To the OP,
I was born and raised evangelical Protestant. Evelyn Christenson was my pastor’s wife, and Gary Smalley was my associate pastor. John Ortberg grew up with me in my youth group; I played piano for him many times. Dr. Erwin Lutzer was a regular speaker at our church, as was Dr. Bill Bright, Josh McDowell, and Stuart and Jill Briscoe.
If you are evangelical Protestant, those names should be very familiar to you. I list them only to demonstrate to you that I grew up in an excellent evangelical church and had the best of Christian education.
I would recommend a book called Church History in Plain Language by Bruce L. Shelley. Dr. Shelley is a Protestant history professor at Denver Theological Seminary, and this book is a Protestant version of the history of the Christian Church.
Interestingly, it does not contradict Catholic versions of the history of the Church. I’ve read the book cover to cover three times, and I’ve referred to it hundreds of times. I took it with me to a class on the history of the Catholic Church offered one semester several years ago, to “check the facts” and seek out contradictions between Catholic and Protestant versions of history. There were no contradictions. Dr. Shelley said exactly the same thing in his book that the Catholic professor said.
History is history, grounded in facts, dates, events, people, places.
According to Dr. Shelley, the Catholic Church did indeed give us the Bible.
Chapter 6 of the book explains the process by which the final canon of Scripture was selected, and Dr. Shelley states in conclusion that "the first complete list of books as we have them today came in an Easter letter written in 367 A.D by Bishop Athanasius from Alexandria. Shortly thereafter councils in North Africa at Hippo (393 A.D.) and at Carthage (397 A.D.) published the same list.
I hope that you (and for that matter, anyone else who is interested, including Catholics!) will read this excellent book. It is written at a level that is very understandable even for those of us who are not intellectual history scholars. Dr. Shelley writes in a conversational style, as though he is telling a story, yet the book is thoroughly documented and well-researched with a long list of sources and footnotes.