Muratorian Fragment

Also called Muratorian Canon, Canon Muratori

Eighty-five lines of bad Latin in an eighth-century manuscript at Milan, preserving what is most likely a list of accepted Christian writings drawn up in Rome around AD 180 — the oldest such list we have.

Type: Eighty-five lines of Latin on two leaves of a parchment codex of 76 leaves — folio 10 recto to folio 11 recto, line 23
Language: Latin, and poor Latin at that; scholars generally agree it is a translation from a Greek original
Contents: A survey of Christian writings with comments on each. It begins mid-sentence, so the opening is lost, and it breaks off at the end. Luke is named third and John fourth; Acts, thirteen letters of Paul, Jude, two letters of John, Revelation and the Wisdom of Solomon are included. Hebrews, James and 1-2 Peter do not appear in what survives
Written: The list itself is conventionally dated c. AD 170-200, which a serious minority disputes; the manuscript that carries it is dated 676-750 by the Ambrosiana's own catalogue Disputed dating
Origin: The list itself is generally placed in Rome; the manuscript that preserves it belonged to the monastery at Bobbio
Found at: The Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan
Found in: Found by Ludovico Antonio Muratori in 1700 and published by him in 1740
Found by: Ludovico Antonio Muratori, in the third volume of his Antiquitates Italicae Medii Aevi
Now held at: Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan
Shelfmark: Cod. Ambrosianus I 101 sup.

Found in a Milan Library

Ludovico Antonio Muratori, an Italian priest and historian, published the text in 1740 from a seventh- or eighth-century codex in the Ambrosian Library in Milan. The manuscript is a scrappy thing — the Latin is clumsy and full of errors, and most scholars think it is a rough translation of a Greek original. It begins in mid-sentence, so the opening is lost, and it breaks off at the end.

What survives is a survey of Christian writings with comments on each. Luke is named as the third Gospel and John as the fourth, which implies Matthew and Mark stood in the missing opening. Acts is there, thirteen letters of Paul, Jude, two letters of John, Revelation, and the Wisdom of Solomon. The writer discusses Paul's letters to seven churches as a deliberate pattern, dismisses letters forged in Paul's name to the Laodiceans and Alexandrians as Marcionite fabrications, and says the Shepherd of Hermas may be read privately but not read out in church, because it was written recently, in his own time, by the brother of Bishop Pius of Rome.

Why It Matters

It is often assumed that the New Testament was assembled by a church council centuries after the fact. This list is one of the plainest pieces of evidence against that picture. Long before any council pronounced on the subject, a Christian writer is simply describing which books the churches read publicly and which they do not, giving reasons, and treating the question as largely settled for the Gospels and for Paul.

It is equally plain that the edges were not settled. Hebrews, James, and 1-2 Peter are not in the surviving text; the Apocalypse of Peter is listed as accepted by some and rejected by others; Wisdom is included. A reader who wants the honest shape of the evidence should notice both halves: a firm core, agreed early and without central decision, and a fringe that took generations to resolve.

The Date Is Disputed

The traditional dating, around AD 170-200, rests on the writer's remark that the Shepherd of Hermas was written "very recently, in our times, in the city of Rome" — the translation is E. Schnabel's — during his brother's episcopate — which places the author within a generation of the 140s or 150s. That reading has been standard since the nineteenth century.

It is not unanimous. Albert Sundberg in 1973 and Geoffrey Hahneman in 1992 argued that the fragment fits far better among fourth-century Eastern canon lists, and that the Hermas remark could have been copied from an earlier source. Most specialists have not been persuaded and the second-century Roman dating remains the majority view, but the alternative is a serious scholarly position, and an argument that leans hard on this document as second-century evidence should acknowledge that it is doing so.

Scripture references

Luke 1:1-4 — The Gospel the fragment describes as third in order
2 Peter 3:15-16 — Paul's letters already spoken of alongside "the other Scriptures"
Colossians 4:16 — Letters circulated and exchanged between churches from the beginning

Sources

ScholarshipEckhard J. Schnabel, "The Muratorian Fragment: The State of Research" — Eckhard J. Schnabel · Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 57:2 (2014), 231-264 — freely available. Gives the shelfmark, the 85 lines, the exact folios, the Bobbio provenance, Muratori's 1740 publication, and a survey of who has and has not accepted the fourth-century redatingSupports: The manuscript's shelfmark and extent, and the state of the dating debate in section three
Holding institutionBiblioteca Ambrosiana digital library: I 101 sup. — Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan · The holding library's catalogue record, dating the codex 676-750. No public digital facsimile of the manuscript was foundSupports: The shelfmark and the date of the manuscript itself
ScholarshipAlbert C. Sundberg, "Canon Muratori: A Fourth Century List" — Albert C. Sundberg Jr. · Harvard Theological Review 66 (1973), 1-41, developed at book length by Geoffrey M. Hahneman, The Muratorian Fragment and the Development of the Canon (Oxford University Press, 1992). Print onlySupports: The fourth-century redating named in section three, cited to the scholarship that argued it
ReferenceText & Canon Institute: How the Two Testaments Became One Bible — Text & Canon Institute, Phoenix Seminary