The Formation of the Canon, 5-6 page paper. Thus far we have come to a closing about the date and source of the individual books of the New Testament, but another questions remains unanswered. We can ask ourselves, how did the New Testament itself come into being? Who collected the writings and on what ideology? What conditions led to the creations of a canon, of trustworthy books? Throughout history Christian’s belief is that the Holy Spirit, who controlled the writing of the individual books, also controlled their selection and compilation, thus continuing to fulfill our Lord’s promise that He would guide his disciples into all reality. This however, is something that is to be discerned by spiritual insight, and not by historical research. The object is to find out what historical research reveals about the origin of the New Testament canon. We have people tell us that we receive the twenty seven books of the New Testament on the mandate of the Church; but even if we do, we have to look at how the Church came to recognize these twenty-seven books as worthy of being placed on a level of encouragement and authority with the Old Testament. It took over a century of the proliferation of numerous writings before anyone was even concerned. They started to pick and choose and it was largely a cumulative, individual and accidental event, guided by chance and prejudice more than objective and scholarly research, until priests and academics began declaring what was authoritative and holy, and even they were not unanimous. Churches had their own books, because there was no clearly defined orthodoxy until the 4th century, there were in fact many simultaneous literary traditions. The illusion that it was otherwise is created by the fact that the Church that had the upper hand simply preserved texts in its favor and destroyed or let fade away conflicting documents.