There was no immediate universal tradition for accepting all local letters, St. Paul wrote them to specific churches and they organically became universally known. It is accepted, because each local church held the tradition of reading their letters, and eventually they were accepted universally.
Nobody's saying there was a 76 book canon in the early church, and if that were necessary, God would have made it happen. The argument is that The Orthodox Church's organic preservation of the scriptures and eventually organization is what allows us to have The Bible today.
Prophets were a class of Christians in the early church, The Apostles weren't the only ones whom God used as mouthpieces. Scripture at its core means sacred writings. A canon of scripture doesn't mean that there aren't other writings that have a holy purpose.
When St. Paul mentions scripture, he's speaking of the Old Testament. Not every Christian during that time had access to every single epistle, and not even every single Gospel, in that case. The Orthodox argue for an organic canon, not innovative, but not instant either.
The Toll Houses doctrine stems from the spiritual reality that Christians acknowledge. It is simple true, it doesn't have to be in scripture. Why did St. Paul pray for Onesiphorus after Onesiphorus had already fallen asleep in The Lord? Where was Lazarus before Christ raised him from the dead? He could have been in heaven, but clearly the final judgement doesn't happen until the last day, as Lazarus died, and before the last judgement, he came back on earth.
The Didache is not canonized scripture, because of the above doctrine: The Church didn't see that it was necessary to put it into the canon. We're ok with that, if we weren't we would have canonized it. The Council of Trullo which I mentioned earlier also mentions writings that are holy that are more accessible to bishops and monks in the same paragraph as the liturgical/law, prophet, wisdom, chronicles, gospel and epistle canon.
If you say that if an Apostle writes something, it must be part of a specific canon rather than just accepted: that's your presupposition, not a fundamental Christian presupposition or something which The Apostles themselves taught or even wrote.
Did you know that there were 70 other apostles? Why don't we have a writing from at least one of them? Why don't we have scripture from St. Thomas?
Paul wrote a letter to the church at Laodicea mentioned in Colossians 4:16. In 1 Corinthians St. Paul mentions that he had already written a letter to the Corinthians. That means we don't have it. Why aren't those letters scripture in your canon if the entire criteria in the age of The Church for scripture is that it was written by an Apostle, and there can be no holy writings or oral teaching which speaks of things outside of our known epistles? Saint Paul also wrote an epistle that we don't have today in which he expounds upon his thorn in the flesh. His thorn in the flesh was an eye defect, as insinuated as if the Galatians knew more than what is just written down in letters in Galatians 4:15-20
The answer is simple, we have our current canon preserved and translated not so that we exclude writings outside of that canon, but that we have a sufficient guide for spiritual edification.
You did not answer my question with regards to why you accept books which are not written by by those with authority on the same level as Moses or the prophets who were appointed judges/born Levites. Or why the Sadducees are wrong to reject all things after Moses as not God-breathed. Nehemiah was written by a layman. He was a prophet because God spoke through him, there's not a black and white apostle vs. non apostle dichotomy for writing scripture. Much of the Old Testament is completed by scribes. And just like I mentioned with lost writings in the New Covenant, the same applies for the Old Covenant. There was a whole school of prophets of whom we don't have their writings. -
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Let me make this abundantly clear, that doesn't mean that those writings weren't God-breathed and used by God.
You seem to have an idea that after Christ whatever The Apostles write must be canonized and that anything not written by them should not be canonized, even further and more extreme, that whatever someone after them writes cannot be God-breathed or at least serve a sacred purpose locally. If this is a special power given only to The Apostles, why is that not in scripture, and further, why do you not obey the Apostolic commands which are in scripture such as "whatever sins ye remit, are remitted, whatever ye bind and loose are bound in heaven." "This cup which we bless, is it not The Blood of our Christ?" and "Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven." "Confess your sins to one another, and He shall be faithful and just to forgive your sins." ???
Personally, your responses are well thought out, but are not sufficient to answer what I have presented. I have heard most of what you speak of before, and I became Orthodox anyways. If you are interested in Orthodoxy, we can talk more, but if at the moment you feel that your reasons are sufficient to justify your belief, it looks like we have to agree to disagree, ask Christ for guidance as we have been doing.
