There are several different historical questions being mixed together here.
If the claim is simply that the fourfold Gospel was firmly established in the mainstream Church by the time of Irenaeus, around AD 180, then yes. That is true. Irenaeus explicitly defends Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
But that is very different from claiming that the entire biblical canon was already universally settled and obvious to Christians, because it clearly wasn’t. .
And Irenaeus himself does not actually say that all four Gospels were written by eyewitnesses of Jesus’ ministry. He says Matthew wrote his Gospel, that Mark was Peter’s disciple and interpreter and wrote down Peter’s preaching, that Luke was Paul’s companion and recorded the Gospel preached by Paul, and that John, the disciple of the Lord, published his Gospel at Ephesus. So describing all four simply as “eyewitness accounts” is already an oversimplification of Irenaeus himself. (Against Heresies 3.1.1)
More importantly, recognizing four Gospels is not the same thing as possessing a universally agreed 27-book New Testament.
Irenaeus himself tells us that not every Christian group received the same Gospels: the Ebionites used Matthew, while Marcion accepted his version of Luke. .
There were even Christians who rejected John: Epiphanius of Salamis, writing in the fourth century about an earlier controversy, describes people whom he calls the Alogi and says that they accepted neither the Gospel of John nor Revelation, so even reception of Johannine literature was not literally universal among everyone calling themselves Christian.
But the much stronger evidence concerns the rest of the New Testament.
At the beginning of the fourth century, Eusebius of Caesarea explicitly divides Christian books into accepted and disputed categories.
Among the writings he calls disputed he names:
James
Jude
2 Peter
2 John
3 John
He also records differing opinions concerning Revelation.
And mind you, there are not Gnostic gospels or obscure heretical works; there are books found today in every Protestant New Testament.
So if the complete 27-book canon had simply been universally obvious from apostolic times onward, why is one of the most important Christian historians of the early fourth century explicitly telling us that several of those books were still disputed?
Cyril of Jerusalem provides another example. Around AD 350, when instructing catechumens about which Scriptures they should read, he gives an ecclesiastical list and tells them to follow the books handed down by the bishops and read publicly in the Church. His New Testament list does not include Revelation.
Yet Revelation is in every Protestant Bible today.
Then, in AD 367, Athanasius gives the familiar list of exactly 27 New Testament books in his 39th Festal Letter.
Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, the seven Catholic Epistles, the Pauline collection and Revelation.
David Brakke, writing in the Harvard Theological Review, notes that this is the earliest surviving Christian document giving precisely the twenty-seven books that eventually became the generally accepted New Testament canon.
That does NOT mean Athanasius “invented the Bible” in 367.
In other words: the core of the New Testament was recognized very early, while the precise boundaries of the 27-book canon remained disputed in different parts of the Church for centuries.
And the Book of Enoch makes the situation even more interesting.
1 Enoch is not in Catholic, Eastern Orthodox or Protestant Old Testaments today, but it was enormously influential in early Christianity.
The New Testament itself contains an unmistakable connection to it. Jude 14–15 cites a prophecy corresponding closely to 1 Enoch 1:9, explicitly introducing it as something Enoch “prophesied.” Now, quoting a book does not automatically make the entire book canonical, even Paul can quote pagan poets without canonizing them, so we should not make that argument, but some early Christians went considerably further than merely quoting Enoch. An example: in AD 200, Tertullian explicitly calls it “the Scripture of Enoch.”
Even more importantly, Tertullian knows that its status is disputed. He writes that the Scripture of Enoch: “is not received by some” because it was not admitted into the Jewish canon.
Tertullian then proceeds to defend the book and argues that Christians should not reject it, appealing in part to the fact that Jude gives testimony to Enoch.
Think about what that means.
Around the year 200, we have a major Christian writer treating Enoch as Scripture while simultaneously admitting that other Christians do not receive it. That is basically a textbook example of disputed canonical reception.
