[boatbums]

But Polycarp said, "To you I have thought it right to offer an account [of my faith]; for we are taught to give all due honor (which entails no injury upon ourselves) to the powers and authorities which are ordained of God. [Romans 13:1-7; Titus 3:1] But as for these, I do not deem them worthy of receiving any account from me.

Wonderful how he was confirming the authority of the Sacred Scriptures centuries before any "formal declaration" determined them to be. God's word was written as "holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit" (II Peter 1:21) and it has been preserved so that we ALL might know what was taught by Jesus Christ and His disciples and binding upon those who follow Him.

[Campion]

Wonderful how he was confirming the authority of the Sacred Scriptures centuries before any "formal declaration" determined them to be.

The unsettled question wasn't "the authority of the Sacred Scriptures," but which books actually composed "the Sacred Scriptures". And among those, the four Gospels and the Pauline epistles were unquestioned. It was other books, like Revelation, and books ultimately judged extracanonical, like the Shepherd of Hermas, which were at issue. Which "issue" wasn't definitively settled until the early 5th century in the West.

So don't gloat too much.

[Antoninus]

Wonderful how he was confirming the authority of the Sacred Scriptures centuries before any "formal declaration" determined them to be.

Keep in mind that Polycarp's church of Smyrna would have had a different canon of Sacred Scripture than, say, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Ephesus, Corinth or Rome. Some churches included books (as Campion pointed out) such as the Apocalypse of Saint Paul, the Shepherd of Hermas, or the Protoevangelium of James. The church of Edessa even included a purported letter from Jesus himself to King Abgar.

What changed in the 4th century is that the Churches got together and decided which books were unquestionably part of the canon of Scripture, and which were not. Once decided, this canon was kept together until it was dismembered by revolutionaries in the 16th century.