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Merry Christmas to you too, HC!

"Actually, the Itala had to date from some time shortly after AD 160, because Tertullian, the first Father to write in Latin, quoted the scriptures from the Itala in the period AD 180-AD 220. The Itala was also the origin of the Psalm translation still used in the Latin Mass and Breviary."

I think you may have misunderstood my point. There is no question that there were various writings around very early on which ultimately ended up as part of the NT which you and I use and even that used by the Protestants. What wasn't in existence was a discrete canon of the NT as we use it today.

"When did Tatian make his Syraic/Aramaic Harmony of the Gospels? I think it was a little later than AD 125 (AD 160?), and that was the first. The Coptic and Latin followed somewhat later."

Last I looked, Syriac/Aramaic were Semitic languages, not Eastern European, which was Free Baptist's assertion. :) I suspect the earliest translation of the NT into an "Eastern European language" was something done by Sts. Cyril and Methodios or their successors, who, as I recall, were sent out by The One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church and not some independant ecclesial assembly or group of vagantes roaming around the mountains and forests of Eastern Europe!

"Last I looked, Syriac/Aramaic were Semitic languages, not Eastern European,..."

This is true. I was not connecting Syrian with the Indo-European strain of Languages, but early translations of NT MSS into European dialects as early as the 2nd century are on record in good manuscript evidence studies.

My point in all of this is that Roman Catholic (and now should I take it to include Orthodox Catholic???) will discard libraries full of manuscript evidence, if that evidence in any way appears to indicate that the Holy Spirit accomplished anything by common Christians who were never under the authority of their religious system(s). I have gone round and round with Roman Catholics especially who, for their own authoritarian purposes, compress the the 2nd and 3rd centuries into oblivion -- that period between the death of John the Beloved and the Council of Nicea.

Rome (What about the Orthodox??) cannot stand the thought that there were just plain common Christians who were personally leading more and more people to Jesus Christ -- that there were congregations of believers forming, and pastors arising, who were NEVER connected with bishops (or with their immediate predecessor) who went to Nicea for the Council. Just as you could travel through the mountains of West Virginia today and find a congregation of believers known to nobody outside of that valley, and the pastor of which was called of God to preach His Gospel, and never went to one of the big seminaries, and never made connections with any denominational headquarters anyplace. And you can find such congregations ALL OVER THE WORLD. I have seen them in four Asian countries, just like that, with my own eyes.

Those little, but stable and growing congregations of believers who meet, and study the Scriptures, and pray, and listen to the preaching of God's word, and love one-another, and help one-another, and give of their incomes to help missionaries preach in other places, and on and on. And they love the Lord Jesus Christ, and God blesses them. And their preachers, who may have never seen a seminary classroom, are obviously blessed of God in their ministries to people, exhibiting true spiritual discretion and discernment, and heavenly wisdom. No seminary, no denominational headquarters, no outside human benefactors, no well-known friends. BUT BLESSED OF GOD BEYOND MEASURE(!), and striving to make Christ known as far as they possibly can with the resources God has provided them.

Rome (and perhaps the Orthodox???) would have us to believe that the fruit of the Apostles and those that heard the Apostles didn't include many, many such autonomous congregations in the 2nd and 3rd centuries. And am I to believe that there were never hand-written copies of any of the Epistles that had been written by the apostles to the churches of Asia Minor floating around these congregations?

I have served underground in Communist China, and I have seen entire books of the New Testament that had been hand copied on to pieces of wood bark by persecuted Christians who could not get a copy of the Bible. An old Chinese Christian sister who has suffered terribly for her faith opened an old storage chest in my presence, and took from there two old Gospel tracts that had survived since the 1920s although they had been mimeographed on paper about the same density as bathroom tissue. She had them in cellophane, and she also had Scripture portions there that she had copied by hand from memory during the Cultural Revolution while exiled to a farm. Am I to believe that there were not hundreds, perhaps thousands of common Christian believers in the 2nd and 3rd centuries doing the same thing? Yes, we KNOW that many, many of them could at least read and write Greek, as well as other languages and dialects.

But Rome (perhaps the Orthodox too???) can not tolerate God having used some of His most common children in the preservation process of His Words. If Rome cannot control the process, then it is either illegitimate, or it just could not have happened at all, and will be discarded from encyclopedia entries, or ridiculed in some others. This is why we often see the remark on this forum to the effect that the Roman Catholic Church was the originator of the Bible; that we would have no Bible if it were not for the RCC. This is why we see Roman Catholic contributors to this forum try to convince us that there were NO Christians except Roman Catholics in the 2nd and 3rd centuries. This kind of history is needed by them to help secure their own authority over their own members. But it is not true history; it's not even reasonable to believe that kind of history. It would be similar to saying that since the officially recognized church in Massachusetts in the 17th century was the Congregational Church, that no believers outside of the Congregational order were meeting (but they were), evangelizing (they were), building congregations (they were), winning the Indians to Jesus Christ (they were), carrying on missionary endeavors in Pennsylvania and Virgina, etc. Others were doing these things while being persecuted by the Congregational ministers who had the backing of the governmental authorities. Read the histories of Christianity of that era and in that place written by the Congregationalists, and you would think that they were the only people who existed there! If you read the histories written by Rome of the 2nd and 3rd centuries, you would think that there were only Roman Catholics and heretics. That is precisely what Rome wants us to believe (What do the Orthodox say???). But it was the Roman Catholic Church as a system and as an authority that didn't exist in the 1st through 3rd centuries. No, not till the Council of Nicea did there come into being a system that we know now as the Roman Catholic Church. That does not mean that there were not men who had begun to develop some of the early tenets of faith that we now identify with Rome, but that doesn't mean that the overall system came first.