And then Origen, only a few decades later, gives us the opposite side of the argument. Although he knew and used Enoch, he states that the books bearing Enoch’s name: “do not at all circulate in the Churches as divine."
So we actually possess early Christian evidence of disagreement over the status of Enoch: Tertullian defends it as Scripture, while Origen says it is not received in the Churches as divine.
And here is perhaps the most interesting fact of all: 1 Enoch is still canonical Scripture in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church today.
The Ethiopian Church’s own official canonical list explicitly includes Enoch among its Old Testament books.
So Enoch is not merely an ancient curiosity, there is is a living apostolic Christian tradition today in which it remains part of the biblical canon.
This dismantles the simplistic historical idea that Christians everywhere simply possessed one obvious, universally recognized table of contents from the beginning.
Far from It
The evidence shows recognition, transmission, debate, reception and eventually broad ecclesiastical consensus.
And this is why saying “God guided the making of the canon” does not answer the actual question.
What does that history actually show? Because that’s the real question. And history shows:
- Bishops discussing books.
- Churches comparing apostolic traditions.
- Questions about authorship.
- Questions about orthodoxy.
- Books being read liturgically.
- Some books being accepted in one region but disputed elsewhere.
And eventually increasingly stable ecclesiastical recognition.
In fact, invoking Irenaeus against Catholic or Orthodox ideas of Tradition creates another problem.
Irenaeus absolutely appeals to Scripture, but he also explicitly appeals to apostolic Tradition and episcopal succession when arguing against heretics.
Finally, the claim that Christians received Scripture in vernacular languages “in spite of Rome, not thanks to it” is another major historical oversimplification. Or a myth, to be less politically correct.
Cambridge’s New Cambridge History of the Bible notes that the first known Bible printed in High German was produced by Johann Mentelin at Strasbourg in 1466, which is more than half a century before Luther’s New Testament appeared in 1522, and the 1466 printed edition itself depended upon an earlier fourteenth-century German translation of the Vulgate.
Another Cambridge history notes that a German Bible printed in Augsburg in 1518, only months after Luther’s 95 Theses, belonged to this pre-Lutheran German Bible tradition originating with the translation first printed in 1466.
Of course, honesty requires acknowledging the other side too, because medieval ecclesiastical authorities sometimes did restrict unauthorized vernacular translations, especially when translations became associated with movements regarded as heretical.
But saying that ordinary Christians only received vernacular Scripture because the Reformers defeated a Roman policy of keeping the Bible exclusively in Latin is simply not serious history.
And speaking of history, Philip Schaff is a particularly important witness here because he was a Protestant church historian, not a Roman Catholic apologist, and his account doesn’t support the idea that the biblical canon was simply self-evident from the beginning, independently of the authority and judgment of the Church.
Schaff explicitly says that the New Testament canon was formed gradually during the first four centuries. He also records that, in the age of Eusebius, the Church’s tradition still “wavered between acceptance and rejection” regarding books such as James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2–3 John, Hebrews, and Revelation.
The fundamental argument is about how the canon became formally settled in the Latin Church: Schaff says that the councils of Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397 gave the first explicit definition of the New Testament canon in the form subsequently receive; He then identifies Augustine and Jerome as having “exerted a decisive influence in settling the Canon” for the Latin Church. And Schaff immediately reminds us that Jerome’s Latin biblical work was undertaken at the request of Pope Damasus of Rome.
But Schaff goes even further and, when discussing the African canonical decision, he says that it was still “subject to ratification.” He then says that it received the agreement of the Roman See when the bishops of Rome repeated the same biblical index. Immediately afterward, Schaff says that this canon remained undisturbed until the sixteenth century.
That sequence matters:
disputed books → growing ecclesiastical consensus → Hippo and Carthage formally fix the Western list → the African decision is subject to ratification → Rome concurs with it → the canon remains stable in the Western Church.
And Schaff’s conclusion, namely “Protestantism retained the New Testament canon of the Roman church” is impossible to dismiss from a Protestant perspective.