Canones Apostolorum

Title	Canones Apostolorum
Key	?
Wikidata Item no.	Q2385311
Size	Very small (less than 100 canons)
Century	saec. IV
General region of origin	Southern Europe and Mediterranean
Main author	Christof Rolker

The Canones Apostolorum are a small canonical collection that probably originated in Syria in the fourth century and were widely distributed in various translations (Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopian, Latin).

The 85 canons deal with questions of church discipline, predominantly in relation to the clergy. The last canon contains a list of the canonical books of the Bible. In the Eastern Churches, the Canones Apostolorum have been a recognised source of canon law since the Quinisextum at the latest. In the Western Church, the first 50 canons were known in a Latin translation by Dionysus Exiguus, who also included them in his collection (the Dionysiana), from where they were adopted in many medieval collections of canon law.

However, Dionysus already had reservations about the validity of the Canones Apostolorum, and the Decretum Gelasianum categorised them as apocryphal writings.