[Pastor Steve]

I did some digging into the question of how long after the Bible was written, was it canonized?
Here is what I found:

The writing of the New Testament was between 40 AD and 100 AD. The first official list of New Testament books was found in a library in Milan, Italy, by a historian named Muratori, and thus is called the Muratorian fragment. The fragment dates back to 170 AD to 200 AD. Not all the 27 books of the New Testament were in the list he discovered, and two books in the list are not in our Bible today.

Of those left out of the books listed on the fragment are Hebrews, James, 1 and 2 Peter, with some debate over 2 and 3 John. Of the books on the fragment that are not in our Bibles are the books of the Apocalypse of Peter and the Wisdom of Solomon.

By 367 AD, Athanasius of Alexandria’s Easter Letter lists all 27 books as we have them in our Bible. This is the first exact list in recorded history, so the canonization of the Bible took place between those two events, possibly at the Council of Nicaea in 325, but it is unclear as far as I can tell.

All that to say that from the writing to the official canonization, there appears to be as much as 230 years or so, but finding an exact number is difficult.

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