[boatbums]

It is nonsense to suggest that Early Christians believed in sola scripture when they did not have much scripture to be solo about until the 4th Century. And yes, the very cannon that not only does not comment on solo scriptura was compiled by none other than the Roman Church in its councils.

I'm tired of this same old and tired argument about the Roman Church "giving" Christians the New Testament or that "Early Christians didn't have much Scripture to be solo about". In all the great deal of study of early church history, have you read anything like this:

Old Testament books were not the only ones which the apostles (by Christ’s own appointment the authoritative founders of the church) imposed upon the infant churches, as their authoritative rule of faith and practice. No more authority dwelt in the prophets of the old covenant than in themselves, the apostles, who had been “made sufficient as ministers of a new covenant “; for (as one of themselves argued) “if that which passeth away was with glory, much more that which remaineth is in glory.” Accordingly not only was the gospel they delivered, in their own estimation, itself a divine revelation, but it was also preached “in the Holy Ghost” (I Pet. i. 12); not merely the matter of it, but the very words in which it was clothed were “of the Holy Spirit” (I Cor. ii. 13). Their own commands were, therefore, of divine authority (I Thess. iv. 2), and their writings were the depository of these commands (II Thess. ii. 15). “If any man obeyeth not our word by this epistle,” says Paul to one church (II Thess. iii. 14), “note that man, that ye have no company with him.” To another he makes it the test of a Spirit-led man to recognize that what he was writing to them was “the commandments of the Lord” (I Cor. xiv. 37). Inevitably, such writings, making so awful a claim on their acceptance, were received by the infant churches as of a quality equal to that of the old “Bible “; placed alongside of its older books as an additional part of the one law of God; and read as such in their meetings for worship — a practice which moreover was required by the apostles (I Thess. v. 27; Col. iv. 16; Rev. 1. 3). In the apprehension, therefore, of the earliest churches, the “Scriptures” were not a closed but an increasing “canon.” Such they had been from the beginning, as they gradually grew in number from Moses to Malachi; and such they were to continue as long as there should remain among the churches “men of God who spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.”

We say that this immediate placing of the new books — given the church under the seal of apostolic authority — among the Scriptures already established as such, was inevitable. It is also historically evinced from the very beginning. Thus the apostle Peter, writing in A.D. 68, speaks of Paul’s numerous letters not in contrast with the Scriptures, but as among the Scriptures and in contrast with “the other Scriptures” (II Pet. iii. 16) — that is, of course, those of the Old Testament. In like manner the apostle Paul combines, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, the book of Deuteronomy and the Gospel of Luke under the common head of “Scripture” (I Tim. v. 18): “For the Scripture saith, ‘Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn’ [Deut. xxv. 4]; and, ‘The laborer is worthy of his hire’” (Luke x. 7). The line of such quotations is never broken in Christian literature. Polycarp (c. 12) in A.D. 115 unites the Psalms and Ephesians in exactly similar manner: “In the sacred books, . . . as it is said in these Scriptures, ‘Be ye angry and sin not,’ and ‘Let not the sun go down upon your wrath.’” So, a few years later, the so-called second letter of Clement, after quoting Isaiah, adds (ii. 4): “And another Scripture, however, says, ‘I came not to call the righteous, but sinners’” — quoting from Matthew, a book which Barnabas (circa 97-106 A.D.) had already adduced as Scripture. After this such quotations are common.

What needs emphasis at present about these facts is that they obviously are not evidences of a gradually-heightening estimate of the New Testament books, originally received on a lower level and just beginning to be tentatively accounted Scripture; they are conclusive evidences rather of the estimation of the New Testament books from the very beginning as Scripture, and of their attachment as Scripture to the other Scriptures already in hand. The early Christians did not, then, first form a rival “canon” of “new books” which came only gradually to be accounted as of equal divinity and authority with the “old books”; they received new book after new book from the apostolical circle, as equally” Scripture “ with the old books, and added them one by one to the collection of old books as additional Scriptures, until at length the new books thus added were numerous enough to be looked upon as another section of the Scriptures.

