Athanasius

Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 296–373) was the tireless champion of the full divinity of Christ against Arianism. As a young deacon at Nicaea (325) and then as bishop, he defended the homoousios through five exiles — “Athanasius against the world.” His On the Incarnation remains a classic, and his Festal Letter of 367 lists the twenty-seven books of the New Testament canon. A Doctor of the Church.

Athanasius reads Scripture relentlessly as the story of God's saving descent: in On the Incarnation he argues from the whole sweep of the Bible that only the Word who made us could remake us, so that "he became what we are that he might make us what he is." His Festal Letter of 367 is the first surviving document to list exactly the twenty-seven books of the New Testament as we have them, a landmark in the formation of the canon every reader now takes for granted.