As just indicated the number of these canons has given rise to no little controversy. In the Apostolic Constitutions (loc. cit.) they are eighty-five (occasionally eighty-four, a variant in the Manuscripts that arises from the occasional counting of two canons as one). In the latter half of the sixth century, John of Antioch (Joannes Scholasticus), Patriarch of Constantinople from 565 to 577, published a collection of synodal decrees in which he included these eighty-five canons (see Justel-Voellus, Bibliotheca Juris Canonici veteris, Paris, 1661, II, 501), and this number was finally consecrated for the Greek Church by the Trullan or Quinisext Council (692), which also confined the current Greek tradition of their Apostolic origin. On the other hand the Latin Church, throughout the Middle Ages, recognized but fifty canons of the Apostles. This was the number finally adopted by Dionysius Exiguus, who first translated these canons into Latin about 500. It is not very clear why he omitted canons 51-85; he seems to have been acquainted with them and to have used the Apostolic Constitutions. In reality Dionysius made three versions of the Apostolic Canons (the oldest of them first edited by C. H. Turner, Ecclesiæ Occidentalis monumenta juris antiquissima, Oxford, 1899, fasc. I, 1-32); it is the second of these versions which obtained general European currency by its incorporation as the opening text of his famous Latin collection of canons (both synodal decrees and papal decretals) known as the "Dionysiana Collectio" (P.L., LXVII, 9 sqq.), made public in the first decade of the sixth century. Later collections of canons (Italy, Spain, France, Germany, etc.) borrowed from him; the text passed into Pseudo-Isidore, and eventually Gratian Included (c. 1140) some excerpts from these canons in his "Decretum", whereby a universal recognition and use were gained for them in the law schools. At a much earlier date Justinian (in his Sixth Novel) had recognized them as the work of the Apostles and confirmed them as ecclesiastical law. (For the Western references in the early Middle Ages see Von Funk, "Didascalia" etc. quoted below, II, 40-50, and for their insertion in the early Western collections of canons, Maassen, "Gesch. der Quellen und Literatur des canonischen Rechts im Abendlande, Gratz, 1872, 438-40.) Nevertheless, from their first appearance in theWest they aroused suspicion. Canon 46 for example, that rejected all heretical baptism, was notoriously opposed to Roman and Western practice. In the so-called "Decretum" of Pope Gelasius (429-96) they are denounced as an apocryphal book, i.e. not recognized by the Church (Thiel, epistolæ Rom. pontificum genuinæ, 1867, I, 53-58, 454-71; Von Funk, op. cit., II, 40), though this note of censure was probably not in the original "Decretum", but with others was added under Pope Hormisdas (514-23). Consequently in a second edition (lost, except preface) of his "Collectio canonum", prepared under the latter pope, Dionysius Exiguus omitted them; even in the first edition he admitted that very many in the West were loath to acknowledge them (quamplurimi quidem assensum non prœbuere facilem). Hincmar of Reims (died 882) declared that they were not written by the Apostles, and as late as the middle of the eleventh century, Western theologians (Cardinal Humbert, 1054) distinguished between the eighty-five Greek canons that they declared apocryphal, and the fifty Latin canons recognized as "orthodox rules" by antiquity.
