were essentially determined by no later than the end of the second century, although it took until A.D. 367 before we have the first extant statement of the list of books that was subsequently accepted almost universally as canonical.4 We may grant that this process of gathering together these books and erecting a fence around them took place over a lengthy period of time after the books were written and that the books were not deliberately composed as a unified collection. Nevertheless, the fact
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