[Textcritic]

Originally Posted by Calgaryborn

You are assuming that because their was no collectively published canon until the Council of Hippo in 393 A.D. that a canon didn't exist. History doesn't work like that. When it comes to history more will always be unknown then known. The Synod of Laodicea(363 A.D.) forbade the reading of non-canonical books. They obviously believed that the canon was already extablished. The Council of Nicea(325 A.D.) refers to the canon. The Synod of Antioch(266 A.D.) denounced the doctrine of Paul of Samosata as foreign to the ecclesiastical canon. Again niether council felt the need to declare a canon. It already existed and although not formally declared in a council of churches was spoken of as already extablished.

The problem with references to the "canon" prior to the fourth century is that for the most part, the clear definition of the function of the word κανων in any given context is fairly flexible, and almost certainly is NOT applied to delimiting a collection of writings. The more basic definition of this word is "rule" or "straight edge", which was then applied in early Christian circles to individual points of doctrine that were more fully outlined in the creeds. It was not until much later that "canon" was applied to the New Testament, and when this did occur, it caused a shift in the meaning of this word as it was re-applied in later generations. When evaluating the early discussions of "canon" as it is applied to Scripture, one must determine what is meant by the use of the word in its original context, and this is by no means a simple and straightforward task. On the one hand, does "canon" mean to imply a set of books by which the "rule of faith" was authoritatively communicated? Or does it on the other, refer to a fixed list of books which would later become "Scripture"?

Originally Posted by Calgaryborn

The trail becomes more difficult in the second century because of extreme persecution and the lack of any organizational structure beyond the local church. The New Testament books were being copied and collected in the different regions of Christian influence. I don't know the date whenever one church finally collected all 27 books but, it more than likely belonged to the second century.

Based on what?
I have no doubt that all the books of the New Testament were completed by the end of the second cent., and I expect that it is plausible that they all existed together in a collection somewhere fairly shortly after this time, but honestly, so what? We have virtually no idea, nor any evidence to suggest that these 27-books specifically were accorded with a different sense of authority, or a higher level of "inspiration" than the dozens upon dozens of other pieces of Christian literature that were in circulation at the same time. The problem is not so much the existence or circulation of the New Testament books by the early third cent.; rather, the problem is that there seems to be little that distinguishes many of the NT books from other Christian writings from the same period.

Originally Posted by Calgaryborn

Of course because of geographical differences in distribution some books were received with reservations. Fortunately being within a hundred years of the source provided amply evidence to support the inclusion or exclusion of these epistles. We don't have the living testimony of the original churches or very many letters from the first century like they did. It should have been very easy in the second century to trace the transmission of and the distribution of all of the epistles.

I find this to be a rather incredible suggestion. You are committing one of the fallacie I outlined in my post about the Bible and ancient cultures, in which you seem to be assuming that because it is a simple process in this day and age, it must have not been a problem in the second cent. Roman empire. If we assume that all the epistles attributed to Paul were actually composed by him, in his lifetime, then they all must have been completed before 65 C.E. People living even within forty years of this date would necessarily be considered a part of the next generation, especially given that the life expectancy in Roman civilization was MUCH shorter than now; some estimates suggest that most people did not live more than 35 years. This is then further complicated by the fact that this was a largely oral culture—the Church itself was founded upon and persisted through the PROCLAMATION of the TESTIMONY of Jesus—in which most people possessed only a very cursory ability to read and write. Also, there are the much more recent sociological studies which show that people who do not read and write process information according to different categories than we do in the modern world. The survival of information in the absence of large-scale printing is very much dependent upon the memory of a given social group, and this memory tends to be shaped by immediate circumstances and perceived needs.

In all of that, it really strikes me as very probable that a great deal of uncertainty or misinformation regarding the earliest Christian writings was quite likely.