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All of those citations you gave me are from letters of Paul (written before the Gospels were), or one from John.

The "Scripture" that they were referring to, and that Jesus was referring to, was the Old Testament. There was no New Testament to be Scripture when Paul wrote his letters. In fact, there were only a few of his own letters. Nowhere does Paul ever refer to his OWN WRITINGS as Scripture. He is not so arrogant. The ALL Paul is referring to is ALL of the Jewish Bible, the only Scriptures that existed at the time he wrote.

What the Scriptures were to First Century Jews is obvious enough: the Jewish Scriptures.

That we Christians have put together a book of Christian writings, called it the New Testament, and call it Scripture is good, but it's not what the writers IN the New Testament are referring to. THEY weren't referencing their own letters and calling them "Scripture". Jesus certainly wasn't referencing the letters of Paul.

Now, who was it, precisely, who identified what the New Testament canon would be, and thereby defined what the new Scriptures would be? Who had the authority to decide what WAS new Scripture, to be added to the old Scripture, and authoritative in itself?

Beyond that, it is very clear in the Old Testament itself, and from the content of what Jesus actually cited to when he specifically referred to "Scripture", that the hierarchy of authority within Judaism between the Torah (the HIGHEST authority in Scripture) and the Prophets (second highest authority) was followed by the apostles and Jesus himself. Jesus refers to "the Law and the Prophets", which is to say, the Jewish expression for the Torah and the Prophetic books. If JESUS was following the conventional Jewish hierarchy of Scriptural authority, how in the dickens can any of US say that it's "unacceptable and ungodly" to view different Scripture with different authority.

That's a made up rule, asserted with authority that you do not have.

So... it seems that you don't consider the New Testament as Scripture. If you did, then you'd realize that the Holy Spirit DID KNOW that the writings were Scripture, and that the words of Paul, SCRIPTURE, are applicable regardless whether he knew them to be or not, and are, therefore, applicable. However, I do not believe that Paul did not know he was penning Scripture, given the number of times he directed folks to heed his commands, examples, and doctrines. In any case, it makes no matter whether he did or not. Unless you don't accept his writings as Scripture.

There was no New Testament to be Scripture when Paul wrote his letters. In fact, there were only a few of his own letters. Nowhere does Paul ever refer to his OWN WRITINGS as Scripture. He is not so arrogant. The ALL Paul is referring to is ALL of the Jewish Bible, the only Scriptures that existed at the time he wrote.

No ---it is not arrogance if it is true. And it was true and Paul knew it to be true.

Since II Timothy was one of Paul's last epistles, he would have been fully cognizant of the fact that his previous epistles and the writings of Matthew, Luke, James that were already down on papyrus, were also holy scriptures, and that there were more to come.

Being that Timothy was probably around 20 years old when Paul wrote his 2nd letter to the youthful Timothy circa 67 AD, Timothy would have been young enough to have learned to read from many of the NT scriptures, including James' Epistle written about the time of his birth circa 47 AD. Matthew's Gospel may have been circulating when he was 5 years old, along with Paul's epistles to the Thessalonians and Galatians. At the age of 10 he would have been reading Paul's letter to the Romans, and the Corinthians.

Furthermore, note what Paul says to Timothy: "that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures", not "when" but "from". In other words he began to read them from childhood and had continued in that practice as a young man. As the scriptures of Paul and the others grew, so Timothy grew into adulthood.

It is interesting that as the youthful NT scriptures were growing from the pens of James, Paul, Matthew, Luke --- so the youthful Timothy was growing as well. His life was probably a chronicle of the NT scriptures themselves. He probably lived long enough to add the last book of John to his canon of scripture.

Thus if Catholics really want to know who put together the first canon of scripture, they need look no farther than Timothy who knew the scriptures from a child, knew therefore what was and what was not scripture, and collected the NT scriptures as they were written, adding the new ones to the old ones. He would have been about 50 years old when he collected John's last book that closed the canon of the holy scriptures.