To begin with, Christians had the Jewish Tanakh, obsessively redirected in its reference towards their efforts to grapple with the meaning of the life and death of Jesus, and when they spoke of ‘scripture’ at the beginning of the second century CE, it is the Tanakh that they meant. By the end of that same century, ‘scripture’ was a more complicated word, because by then many Christians would include in the term a new series of books, a ‘New Testament’ of exclusively Christian works.
