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.
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. Who's gloating??? Do you actually believe that the early Christians didn't know WHO delivered Divinely-inspired writings to them? The way some Roman Catholics put it no one can hear God's voice unless THEY tell them it is God's voice! Jesus said His sheep HEAR Him and follow Him. I read writings like the Maccabees and know that it is NOT Holy Spirit inspired. We know:
Let it, however, be clearly understood that it was not exactly apostolic authorship which in the estimation of the earliest churches, constituted a book a portion of the “canon.” Apostolic authorship was, indeed, early confounded with canonicity. It was doubt as to the apostolic authorship of Hebrews, in the West, and of James and Jude, apparently, which underlay the slowness of the inclusion of these books in the “canon” of certain churches. But from the beginning it was not so. The principle of canonicity was not apostolic authorship, but imposition by the apostles as “law.” Hence Tertullian’s name for the “canon” is “instrumentum”; and he speaks of the Old and New Instrument as we would of the Old and New Testament. That the apostles so imposed the Old Testament on the churches which they founded — as their “Instrument,” or “Law,” or “Canon” — can be denied by none. And in imposing new books on the same churches, by the same apostolical authority, they did not confine themselves to books of their own composition. It is the Gospel according to Luke, a man who was not an apostle, which Paul parallels in I Tim. v. 18 with Deuteronomy as equally “Scripture” with it in the first extant quotation of a New Testament book of as Scripture. The Gospels which constituted the first division of the New Books, — of “The Gospel and the Apostles,” — Justin tells us, were “written by the apostles and their companions.” The authority of the apostles, as by divine appointment founders of the church, was embodied in whatever books they imposed on the church as law, not merely in those they themselves had written. The early churches, in short, received, as we receive, into their New Testament all the books historically evinced to them as given by the apostles to the churches as their code of law; and we must not mistake the historical evidences of the slow circulation and authentication of these books over the widely-extended church, for evidence of slowness of “canonization” of books by the authority or the taste of the church itself. http://www.the-highway.com/ntcanon_Warfield.html