By Craig D Wescoe 
No church council invented the New Testament. The twenty-seven books were read, copied, and used in worship for generations before any formal list was drawn up — and the earliest surviving list that matches our canon exactly appears in Athanasius’s Easter letter of AD 367.
This article will follow that gradual process: which books were accepted from the beginning, which were disputed, what criteria the early church applied, and why works like the Shepherd of Hermas ultimately fell outside the collection. (Placeholder article — full research to come.)