The New Testament

The twenty-seven books of the new covenant: the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the fourteen epistles of St Paul, the seven Catholic epistles and the Revelation to St John. The first list to name exactly these is St Athanasius’ Festal Letter of 367, and the Council in Trullo of 692 received the canons of the earlier councils and Fathers that set out the books, though the East long hesitated over Revelation, which St Cyril of Jerusalem left out of his list. It remains the one book of the New Testament from which no lectionary reading is appointed. In church the New Testament is not a single volume: the Gospels are read from the Gospel book on the altar, and Acts and the epistles from the Apostolos, each passage appointed for its day. The Greek-speaking Churches read it in the Byzantine text, printed by the Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1904, and the whole Church reads it as its own book, written within the Church and interpreted by it.