The Holy Canons
The law of the Church, as the Church received it: 274 canons of the Apostles and the seven Ecumenical Councils, each in its Greek beside an English made from it for this site.
A canon (κανών, a rule or measuring rod) is a decision of a council or a ruling of a Father on the order of the Church: who may be ordained and how, what a bishop may and may not do, how the fallen are received back, how the fasts and feasts are kept, how heretics are received, what is read in church. The canons are not a code. Each was written for a moment, and the Church has always read them together, the later interpreting the earlier and all of them applied with judgement.
Four kinds are received. The Apostolic Canons, eighty-five rules handed down under the Apostles' name from the Syrian church of the fourth century. The canons of the seven Ecumenical Councils, from Nicaea in 325 to Nicaea in 787, with the Council in Trullo of 691 to 692 supplying the canons the Fifth and Sixth Councils had not written. The canons of the local councils, Ancyra, Neocaesarea, Gangra, Antioch, Laodicea, Sardica and Carthage among them, received into the whole Church's law. And the canons of the Fathers: rulings of St Basil the Great, St Athanasius, St Gregory of Nyssa and others, given in letters and received as law.
The Church itself named the list. The second canon of the Council in Trullo receives the Apostolic Canons, the councils before it and the Fathers by name, and the first canon of the Seventh Council confirms them all. In 1800 St Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and the hieromonk Agapios printed the whole body with a commentary as the Pedalion, the Rudder, and that is the collection the Orthodox Church uses. Two words govern how it is applied: akribeia, the strictness of the letter, and oikonomia, the pastoral leniency the bishop may exercise for the salvation of a soul. The canons are the measure; the bishop is the physician.
The collections
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The Apostolic Canons
Eighty-five canons handed down under the name of the Apostles. They close the Apostolic Constitutions, a Syrian compilation of the later fourth century, and the Church received the canons while setting the Constitutions aside: the Council in Trullo, in its second canon, took the eighty-five and rejected the rest as corrupted by heretics. They come first in every collection, and the councils that follow cite them as already binding: Nicaea's fifteenth canon speaks of "the apostolic canon" against a cleric moving from city to city.
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The First Ecumenical Council
Twenty canons from the council that condemned Arius and wrote the first part of the Creed. They settle the rank of the great sees, the readmission of those who lapsed in the persecution, the grades of penance, and why no one kneels on Sunday or in the days of Pentecost.
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The Second Ecumenical Council
Seven canons from the council that completed the Creed. The first confirms the faith of Nicaea and names the heresies it condemns; the third gives the bishop of Constantinople the primacy of honour after the bishop of Rome, because it is New Rome; the seventh sets out how converts from each heresy are received, by anointing or by baptism.
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The Third Ecumenical Council
Eight canons from the council that condemned Nestorius and confessed the Virgin as Theotokos. Six of them deal with the bishops and clergy who sided with Nestorius; the seventh forbids anyone to compose or offer another Creed than that of Nicaea; the eighth upholds the independence of the Church of Cyprus against the bishop of Antioch, and with it the principle that no bishop may seize a province that was never his.
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The Fourth Ecumenical Council
Thirty canons from the council that defined the two natures of Christ. They confirm every earlier canon, forbid ordination for money, place monks under their bishop, forbid a cleric to be ordained without a church, and in the twenty-eighth give the see of Constantinople equal privileges with Old Rome, second in rank after it.
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The Council in Trullo
A hundred and two canons, the largest body of law any council gave the Church. The Fifth and Sixth Councils had defined doctrine and issued no canons, so the bishops met again in the domed hall (the Trullos) of the palace to supply them: the Quinisext, the Fifth-Sixth. Its second canon names every collection the Church receives, from the Apostolic Canons to the Fathers; the rest order the clergy, the monasteries, the liturgy, the fasts, marriage, the icons, and the reception of heretics.
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The Seventh Ecumenical Council
Twenty-two canons from the council that restored the icons. The first receives every canon before it; the rest restore what the iconoclast years had broken, forbidding ordination for money and the secular appointment of bishops, requiring relics in every consecrated church, and ordering the monasteries and their property.
The texts, and whose they are
The Greek is the text of the Pedalion as transcribed by Nektarios Mamalougos (users.uoa.gr/~nektar). It has been read against the manuscripts' plain sense canon by canon and 213 misprints of the transcription corrected, each with its evidence, in tools/import-canons.js. Where the reading is still open the transcription is printed as it stands. The English is this site's own translation of the Greek beside it, close and word for word where English allows; it follows no other translation and may be quoted freely with a link. The canons themselves belong to the Church.
Coming: the canons of the local councils and of the Fathers, from the same source, in the same form.