Kosta is correct that he stated "compile," and I apologize for the misunderstanding of what he and jo kus had been saying.
The specific post contained this statement, and I suspect that it was this statement that both FK and I responded to:
"That means that the Patriarch of Antioch, St. Ignatius, who was made bishop by none other than St. Peter in person, knew what we now read in the Bible by learning it from the mouth of St. Peter and not reading it in the "Bible" mainly because the only Bible in those days was the Old Testament. The New Testament did not see the light of the day for another three hundred years."
Since not even the canon of the OT had been codified within either Judaism or Christianity at the time of St. Ignatius, I assumed that this statement meant that the texts of the books we refer to as the OT existed, but that the texts of what we now call the NT did not exist until much later and that St. Ignatius therefore didn't have access to the NT texts. This is a pretty common belief amongst modern scholarship, so I can, I hope, be forgiven for missing the distinction in this particular case.
My emphasis on the 4 Gospels was due to the fact that St. John's Gospel does have some anti-Gnostic qualities, and due to the fact that the most prominent Gnostic writings were "Gospels."
I agree, of course, completely that the process of compiling the canon of the NT was the work of the Church, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, just as the work of writing the individual books was the work of individual men -- also with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. And of course the preservation of those texts and that canon was the work of the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
I would point out for the sake of our Protestant brethren that the process of selecting a canon was not solely based on a need to differentiate between canonical and heretical works.
There are works still considered to be valuable and non-heretical writings that were considered at one time or place or another to be Scriptural: the Shepherd of Hermas, the Epistle of Barnabas, the (1st) Epistle of Clement, the canons of the Apostles, etc...
So the fact that a particular work was not included in the NT canon does not necessarily mean that the Church considered it to be heretical -- although most rejected works were, as Kosta notes, quite simply heretical frauds.
Likewise, the fact that the Apocalypse and a number of the general epistles were excluded from various lists does not mean that anyone of the Church of that time considered them to be heretical -- they were simply exercising caution in making certain that they were embracing only works of genuinely Apostolic origin, of inspiration by the Holy Spirit, and with no doctrinal errors.
Interestingly, it took the Protestant Reformation for a serious reconsideration of the canon of Scripture to take place. As well as rejecting the "deuterocanonical" works, there is the famous labeling of the Epistle of St. James by Martin Luther as "the epistle of straw," and his disparaging attitude toward Hebrews, Jude and Revelation -- not to mention his relative "downgrading" of the importance of the Gospels of Sts. Matthew, Mark, and Luke...
As a coda to my final paragraph above, I must in fairness say that Luther and the Reformers never actually excised any of the NT books. It was in Luther's comments about the Scriptures that his opinions are known.
In setting up a sort of hierarchy within the Scriptures, Luther wasn't really doing anything that the Church hadn't already done to some extent. What he did, though, was to reject the traditional hierarchy in favor of one of his own preference. He liked the Gospel of John and certain Pauline epistles best.
What bothered Luther were the perceived contradictions within Scripture -- since the Epistle of St. James seemed to contradict St. Paul, then the Epistle of St. James must be of doubtful origin or lesser authority. He seems to have fallen prey to the idea that if Scripture seems to contradict itself, then part of it must not really be truly Scripture.
The Calvinist tradition tends to like the Pauline epistles and the Old Testament the best -- its own "practical hierarchy" within Scripture.