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Read the Letters of +Ignatius of Antioch to the Smyrneans for starters, then try his letters to +John; they are all available online. Are they scripture? No. Were they written under the tutelage of an Apostle? Yes.

Since the people who determined that +Paul's epistles were to be included in the canon of scripture were bishops of The Church, why do you suppose they didn't just close up shop and set up independant protestant type assemblies right then if they had been so very wrong in their ecclesiology for the previous 400 years?

" why do you suppose they didn't just close up shop and set up independent protestant type assemblies right then if they had been so very wrong in their ecclesiology for the previous 400 years?"

We don't know what they did after the councils. What we do know is the church lost its vitality and for the next 800 years or so nothing of significance came out of the church which is indicative of institutionalization. If you want to drain the life out of an assembly take the power out of the hands of the people and centralize it in the hands of the professionals. Keep people ignorant of the heritage promised in the scriptures except what the professionals want them to know and you have darkness. Make them keep coming back to the professionals to insure their salvation rather than the freedom of seeking it and finding it personally by faith through the Word of God.

When light finally breaks and people can understand for themselves their inheritance, surely there will be excesses, but there will also be be truth that saves and empowers them to be the stewards of the promises given to them and to those they are responsible for. The church was never meant for the professionals. It was meant for the people to personally know their God and in knowing to do great deeds.

I think that some blame for this must rest with the lack of teaching given to all members of The Church -- we must learn about the early struggles, the debates, etc. We MUST ask questions and seek answers. These have happened in the past and have only enriched our awe of God. Protestants ask, but they don't have the richness of the past to refer to views of the Fathers for and against, hence they split and form splinter groups and splinter groups of splinter groups and go so far away