Huldrych Zwingli on Canon of the Old Testament
66 books — Apocrypha useful but not Scripture
THE POSITION
The Zurich Bible of 1531, produced under Zwingli in his last year, prints the deuterocanonical books in a closing appendix headed Apocryphi, with a title page saying these are books not reckoned as biblical by the ancients and not found among the Hebrews — useful reading, not Scripture. That is a 66-book canon in practice. It is placed at contested rather than researched because the Zurich Bible was a committee's work with Leo Jud and Konrad Pellikan, the relevant preface is only commonly ascribed to Zwingli, and no statement in his own signed works settles the Apocrypha.
WHY THERE IS NO QUOTATIONFive positions carry no quotation, for two different reasons. On the canon, the miraculous gifts, the millennium and the unseen realm nothing in the works read poses the question; on the final state he assumes the answer rather than arguing it. Zwingli died at 47 leaving no systematic theology, and several of his works were not reachable in a public-domain English text for this run, so these are blanks in a partial corpus rather than proof that he was silent everywhere.
13 OTHERS HOLD THIS
ABOUT THIS FIGURE
Reformer of Zurich and the first Reformed theologian to leave a confession — the Sixty-Seven Articles of 1523 predate Augsburg by seven years. He pushed further than Luther on the Supper, which split the early Reformation at Marburg in 1529, further than anyone on the reach of election, and further than any other Reformer on who might finally be saved. This entry rests on the Sixty-Seven Articles (1523), the Declaration Regarding Original Sin (1526), the Fidei Ratio sent to Charles V (1530) and the Exposition of the Christian Faith written weeks before he died in battle — the last of these read only in its chapter on eternal life.
Cite this page
"Huldrych Zwingli on Canon of the Old Testament", Examined Doctrine, July 2026 edition, https://examineddoctrine.com/position/zwingli/ot-canon (archived at https://examineddoctrine.com/editions/2026-07/position/zwingli/ot-canon).