Several things strike me as being incorrect about your post. I hope you won't take offence.
quote:
it is because Paul was known as a major, or the major, approved apostle; approved by the twelve.
I am not aware of any evidence that Paul met any of the twelve apostles, though he would have been alive at the time.
This is not exactly on target but it is related and you might find it interesting:
No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.apostolicfathering.org/ncsm/paul_among_the_12_apostles.htm
quote:
The churches that are the ancestors of large-scale Christianity today did not have many canons. A few books were in question, but the canon in those churches did not vary much at all.
This is just wrong, my friend. There are/were hundreds of apocryphal books and just as many cannons, if you want to call them that. There was no cannon until until one was created by Constantine. The leaders who met to form the cannon fought viciously and then went home and essentially ignored the new cannon. It was many years before A cannon caught on and it caught on largely due to military action against 'heretics.' The various churches kept their own collections of documents. I imagine, even, that the idea of A Cannon was a bit foreign.
quote:
I do know that by the time any major councils were held, the canon was quite set already.
I'd like to see evidence for this.
quote:
The churches I've mentioned and was talking about were basically agreed on the canon from at least around AD 160, where the Muratorian canon matches modern ones pretty closely.
You mean this?
quote:
The Muratorian Canon
It leaves out a few books. At any rate, it was compiled some 130 years after the foundation of the church-- that is much too late a date for my way of thinking.
Consider this:
Because the N.T. Canon was not yet settled, they respected and quoted from works that have generally passed out of the Christian tradition. The books of Hermas, Barnabas, Didache, and 1 and 2 Clement were all regarded highly (Hannah, Lecture Notes for the History of Doctrine, 2.2).
The Christian Canon
------------------
No webpage found at provided URL: www.hells-handmaiden.com