It must be remembered that Scripture is nothing more than a written testimony to and a product of Tradition. What came first? Was it Scripture or Tradition? The simple answer is, of course, Tradition. Scripture, as I have attempted to present in the article about Scripture, found on page 9, was the product of the various stories about Jesus (Gospels) and the letters of Paul and others that Tradition maintained. In fact it is because of Sacred Tradition that the canon of the New Testament (NT) was officially recognized in the East in 692 at the Second Council of Trullan and in the West, the Catholic Church officially defined the Canon at the Council of Trent in 1546, thus reaffirming the Canons of Florence 1442 and supporting the decrees of the North African Councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (419). It seems that all Christians seem to have agreed on the 27 books of the NT in the mid-300s.

Writings that were attributed to the Apostles circulated among the earliest Christian communities. The Pauline epistles were circulating, perhaps in collected forms, by the end of the 1st century AD. Justin Martyr, in the mid-second century, mentions memoirs of the apostles as being read on the day called that of the sun(Sunday) alongside the writings of the prophets. A defined set of four gospels (the Tetramorph) was asserted by Irenaeus, c. 180, who refers to it directly.

In the one-hundred-year period extending roughly from 50 to 150, a number of documents began to circulate among the churches, including epistles, gospels, memoirs, apocalypses, homilies, and collections of teachings. While some of these documents were apostolic in origin, others drew upon the tradition the apostles and ministers of the word had utilized in their individual missions. Still others represented a summation of the teaching entrusted to a particular church center. Several of these writings sought to extend, interpret, and apply apostolic teaching to meet the needs of Christians in a given locality.

So, it is because of Sacred Tradition that we currently have the NT. Those who deny the value of Sacred Tradition fail to realize its particular role in the formation of the NT. Further, Sacred Tradition also preserved how the various writings were used within Christian communities. The writings that are not found in the NT were used in the worship-gatherings of the early Church. The prayers of these gatherings also help us understand the intended meaning of the NT writings.