[squirt]

how did the early church leaders determine which books would be considered authoratative and which would be discarded? what criteria did they use in determining which documents would be included in the New Testament? basically, the early church had 3 criteria, first, the books must have apostolic authority - that is, they must have been written either by the apostles themselves, who were eyewitnesses to what they wrote about, or by followers of apostles, so in the case of Mark and Luke, while they weren't among the 12 disicples, early tradition has it that Mark was a helper of Peter, and Luke was an associate of Paul, second, there was the criterion of conformity to what was called the rule of faith, that is, was the document congruent with the basic Christian tradition that the church recognized as normative? and third, there was the criterion of whether a document had had continuous acceptance and usage by the church at large, what's remarkable is that even though the fringes of the canon remained unsettled for a while, there was actually a high degree of unanimity concerning the greater part of the New Testament within 2 centuries, and this was true among very diverse congregations scattered over a wide area, so the 4 gospels we have in the New Testament today met those criteria, while others didn't? it was an example of "survival of the fittest", we can be confident that no other ancient books can compare with the New Testament in terms of importance for Christian history or doctrine, the other documents (the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of the Egyptians, the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of Nativity of Mary) were written later than the 4 gospels, in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, even 6th century, long after Jesus, and they're generally quite banal (devoid of freshness or originality; hackneyed; trite), they carry names that are unrelated to their real authorship, on the other hand, the 4 gospels in the New Testament are readily accepted with remarkable unanimity as being authentic in the story they told