The earliest name given to this new section of Scripture was framed on the model of the name by which what we know as the Old Testament was then known. Just as it was called “The Law and the Prophets and the Psalms” (or “the Hagiographa”), or more briefly “The Law and the Prophets,” or even more briefly still “The Law”; so the enlarged Bible was called “The Law and the Prophets, with the Gospels and the Apostles” (so Clement of Alexandria, “Strom.” vi. 11, 88; Tertullian, “De Præs. Hær.” 36), or most briefly “The Law and the Gospel” (so Claudius Apolinaris, Irenæus); while the new books apart were called “The Gospel and the Apostles,” or most briefly of all” The Gospel.” This earliest name for the new Bible, with all that it involves as to its relation to the old and briefer Bible, is traceable as far back as Ignatius (A.D. 115), who makes use of it repeatedly (e.g., “ad Philad.” 5; “ad Smyrn.” 7). In one passage he gives us a hint of the controversies which the enlarged Bible of the Christians aroused among the Judaizers (“ad Philad.” 6). “When I heard some saying,” he writes, “‘Unless I find it in the Old [Books] I will not believe the Gospel,’ on my saying, ‘It is written,’ they answered, ‘That is the question.’ To me, however, Jesus Christ is the Old [Books]; his cross and death and resurrection, and the faith which is by him, the undefiled Old [Books] — by which I wish, by your prayers, to be justified. The priests indeed are good, but the High Priest better,” etc. Here Ignatius appeals to the “Gospel” as Scripture, and the Judaizers object, receiving from him the answer in effect which Augustine afterward formulated in the well-known saying that the New Testament lies hidden in the Old and the Old Testament is first made clear in the New. What we need now to observe, however, is that to Ignatius the New Testament was not a different book from the Old Testament, but part of the one body of Scripture with it; an accretion, so to speak, which had grown upon it.

This is the testimony of all the early witnesses — even those which speak for the distinctively Jewish-Christian church. For example, that curious Jewish-Christian writing, “The Testaments of the XII. Patriarchs” (Benj. 11), tells us, under the cover of an ex post facto prophecy, that the “work and word” of Paul, i.e., confessedly the book of Acts and Paul’s Epistles, “shall be written in the Holy Books,” i.e., as is understood by all, made a part of the existent Bible. So even in the Talmud, in a scene intended to ridicule a “bishop” of the first century, he is represented as finding Galatians by “sinking himself deeper” into the same “Book” which contained the Law of Moses (“Babl. Shabbath,” 116 a and b). The details cannot be entered into here. Let it suffice to say that, from the evidence of the fragments which alone have been preserved to us of the Christian writings of that very early time, it appears that from the beginning of the second century (and that is from the end of the apostolic age) a collection (Ignatius, II Clement) of “New Books” (Ignatius), called the “Gospel and Apostles” (Ignatius, Marcion), was already a part of the “Oracles” of God (Polycarp, Papias, II Clement), or “Scriptures” (I Tim., II Pet., Barn., Polycarp, II Clement), or the” Holy Books “or “Bible” (Testt. XII. Patt.).

The Canon of the New Testament was completed when the last authoritative book was given to any church by the apostles, and that was when John wrote the Apocalypse, about A.D. 98. Whether the church of Ephesus, however, had a completed Canon when it received the Apocalypse, or not, would depend on whether there was any epistle, say that of Jude, which had not yet reached it with authenticating proof of its apostolicity. There is room for historical investigation here. Certainly the whole Canon was not universally received by the churches till somewhat later. The Latin church of the second and third centuries did not quite know what to do with the Epistle to the Hebrews. The Syrian churches for some centuries may have lacked the lesser of the Catholic Epistles and Revelation. But from the time of Irenæus down, the church at large had the whole Canon as we now possess it. And though a section of the church may not yet have been satisfied of the apostolicity of a certain book or of certain books; and though afterwards doubts may have arisen in sections of the church as to the apostolicity of certain books (as e. g. of Revelation): yet in no case was it more than a respectable minority of the church which was slow in receiving, or which came afterward to doubt, the credentials of any of the books that then as now constituted the Canon of the New Testament accepted by the church at large. And in every case the principle on which a book was accepted, or doubts against it laid aside, was the historical tradition of apostolicity. (The Formation of the Canon of the New Testament)

In any study of history, a well-rounded one looks at many sources. I hope you will take the time to read this.

[count-your-change]

And in that narrative it's clear that no council was needed to set down a list of books for the canon. The majority of the NT books were completed by 65 a.d. and most most circulated to the extent they were accepted as “Scripture” soon after.
Those attempting to claim:

“It is nonsense to suggest that Early Christians believed in sola scripture when they did not have much scripture to be solo about until the 4th Century” may hope to tout Catholic “ownership” of the Scriptures but at the completion of the Bible canon before the end of the first century there was nothing resembling the Catholic church in existence.