EXCURSUS ON THE NUMBER OF THE NICENE CANONS.

There has come down to us a Latin letter purporting to have been 

written by St. Athanasius to Pope Marcus. This letter is found in the 

Benedictine edition of St. Athanasius's works(ed. Patav. ii. ) but 

rejected as spurious by Montfaucon the learned editor. In this letter is 

contained the marvellous assertion that the Council of Nice at first 

adopted forty canons, which were in Greek, that it subsequently added 

twenty Latin canons, and that afterwards the council reassembled and 

set forth seventy altogether. A tradition that something of the kind had 

taken place was prevalent in parts of the East, and some collections 

did contain seventy canons.

In the Vatican Library is a MS. which was bought for it by the famous 

Asseman, from the Coptic Patriarch, John, and which contains not 

only seventy, but eighty canons attributed to the council of Nice. The 

MS. is in Arabic, and was discovered by J. B. Romanus, S. J., who 

first made its contents known, and translated into Latin a copy he had 

made of it. Another Jesuit, Pisanus, was writing a history of the 

Nicene Council at the time and he received the eighty newly found 

canons into his book; but, out of respect to the pseudo-Athanasian 

letter, he at first cut down the number to seventy; but in later editions 

he followed the MS. All this was in the latter half of the sixteenth 

century; and in  Turrianus, who had had Father Romanus's 

translation revised before it was first published, now issued an entirely 

new translation with a Proemium() containing a vast amount of 

information upon the whole subject, and setting up an attempted proof 

that the number of the Nicene Canons exceeded twenty. His argument 

for the time being carried the day.

Hefele says, "it is certain that the Orientals() believed the Council of 

Nice to have promulgated more than twenty canons: the learned 

Anglican, Beveridge,() has proved this, reproducing an ancient 

Arabic paraphrase of the canons of the first four Ecumenical Councils. 

According to this Arabic paraphrase, found in a MS. in the Bodleian 

Library, the Council of Nice must have put forth three books of 

canons.  . . .   The Arabic paraphrase of which we are speaking gives a 

paraphrase of all these canons, but Beveridge took only the part 

referring to the second book--that is to say, the paraphrase of the 

twenty genuine canons; for, according to his view, which was perfectly 

correct, it was only these twenty canons which were really the work of 

the Council of Nice, and all the others were falsely attributed to it."()

Hefele goes on to prove that the canons he rejects must be of much 

later origin, some being laws of the times of Theodosius and Justinian 

according to the opinion of Renaudot.()

Before leaving this point I should notice the profound research on 

these Arabic canons of the Maronite, Abraham Echellensis. He gives 

eighty-four canons in his Latin translation of , and was of opinion 

that they had been collected from different Oriental sources, and sects; 

but that originally they had all been translated from the Greek, and 

were collected by James, the celebrated bishop of Nisibis, who was 

present at Nice. But this last supposition is utterly untenable.

Among the learned there have not been wanting some who have held 

that the Council of Nice passed more canons than the twenty we 

possess, and have arrived at the conclusion independently of the 

Arabic discovery, such are Baronius and Card. d'Aguirre, but their 

arguments have been sufficiently answered, and they cannot present 

anything able to weaken the conclusion that flows from the 

consideration of the following facts. (Hefele: History of the Councils, Vol. I. pp.  et seqq.[2ded.])

Let us see first what is the testimony of those Greek and Latin authors 

who lived about the time of the Council, concerning the number.

a. The first to be consulted among the Greek authors is the learned 

Theodoret, who lived about a century after the Council of Nicaea. He 

says, in his History of the Church: "After the condemnation of the 

Arians, the bishops assembled once more, and decreed twenty canons 

on ecclesiastical discipline."

b. Twenty years later, Gelasius, Bishop of Cyzicus, after much 

research into the most ancient documents, wrote a history of the 

Nicene Council. Gelasius also says expressly that the Council decreed 

twenty canons; and, what is more important, he gives the original text 

of these canons exactly in the same order, and according to the tenor 

which we find elsewhere.

c. Rufinus is more ancient than these two historians. He was born near 

the period when the Council of Nicaea was held, and about half a 

century after he wrote his celebrated history of the Church, in which 

he inserted a Latin translation of the Nicene canons. Rufinus also 

knew only of these twenty canons; but as he has divided the sixth and 

the eighth into two parts, he has given twenty-two canons, which are 

exactly the same as the twenty furnished by the other historians.

d. The famous discussion between the African bishops and the Bishop 

of Rome, on the subject of appeals to Rome, gives us a very important 

testimony on the true number of the Nicene canons. The presbyter 

Apiarius of Sicca in Africa, having been deposed for many crimes, 

appealed to Rome. Pope Zosimus(-) took the appeal into 

consideration, sent legates to Africa; and to prove that he had the right 

to act thus, he quoted a canon of the Council of Nicaea, containing 

these words: "When a bishop thinks he has been unjustly deposed by 

his colleagues he may appeal to Rome, and the Roman bishop shall 

have the business decided by judices in partibus." The canon quoted 

by the Pope does not belong to the Council of Nicaea, as he affirmed; 

