The New Testament was NOT dropped from heaven.
The New Testament was NOT delivered by an angel.
The New Testament was NOT found in a farmer’s field, as the Book of Mormon was.
The New Testament was NOT suddenly “discovered” in a clay jar with 27 “books” intact, like the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Nag Hammadi texts.

The process of canonization of the New Testament was complex and lengthy. In the early centuries of Christianity, many books were widely considered inspired, but the church had no single, formally recognized New Testament canon. The process involved compiling books that apostolic tradition considered authoritative for worship and teaching, relevant to the historical situations in which they were written, and consonant with the Old Testament. Writings attributed to the apostles circulated among the earliest Christian communities, and the Pauline epistles circulated, perhaps in collected form, by the end of the 1st century AD.

• One of the earliest attempts at solidifying a canon was made by Marcion, c. 140 AD, who accepted only a version of Luke that most New Testament scholars agree was a modified version of Luke.
• Polycarp, Irenaeus, and Tertullian held Paul’s epistles to be divinely inspired “scripture”. Other books were held in high esteem but were gradually relegated to the status of New Testament apocrypha. In the mid-2nd century, Justin Martyr mentions reading “memoirs of the apostles” on Sunday alongside the “writings of the prophets”.
• The oldest clear endorsement of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John being the only legitimate gospels was written c. 180 AD. Irenaeus asserted a four-gospel canon (the Tetramorph).The books considered to be authoritative by Irenaeus included the four gospels and many of the letters of Paul, although, based on the arguments Irenaeus made in support of only four authentic gospels
• By the early 200s, Origen may have used the same twenty-seven books as the Catholic New Testament canon. Origen was largely responsible for collecting usage information about the texts that became the New Testament. The information used to create the late-4th-century Easter Letter, which declared accepted Christian writings, was probably based on the Ecclesiastical History (HE) of Eusebius of Caesarea
• Eusebius, c. 300, gave a detailed list of New Testament writings in his Ecclesiastical History Book 3, Chapter XXV.

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The New Testament (NT) is the second division of the Christian Bible. It discusses the teachings and person of Jesus, as well as events relating to first-century Christianity. The first division, known as the Old Testament (based primarily on the Hebrew Bible), together with the New Testament, constitutes Christianity’s sacred scripture.

The New Testament is a collection of 27 Christian texts written in Koine Greek by various authors. It includes four gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, epistles attributed to Paul and other authors, and the Book of Revelation. The New Testament canon developed gradually over the first few centuries of Christianity through debate, the rejection of heretical texts, and the recognition of writings deemed apostolic, culminating in the formalization of the 27-book canon by the late fourth century. Christian traditions have widely accepted it since Late Antiquity.

Literary analysis suggests many of its texts were written in the mid-to-late first century. Scholars have no consensus on the date of the latest New Testament text. The earliest surviving New Testament manuscripts date from the late second to early third centuries AD, with the possible exception of Papyrus 52.

The New Testament was transmitted through thousands of manuscripts in various languages, as well as church quotations, and contains variants. Textual criticism uses surviving manuscripts to reconstruct the earliest recoverable text and trace its transmission history. Christians receive it differently today. The Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodoxy, evangelicals, and many other Protestants regard it as inspired holy scripture. Catholics and Orthodox receive the New Testament, along with sacred tradition, as a source of divine revelation, whereas Protestants hold that doctrine derives from scripture alone, without tradition. Evangelicals and some other Protestants believe the New Testament, as the written word of God, to be inerrant.

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• https://bibleacademy.africa

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SOURCE:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Testament