Collections of ancient canons contain collected bodies of canon law that originated in various documents, such as papal and synodal decisions, and that can be designated by the generic term of canons.
Canon law was not a finished product from the beginning, but rather a gradual growth. This is especially true of the earlier Christian centuries. Such written laws as existed were not originally universal laws, but local or provincial statutes. Hence arose the necessity of collecting or codifying them. Earlier collections are brief and contain few laws that are chronologically certain. Only with the increase of legislation did a methodical classification become necessary.
These collections may be genuine (e. g. the Versio Hispanica), or apocryphal, i.e. made with the help of documents forged, interpolated, wrongly attributed or otherwise defective (e. g. the Pseudo-Isidore collection). They may be official and authentic (i.e. promulgated by competent authority) or private, the work of individuals. The forged collections of the middle of the ninth century are treated in the article on False Decretals.
From the earliest to the apocryphal collections
Apostolic period
In the primitive Christian ages there were apocryphal collections attributed to the Apostles, which belong to the genre of the Church Orders. The most important of these are the Doctrine of the Twelve Apostles, the Apostolic Constitutions, and the Apostolic Canons.
The Apostolic Constitutions, though originally accepted throughout the Orient, were declared apocryphal in the Trullan Council of 692; they were never accepted as ecclesiastical law in the West. The Apostolic Canons (eighty-five) were, on the other hand, approved by the Trullan Council.
Dionysius Exiguus, a Western canonist of the first half of the sixth century, noted that "many accept with difficulty the so-called canons of the Apostles". Nevertheless, he admitted into his collection the first fifty of these canons. The so-called Decretum Gelasianum, de libris non recipiendis (about the sixth century), puts them among the apocrypha.
From the collection of Dionysius Exiguus they passed into many Western collections, though their authority was never on one level. They were admitted at Rome in the ninth century in ecclesiastical decisions but in the eleventh century Cardinal Humbert accepts only the first fifty. Only two of them (20, 29) found their way into the Decretals of Gregory IX.
Papal decretals
In primitive Christian centuries, the popes carried on ecclesiastical government by means of an active and extensive correspondence. A synod of the year 370, under Pope Damasus, mentions that the minutes of their letters or decretals were kept in the papal archives; these Vatican Archives have perished up to the time of pope John VIII (died 882). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries attempts were made to reconstruct them. During the period under discussion (i. e. to the middle of the eleventh century) there was a constant use of the papal decretals by the compilers of canonical collections from the sixth century on.
Greek collections
In 451 there was quoted at the Council of Chalcedon a collection of councils no longer extant, nor has the name of the compiler ever transpired. At the beginning of the collection were then placed the decrees of Nicæa (325); subsequently the canons of Antioch (341) were included, in which shape it was known to the Fathers of Chalcedon. In the latter part of the fifth century the canons of Laodicæa (343-81), Constantinople (381), Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451), were incorporated with this ecclesiastical code, and finally (after the canons of Neo-Cæsarea) the decrees of Sardica (343-44), in which form the collection was in use during the sixth century. Though unofficial in character, it represents (inclusive of sixty-eight canons taken from the "Canonical Epistles" of St. Basil, I, III) the conciliar discipline of the Greek Church between 500 and 600.
This collection was chronological in order. Towards 535 an unknown compiler classified its materials in a methodical way under sixty titles, and added to the canons twenty-one imperial constitutions relative to ecclesiastical matters taken from the Code of Justinian. This collection has been lost.
Some years later (540-550) Johannes Scholasticus, Patriarch of Constantinople, made use of this code to compile a new methodical collection, which he divided into fifty books. After the emperor's death (565), the patriarch extracted from ten of the former's constitutions, known as Novellæ, some eighty-seven chapters and added them to the aforesaid collection.