canon. The earliest complete canon listing, in the thirty-ninth Festal Letter of Athanasius (AD 367), lists ‘the seven so-called catholic epistles of the apostles’ immediately after the Gospels and Acts, an order still used by the Russian Orthodox Church. Placed before the letters of Paul the missionary, this makes profound sense: the gathering of epistles from the leaders described so often in Acts, the men who fronted and guided the shape of the entire early church. It can be a helpful exercise