“The Catholic Church gathered/Organized/ordered the Canon and is exclusivley responsible for it’s protection for almost 2000 years. So yeah.....”
You do realize there was no such thing as the Roman Catholic Church for hundreds of years. Frankly, as a Baptist, it looks to me like the Bishop of Rome broke with all the other bishops, not they with him. Even if one grants that a hierarchical church was God’s plan - and I do not - then one would need to ask who broke away from whom. Even after the hierarchy developed, the Bishop of Rome was responsible for his area, and other bishops responsible for theirs.
Yes, I’ve read Matthew 16:16, but I see no justification for the idea that Peter was to rule over all others. If that was what Jesus was trying to communicate, he sure didn’t speak clearly!
That said, the church in 400 AD agreed (mostly) on what was being used as scripture, although it continued to debate the value of the Apocrypha and many continued to debate on Revelations. It was a bottom up process, with the council recognizing what was already accepted rather than pulling a list out of its own mind. The congregations drove the decision by what they already accepted.
The Hebrew scriptures, without any controlling body determining them, were already recognized as scripture. The Gospels, Paul’s letters and 1 Peter and 1 John were recognized as scripture almost as soon as the ink dried.
Nor was the Roman Catholic Church responsible as custodian of the scriptures, since the Orthodox also kept copies, as did other groups. And Protestant Bibles, except Wycliffe’s translation, have never been based on Jerome’s translation. Tyndale and Luther both went to the Greek and Hebrew, not the Vulgate.
The Vatican DOES have many valuable manuscripts. So does the British Museum...
“...exclusivley responsible for it’s protection for almost 2000 years.”
I suspect Wycliffe, Tyndale and others would dispute the exclusive protection the Catholic Church gave. The Word of God was meant for all men. Protecting it by locking it up was, shall we say, a bit misguided. I’d rather see scripture ‘protected’ the way the Wycliffe Bible Translators do it (http://www.wycliffe.org/).