Development of the New Testament canon 1290 to include in the Armenian canon several apocryphal books: Advice of the Mother of God to the Apostles, the Books of Criapos, and the ever-popular Epistle of Barnabas. The Armenian Apostolic church at times has included the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs in its Old Testament and the Third Epistle to the Corinthians, but does not always list it with the other 27 canonical New Testament books. The New Testament of the Coptic Bible, adopted by the Egyptian Church, includes the two Epistles of Clement. The canon of the Tewahedo Churches is somewhat looser than for other traditional Christian
The Books of the Bible a good deal to the invention of printing. It was preceded by an era of fluidity, both among the Jews (the chief guardians of the Hebrew Bible) and among Christians (the chief guardians of the Greek [Bible])." In the case of the New Testament, Bruce M. Metzger notes similarly that beyond today's familiar order, "Prior to the invention of printing… there were many other sequences, not only of the five main groups of books [gospels, Acts, Pauline epistles, general epistles, Revelation], but also of the several books within each group. …Such matters were of no great significance for the ancient