>>20149302The Bible already had an established canon before the Catholic and Protestant churches came along.
>OTJewish tradition credits Ezra with beginning the compiling and cataloging of the canon of the Hebrew Scriptures, and it says that this was completed by Nehemiah. Ezra was certainly well equipped for such a work, being one of the inspired Bible writers himself as well as a priest, scholar, and official copyist of sacred writings. (Ezra 7:1-11)
>“We do not possess myriads of inconsistent books, conflicting with each other. Our books, those which are justly accredited, are but two and twenty, and contain the record of all time. Of these, five are the books of Moses, comprising the laws and the traditional hisstory from the birth of man down to the death of the lawgiver. . . . From the death of Moses until Artaxerxes, who succeeded Xerxes as king of Persia, the prophets subsequent to Moses wrote the history of the events of their own times in thirteen books. The remaining four books contain hymns to God and precepts for the conduct of human life.” - The Jewish historian Josephus, in answering opponents in his work Against Apion, around 100 CE (I, 38-40 )>NTIn the first century C.E., letters from Paul, James, Peter, John, Jude, and the governing body in Jerusalem contributed to the growth and the preservation of the unity and cleanness of the Christian congregation.—Ac 15:22-31; 16:4, 5; 2Co 7:8, 9; 10:8-11; 2Co 3:7; Ac 28:21; 2Th 2:2; Heb 13:22. All those were compiled.
The oldest known reference to the NT Bible canon is the Muratorian Fragment which dates back to 170-200 CE. The Fragment mentions a non-Biblical book, the Shepherd, and states that a man named Hermas wrote it “very recently, in our times, in the city of Rome.” Scholars date the final writing of Hermas’ Shepherd between 140 and 155 C.E.
The RCC didn't compile the Bible. God compiled it himself.
