The Apostolic Canons

Eighty-five rules handed down under the name of the Apostles, the oldest body of church law the Orthodox Church receives. They were compiled in Syria in the later fourth century as the close of the Apostolic Constitutions, and the Church took the canons while setting the Constitutions aside: the second canon of the Council in Trullo (692) received the eighty-five and rejected the rest as corrupted by heretics. The councils already treated them as binding; Nicaea I's fifteenth canon appeals to "the apostolic canon" against a cleric moving from city to city. They come first in every collection and in the Pedalion, and they govern ordination (a bishop by two or three bishops), the conduct of the clergy, the reception of heretics, the Paschal reckoning, and, in the eighty-fifth, which books are to be held as Scripture.