A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

The long process of creating and re-editing texts now approached something like completion, and a number of books, twenty-four in all, came to be recognized as having a special status. It is difficult to say exactly when this happened: in Jewish tradition the decision is said to have been made in a ‘Great Assembly’ in 450 BCE, but that is a fairly typical historical back-projection of a process which was probably gradual and incremental. In fact it must have been completed at a much later date, especially since some books within the collection, like the prophecies of Daniel, patently cannot be as old as the fifth century BCE, whatever superficial claims they make to a particular antiquity.