Steve Ray has a list of 35 loaded Questions for "Bible
Christians" (quotation marks his)(link to the whole list). This
is number 31/35. I'm trying to provide the answers in a common
format, for easy reference. 31) The time interval between the
Resurrection and the establishment of the New Testament canon in
AD 382 is roughly the same as the interval between the arrival
of the Mayflower in America and the present day. Therefore,
since the early Christians had no defined New Testament for
almost four hundred years, how did they practice sola Scriptura?
One doesn't need a "defined" canon to read the Bible. 1)
Obviously, one needs some idea of which books are the Bible, and
the early church did have an understanding of that, from the
very days that the Scriptures were being penned. For example,
Peter referred to Paul's epistles as "Scripture" long before any
council convened to "define" the canon (and even before the
canon of the New Testament was closed). 2) The definitions of
the canon in the late 300's were no