historical picture is simply the reverse of the popular Trinitarian claims.
Christians did not receive the New Testament from Constantine or from the Council of Nicaea. The churches had been reading, copying, exchanging and recognizing these apostolic writings for centuries before the later doctrinal formulas were completed. The precise edges of the canon gradually became fixed, just as theological controversies were also developing.
Simply put, the later Trinitarian system inherited the New Testament writings; it did not create them.
