Was choosing the books for the New Testament a political process?
There probably was an element of it that was political. Because it was an effort to distinguish the true from the false, and to include and exclude. But it was more of a process of recognition than selection. What I mean by that is, is that the books that were included were books whose roots went back to the Apostles and their followers. They were the books that gave evidence of impacting churches of a wide geographic range and time period. Were they already recognized as canonical, then? Well, they were in the process of being recognized. Now, they didn’t function as a Bible really until the last part of the second century. What you had was individual books circulating for a time, and you didn’t have the conscious effort to draw them into a collection until the end of the second century. So there’s a very important 150-year period in there in which traditional Christianity is being communicated through little theological summaries that are embedded in these materials [the New Testamen
