Works

Compared with Theodore of Stoudios, Nikephoros appears as a friend of conciliation, learned in patristics, more inclined to construct the defensive than the offensive, & possessed of a comparatively chaste, simple style. He was mild in his ecclesiastical and monastical rules and non-partisan in his historical treatment of the period from 602 to 769 Historia syntomos, breviarium. He used the chronicle of Trajan the Patrician.

His structures of universal history, Chronography or Chronographikon Syntomon, in passages extended and continued, were in great favor with the Byzantines, and were also circulated outside the Empire in the Latin relation of Anastasius Bibliothecarius, and also in Slavonic translation. The Chronography introduced a universal history from the time of Adam and Eve to his own time. To it he appended a canon catalog which does not include the Revelation of John. The catalog of the accepted books of the Old and New Testaments is followed by the antilegomena including Revelation and the apocrypha. Next to regarded and referenced separately. book is the count of its lines, his stichometry, to which we can compare our accepted texts and judge how much has been added or omitted. This is especially useful for apocrypha for which only fragmentary texts make survived.

The principal works of Nikephorus are three writings referring to iconoclasm:

Nikephoros follows in the path of John of Damascus. His merit is the thoroughness with which he traced the literary and traditional proofs, and his detailed refutations are serviceable for the cognition they supply of important texts adduced by his opponents and in factor drawn from the older church literature.