it was the fifth canon of the Council of Sardica(the seventh in the Latin 

version). What explains the error of Zosimus is that in the ancient 

copies the canons of Nicaea and Sardica are written consecutively, 

with the same figures, and under the common title of canons of the 

Council of Nicaea; and Zosimus might optima fide fall into an error--

which he shared with Greek authors, his contemporaries, who also 

mixed the canons of Nicaea with those of Sardica. The African 

bishops, not finding the canon quoted by the Pope either in their Greek 

or in their Latin copies, in vain consulted also the copy which Bishop 

Cecilian, who had himself been present at the Council of Nicaea, had 

brought to Carthage. The legates of the Pope then declared that they 

did not rely upon these copies, and they agreed to send to Alexandria 

and to Constantinople to ask the patriarchs of these two cities for 

authentic copies of the canons of the Council of Nicaea. The African 

bishops desired in their turn that Pope Boniface should take the same 

step(Pope Zosimus had died meanwhile in )--that he should ask for 

copies from the Archbishops of Constantinople, Alexandria, and 

Antioch. Cyril of Alexandria and Atticus of Constantinople, indeed, 

sent exact and faithful copies of the Creed and canons of Nicaea; and 

two learned men of Constantinople, Theilo and Thearistus, even 

translated these canons into Latin. Their translation has been 

preserved to us in the acts of the sixth Council of Carthage, and it 

contains only the twenty ordinary canons. It might be thought at first 

sight that it contained twenty-one canons; but on closer consideration 

we see, as Hardouin has proved, that this twenty-first article is nothing 

but an historical notice appended to the Nicene canons by the Fathers 

of Carthage. It is conceived in these terms: "After the bishops had 

decreed these rules at Nicaea, and after the holy Council had decided 

what was the ancient rule for the celebration of Easter, peace and unity 

of faith were re-established between the East and the West. This is 

what we(the African bishops) have thought it right to add according to 

the history of the Church." The bishops of Africa despatched to Pope Boniface the copies which 

had been sent to them from Alexandria and Constantinople, in the 

month of November ; and subsequently in their letters to Celestine 

I. (-), successor to Boniface, they appealed to the text of these 

documents.

e. All the ancient collections of canons, either in Latin or Greek, 

composed in the fourth, or quite certainly at least in the fifth century, 

agree in giving only these twenty canons to Nicaea. The most ancient 

of these collections were made in the Greek Church, and in the course 

of time a very great number of copies of them were written. Many of 

these copies have descended to us; many libraries possess copies; thus 

Montfaucon enumerates several in his Bibliotheca Coisliniana. 

Fabricius makes a similar catalogue of the copies in his Bibliotheca 

Groeca to those found in the libraries of Turin, Florence, Venice, 

Oxford, Moscow, etc.; and he adds that these copies also contain the 

so-called apostolic canons, and those of the most ancient councils. The 

French bishop John Tilius presented to Paris, in , a MS. of one of 

these Greek collections as it existed in the ninth century. It contains 

exactly our twenty canons of Nicaea, besides the so-called apostolic 

canons, those of Ancyra, etc. Elias Ehmger published a new edition at 

Wittemberg in , using a second MS. which was found at 

Augsburg; but the Roman collection of the Councils had before given 

in , the Greek text of the twenty canons of Nicaea. This text of the 

Roman editors, with the exception of some insignificant variations, 

was exactly the same as that of the edition of Tilius. Neither the 

learned Jesuit Sirmond nor his coadjutors have mentioned what 

manuscripts were consulted in preparing this edition; probably they 

were manuscripts drawn from several libraries, and particularly from 

that of the Vatican. The text of this Roman edition passed into all the 

following collections, even into those of Hardouin and Mansi; while 

Justell in his Bibliotheca juris Canonici and Beveridge in his 

Synodicon(both of the eighteenth century), give a somewhat different 

text, also collated from MSS., and very similar to the text given by 

Tilius. Bruns, in his recent Bibliotheca Ecclesiastica, compares the 

two texts. Now all these Greek MSS, consulted at such different times, 

and by all these editors, acknowledge only twenty canons of Nicaea, 

and always the same twenty which we possess.

The Latin collections of the canons of the Councils also give the same 

result--for example, the most ancient and the most remarkable of all, 

the Prisca, and that of Dionysius the Less, which was collected about 

the year . The testimony of this latter collection is the more 

important for the number twenty, as Dionysius refers to the Groeca 

auctoritas.

f. Among the later Eastern witnesses we may further mention Photius, 

Zonaras and Balsamon. Photius, in his Collection of the Canons, and 

in his Nomocanon, as well as the two other writers in their 

commentaries upon the canons of the ancient Councils, quote only and 

know only twenty canons of Nicaea, and always those which we 

possess.

g. The Latin canonists of the Middle Ages also acknowledge only 

these twenty canons of Nicaea. We have proof of this in the celebrated 

Spanish collection, which is generally but erroneously attributed to St. 

Isidore(it was composed at the commencement of the seventh 

century), and in that of Adrian(so called because it was offered to 

Charles the Great by Pope Adrian I). The celebrated Hincmar, 

Archbishop of Rheims, the first canonist of the ninth century, in his 

turn attributes only twenty canons to the Council of Nicaea, and even 

the pseudo-Isidore assigns it no more.

I add for the convenience of the reader the captions of the Eighty 

Canons as given by Turrianus, translating them from the reprint in 

Labbe and Cossart, Concilia, Tom. II. col. . The Eighty-four 

Canons as given by Echellensis together with numerous Constitutions 

and Decrees attributed to the Nicene Council are likewise to be found 

in Labbe(ut supra, col. ).