thumb|[[Canon (canon law)|Canons 1 to 4 of the Apostolic Canons attributed by some to the Apostles, in Greek (left) and Latin (right) from a 1715 edition]]
The Apostolic Canons, also called Apostolic canons (Latin: Canones apostolorum, "Canons of the Apostles"), Ecclesiastical Canons of the Same Holy Apostles, or Canons of the Holy Apostles, is a 4th-century Syrian Christian text. It is an Ancient Church Order, a collection of ancient ecclesiastical canons concerning the government and discipline of the Early Christian Church, allegedly written by the Apostles. This text is an appendix to the eighth book of the Apostolic Constitutions. Like the other Ancient Church Orders, the Apostolic Canons uses a pseudepigraphic form.
These eighty-five canons were approved by the Council in Trullo in 692 but were rejected by Pope Sergius I. In the Western Church only fifty of these canons circulated, translated in Latin by Dionysius Exiguus in about 500 AD, and included in the Western collections and afterwards in the Corpus Juris Canonici.
The document contains a list of canonical books.
Content
They deal mostly with the office and duties of a Christian bishop, the qualifications and conduct of the clergy, the religious life of the Christian flock (abstinence, fasting), its external administration (excommunication, synods, relations with pagans and Jews), the sacraments (Baptism, Eucharist, Marriage); in a word, they are a handy summary of the statutory legislation of the Early Church.
Reception
There is some controversy over the number of these canons. In the Apostolic Constitutions, the Apostolic Canons are eighty-five (occasionally eighty-four, a variant in the Manuscripts that arises from the occasional counting of two canons as one). In the latter half of the 6th century, Joannes Scholasticus, Patriarch of Constantinople from 565 to 577, published a collection of synodal decrees in which he included these eighty-five canons, and this number was finally consecrated for the Greek Church by the Trullan or Quinisext Council of 692, which also confined the current Greek tradition of their Apostolic origin.
Nevertheless, from their first appearance in the West they aroused suspicion. Canon 46 for example, that rejected all heretical baptism, was notoriously opposed to Roman and Western practice. In the so-called Decretum traditionally attributed to Pope Gelasius (492-96) they are denounced as an apocryphal book, i. e. not recognized by the Catholic Church, though this note of censure was probably not in the original Decretum, but with others was added under Pope Hormisdas (514-23). Consequently, in a second edition (lost, except preface) of his Collectio canonum, prepared under the latter pope, Dionysius Exiguus omitted them; even in the first edition he admitted that very many in the West were loath to acknowledge them (quamplurimi quidem assensum non prœbuere facilem). Hincmar of Reims (died 882) declared that they were not written by the Apostles, and as late as the middle of the 11th century, Western theologians (Cardinal Humbert, 1054) distinguished between the eighty-five Greek canons that they declared apocryphal, and the fifty Latin canons recognized as orthodox rules by antiquity.