Because that is what you said. You said the church existed before the Bible. That was my refutation. I was speaking of the events of Scripture, not the book itself. You are the one not understanding here. You are just so quick to try and encompass everything into the Catholic church that you won’t stop to consider what you are saying. You seem to do that with anyone you think is Protestant like you have something to prove or to show to all Protestants.
Max,
Yes I did say the Church existed before the Bible. I still believe this because the Bible itself contain both the Old Testament and New Testament.
Yes, there was Scripture which was Hebrew Scripture to include mind you, the Deutrocanonical Books before the Church. I acknowledge that much but Bible we see it today containing both OT and NT. They didn’t have the Bible back then only they had was the Hebrew Canon and the Deutrocanonical Books.
The Early Christians had Hebrew Scriptures. The 27 NT text were not written until 10 to 20 years after the resurrection of our Lord.
I’m pretty sure what the facts are and what I understand how Biblical Canon came into being.
Who decided which books were to be in Scripture?
Well, the NT Canon were finalized in 393 AD in Hippo
Wikipedia, a source provide a detailed account how Church canonized Scripture.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_canon
The African Synod of Hippo, in 393, approved the New Testament, as it stands today, together with the Septuagint books, a decision that was repeated by Councils of Carthage in 397 and 419. These councils were under the authority of St. Augustine, who regarded the canon as already closed.
Pope Damasus I’s Council of Rome in 382, if the Decretum Gelasianum is correctly associated with it, issued a biblical canon identical to that mentioned above, or if not the list is at least a sixth century compilation. Likewise, Damasus’s commissioning of the Latin Vulgate edition of the Bible, c. 383, was instrumental in the fixation of the canon in the West. In 405, Pope Innocent I sent a list of the sacred books to a Gallic bishop, Exsuperius of Toulouse. When these bishops and councils spoke on the matter, however, they were not defining something new, but instead "were ratifying what had already become the mind of the Church."Thus, from the fourth century, there existed unanimity in the West concerning the New Testament canon (as it is today), and by the fifth century the East, with a few exceptions, had come to accept the Book of Revelation and thus had come into harmony on the matter of the canon. Nonetheless, a full dogmatic articulation of the canon was not made until the Council of Trent of 1546 for Roman Catholicism, the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563 for the Church of England, the Westminster Confession of Faith of 1647 for Calvinism, and the Synod of Jerusalem of 1672 for the Greek Orthodox.
In regards to what I think. I hardly care what you think. I merely want to tell Non-Catholics the true behind Biblical Canon.
