God’s Word. Stop right there. That's right - you should have stopped typing right there, and followed your own advice. God's Word.
They were sorted out through infallible interpretation over nearly 300 years under Petrine authority and the canonical text of AD 382 in the Synod of Rome is the Bible you speak of. That infallible authority to say authoritatively what is and is not God’s Word did not disappear eleven centuries late with the Protestant Reformation where very Tom, Dick, and Harry and their grandmother offer us “their” interpretations of God’s Word. Thus we don’t have Joel Osteen anymore than Billy Graham or Jim Jones or David Koresh or Rev. Jeremiah Wright telling us what is God’s Word.
God's Word is given by God Himself, not man. Throughout human history, human beings have attempted to add to, remove, and twist God's Word. Read the Bible - God Himself speaking through Jeremiah and the other prophets condemned the false prophets, who made up lies and said it came from God. Paul had to correct and warn the early Christians several times about incorrect teaching, false doctrines, and the like in several of his letters.
The early Christians had the authority of Torah and the legitimate books of the Old Testament. They had met the test of truthfulness. These were not in dispute, and those that were false were never adopted. There was no one "Bible" during this phase of Christianity. In the early centuries, before any of your present day Roman Catholic traditions and all the rest, since early Christians did assemble the Old and legitimate New Testament books. Since God inspires all true Scripture (2 Timothy 3:16), we can be quite certain and confident that God assembled and directed the 66 books of the current Bible. However, the foundations of what became the present day Roman Catholic church made fundamental errors that God did not inspire, along with many other blasphemies and heresies against His Word that were not addressed until the Reformation.
Just one example for you: the 5th century Latin Vulgate chose to include the Apocrypha, which is still included by Catholics as God inspired Scripture, where clearly it is not.
Reasons why the Apocrypha does not belong in the Bible
Paul himself had to continually warn about false teaching:
https://www.biblegateway.com/resources/commentaries/IVP-NT/1Tim/Opposing-False-Teachers-541
Today's Catholic church has gone way, waaaay off the path that God laid out clearly in His Word. It is a teaching of traditions, idolatry, and under Francis, absolute lies about what God's Word says.
Pope Francis assures atheists: You don’t have to believe in God to go to heaven
Pope Francis Warns ANY "Personal Relationship w/ Jesus is Dangerous"
Joes Osteen is a false teacher, he preaches a false "prosperity Gospel."
anymore than Billy Graham
Billy Graham is one of the greatest men of the last millennium, and perhaps one of the most Godly men in history. God will richly bless him on the Bema Seat as Scripture tells us in Romans 14:10-12; 1 Corinthians 3:10--4:5; and 2 Corinthians 5:1-10.
Jim Jones or David Koresh or Rev. Jeremiah Wright telling us what is God’s Word
LOL! Why don't you throw Barack Obama and Adolph Hitler into your bag of wet pasta and see if anything else might stick to the wall.
Despite your lengthy riposte, you have missed the entire point. Of course, God’s Word was given by God Himself. No one disputes this. This is a straw man’s argument.
But before we knew exactly what was God’s Word, we had the Church. God’s Word was not up in the clouds, and the books in the Bible did not fall from the skies and self-assemble themselves. There were hundreds of other writings purporting to be God’s words like the gnostic gospels of Judas and Thomas. Who sorted all this out? Yes, it was the early Church Fathers who through infallible authority sorted out what was truly God’s Word and what was not. This is the ultimate authority, to know exactly what is God’s Word.
It was not until the Synod of Rome (382) and the Councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) that we find a definitive list of canonical books being drawn up, and each of these Councils acknowledged the very same list of books. These were ALL Councils of the ONE Church. From this point on, there is in practice no dispute about the canon of the Bible and its universal interpretation given by the Church. The only exception being the so-called Protestant Reformers, who entered upon the scene in 1517, an unbelievable 11 centuries later.
There were many things that Christ said and did that were not written down but became part of the sacred oral traditions of the Church, its liturgies and rituals.
It is this command to go out to the whole world (all nations) that marks the Church that Christ established, which is why that Church came to be known as “Catholic”, from the Greek word katholikos (kata “about”, and holos, “whole”).
In the year 110 A.D., not even fifteen years after the book of Revelation was written, while on his way to execution St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote: “Where the bishop is present, there let the congregation gather, just as where Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic church”. The Church believes that when the bishops speak as teachers, Christ speaks; for he said to them: “He who hears you, hears me; and he who rejects you, rejects me” (Lk 10, 16).
St. Paul in his letters also warns the faithful to hold fast to the tradition they received: “We command you, brothers, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, to avoid any brother who wanders from the straight path and does not follow the tradition you received from us” (2 Th 3, 6).
This is precisely why scores of preeminent Lutheran and other Protestant scholars have after a lifetime of scholarship, teaching, and preaching have decamped from the Protestant rot and converted to Catholicism.
You are trying to play neophyte “internet” theologian by telling us how Paul tried to “correct” etc. This is the shallow nonsense of Bible Christians and why now scores of Protestant theologians have found to taken out of context and is considered sheer rubbish.
Ulf Ekman, the founder of Scandinavia’s biggest Bible school, with a congregation of some 4000 individuals, converted to Catholicism because his theological inquiry confirmed for him the indispensability of the Catholic sacraments.
Francis J. Beckwith, a “born-again” evangelical, a tenured professor at Baptist-affiliated Baylor University in Waco, Tex, was the president of the Evangelical Theological Society, an association of 4,300 Protestant theologians resigned and joined the Catholic Church. One blogger likened it to Hulk Hogan’s defection from the World Wrestling Federation to the rival World Championship Wrestling league.
Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, was a pre-eminent Lutheran theologian in America. He knew his Bible-text and history like no other Protestant. When he converted to Catholicism he said, “I have long believed that the Roman Catholic Church is the fullest expression of the church of Christ through time.”
Thus the early Church historian J. N. D. Kelly, a Protestant, writes, “[W]here in practice was [the] apostolic testimony or tradition to be found? . . . The most obvious answer was that the apostles had committed it orally to the Church, where it had been handed down from generation to generation. . . . Unlike the alleged secret tradition of the Gnostics, it was entirely public and open, having been entrusted by the apostles to their successors, and by these in turn to those who followed them, and was visible in the Church for all who cared to look for it” (Early Christian Doctrines, 37).
Don’t take my word. Here’s one original source. St. Irenaeus:
“It is possible, then, for everyone in every church, who may wish to know the truth, to contemplate the tradition of the apostles which has been made known to us throughout the whole world. And we are in a position to enumerate those who were instituted bishops by the apostles and their successors down to our own times, men who neither knew nor taught anything like what these heretics rave about” (Against Heresies 3:3:1 [A.D. 189]).
At the end of the day we can’t have a million interpretations of every Tom, Dick, and Harry and you and the Joel Osteens, Billy Grahams, the Moonies, and Rev. Jeremiah Wrights of this world crack open the pages of the Bible and each offers us their “own” interpretations of Scripture with all their vapid and contradictory nonsense. Christ established ONE Church to make sure His Word and it’s interpretation will be infallibly proclaimed through the ages as ONE truth.