THE SHORT ANSWER
Nicaea (325) dealt with Arius and the date of Pascha; none of its twenty canons lists the books of the Bible.
What you'll notice
You'll hear it online: in 325 a roomful of bishops voted on which books made the Bible.
What it's called
The canon of Scripture is the list of books the Church reads as Scripture. The same word names a church rule, so Nicaea's twenty "canons" are rules, not book lists.
What's actually happening
Nicaea met to answer Arius, who taught that the Son was a creature. It gave the Church the core of the Creed, settled that all Christians should keep Pascha together, and issued twenty canons on church order.1 Not one of them lists books.
Why it matters
The Bible is the Church's book, read in the Liturgy long before anyone wrote a table of contents. The Church didn't create the canon so much as recognize what it had been reading all along. Scripture and Tradition has the rest.
Where it came from
It took centuries of churches reading certain books in worship and recognizing them as apostolic. The first surviving list of exactly our twenty-seven New Testament books comes from Saint Athanasius in his Easter letter of 367, forty-two years after Nicaea.2 Regional councils such as Carthage issued lists, which the Council in Trullo (692) received into the Church's law.3
The myth comes from a good story. A Byzantine collection, the Synodicon Vetus, probably from the late ninth century, says the fathers laid the disputed books by the altar and prayed, and the true ones ended up on top. Saint Jerome even mentions a report that Nicaea counted Judith among the Scriptures.4 It made better copy than four centuries of reading.
What you do
If you're Orthodox: when it comes up, name Athanasius and 367.
If you're visiting: listen to the readings; you're hearing the canon used the way it was formed.
Go deeper
- Saint Athanasius, Festal Letter 39 (NPNF2 4).
- The canons of Nicaea in The Seven Ecumenical Councils (NPNF2 14).