I completely agree.
I'm just trying to point out that it is messy. I'd almost say, however messy we envision it, it was probably messier. History is made by people with the benefit of hindsight but the struggle of lacking context. Those combine to force us to greatly simplify in order to make sense of things, to make a story where there wasn't one.
Messy in this case meaning, you had pockets of people for centuries who were Christians who simply were not using the same canon of scripture. I mean, look, in the early days you couldn't even clearly linguistically distinguish an ethnic Jew who was a Christ-follower and Torah follower from a pagan convert non-kosher keeping gentile. St Paul sometimes calls the former those of the circumcision, but that needs a further modifier (those of the circumcision
who follow Christ). These people were all over the map in their understanding of... everything. The world, philosophy, who God was, what worship looked like (you mean it
shouldn't involve orgies?!). Read the epistles to the church in Corinth, it's absolutely nuts.
They were being taught, without the New Testament, from gospel accounts of the Lord from His followers. These gospel accounts were guarded by what Papias and St Luke both refer to as "witnesses" in a way we would say "eyewitnesses." And those same people were instructing the faithful from their experience with Christ. The epistles are all occasional letters, and from these specifics we can pull out universals. But by necessity it shows that the epistles were drawing from a set of ideas, teachings, concepts that pre-date any concept of Christian scriptural teaching.
Look at the sort of chain of teaching represented by Apollos. The Lord reveals to St Paul the correct interpretation of the OT scriptures, who teaches Sts Priscilla and Aquilla (Jews who lived in Rome, with Roman names), who taught Apollos (an Alexandrian Jew named after a freakin pagan god) the correct interpretation of the OT, who then used that teaching to "water" the churches planted by St Paul. The bedrock here is the OT
combined with the divinely revealed interpretation - whether by vision or earthly experience with the Lord. And all this at a time when the understanding of what parts of the OT were scripture was extremely diverse and tenuous.
For example, the Book of Jubilees was crazy popular in the first century. At Qumran, among the dead sea scrolls, it is the most found writing excepting only Genesis and 1 Enoch. Josephus uses it more than anything else as a reference in
Antiquities. A bunch of the concepts from this book are latent in the NT writings, casually mixed in much the same was as other Rabbinic traditions (like the names of Jannes and Jambres or that the Law was given by angels) without any reference or footnote. Some NT places seem to refer to it directly, even quotations by Christ. (Good article
here). The book and its language and ideas is just one of many things that point to the fact that around this time there was no set canon of Hebrew scriptures.
You've got people being taught from a diverse set of writings held in various degrees of divine inspiration, all being read and framed through the lens of the direct revelation of Jesus Christ - as taught by those who experienced Christ directly, personally. And this state persists for literally centuries. So its messy. Very messy, from the perspective of a historical narrative.
While this
is an argument against sola scriptura - a devastating one, in my opinion - it is
not an argument against the grace of the Holy Spirit holding it all together towards an aim. In fact the providence of the Spirit is the only way something like this could have come about, if we look at it correctly. It is incredible what happened with the faith to so firmly reflect a single, common apostolic tradition. The ultimate form of the canon reflects that.
