ANSWERS: 2
  • I am sorry to say that the "New Testament" was recognized and present in the Christian Church much earlier than 300 years after Christ.
  • All the books (you could even call them booklets, because they are booklet length) of the New Testament were complete by 100 AD, and people eagerly copied and shared them. One thing we have to keep in mind is that books were expensive--an entire New Testament would cost approximately fifty silver dollars, which would have been a year's income at the time. And most people couldn't read. So congregations, which had to meet in secret most of the time, would have one or a few Bible books, trade them with other congregations and so forth. Other fictitious or heretical gospels, epistles, histories and apocalypses were also written. But the 27 that are in the Bible were recognized as the true word of God because of the strength of their content, and other books were identified as spurious. Although for Catholics the important issue is that these 27 books are the books that the pope recognizes, for Protestants it was a grass-roots process of millions of people individually looking at the evidence and being convinced that these 27 and no others were the New Testament word of God.

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