1. And yet they were perfectly comfortable testing doctrine "by all the scriptures" in their own first century words.
If you’re referring to the Bereans, they were referring to the Old Testament, which was used to test the doctrine of the New, and if you’re referring to the Apostolic instruction, this would also refer to the Old Testament and to whatsoever New Testament scripture you had received, if you had any at all (the churches of Armenia, Georgia, Ethiopia, Eritrea and of many other people all had the Gospel preached orally long before it was translated into the vernacular; likewise a great many Coptic Christians heard and followed the Gospel without ever reading a Bible, including St. Anthony the Great and most of the Desert Fathers and inumerable holy martyrs such as St. Mina and St. Abanoub the Child Martyr, heard the Gospel and lived it without being able to read or without being able to read the Bible, since it was not translated into Coptic in its entirety until the time of St Cyril the Great of Alexandria completed the Coptic translation of the Bible and the DIvine Liturgy of St. Mark and other services in the Fifth Century, in addition to dealing with Nestorius and Pelagius, likewise, obviously since Syriac-speaking Christians without knowledge of Greek or another language in which it had been translated, including bishops, could not even theoreticall test doctrine against the Apocalypse of St. John until it was translated by St. Philoxenus of Mabbug along with the other books of the Athanasian canon absent from the Peshitta (a Syriac Orthodox saint, the Roman Catholics regarded him as anathema as do unfortunately some of my own Eastern Orthodox coreligionists) in the sixth century.
Thus a legalistic interpretation of this instruction or an interpretation that requires all Scriptures to be present is contradicted not just by all archaeological and documentary evidence but by the blood of Christian martyrs who were killed by the Romans and Hindu and Persian and Mesopotamian Pagans and later by Islamic Pagans in the case of the East Syriac Christians and by the witness of the Desert Fathers and other Christians who lived without access to the Scriptural text itself.
2. And this thread is not about "when did all the scriptures get written". Rather this thread is more like "What is the Gospel"
If the Gospel is in the Apocalypse only as the OP asserted or if as some appeared to suggest, it requires the Apocalypse to be explained, it becomes a problem that St. John, because the other Apostles had been martyred by the time he received the Revelation on Patmos, and it took that much longer for his Apocaylpse to be included in the canon, and its late date and the unusual, apocalyptic nature of its content compared to the rest of the Old Testament caused many early Christians to suspect it of being a forgery (ultimately what led the Alexandrians and Cappadocians and others, and helped the decision of St. Athanasius to include it, is the thematic consistency with the rest of the Johannine corpus, but even now one can find pious Christians who regard it as canonical yet believe it was written in imitation of the Gospel of St. John but not by the same author, since there were stylistic differences, which can also be accounted for by the time elapsed between the writing of the two (the early church also recorded the Gospel According to John as being the last to be written, a point on which paradoxically most modern day left wing scholars do not dispute, but whereas the neo-Alogoi claim that it is inauthentic, the early church fathers wrote that St. John had sought to document things not documented in the synoptic Gospels, and this makes sense, particularly in light of the closing words of that Gospel). The point being, even saying that John 3:16 is required for salvation, or linking salvation to knowledge of any individual New Testament verse is extremely problematic.
Rather, based on the Creed, we must say simply being grafted onto the Body of Christ through Baptism and receiving the Holy Spirit and salvific living faith that comes with reception into His Church and of His Supper, the Eucharist, and faith that in Him the fullness of the Godhead dwelled bodily, and the reception, therefore, of God the Holy Spirit, who was sent by Christ the Incarnate Word of God to be our Comforter and Paraclete, is enough, and that the Scriptures exist to aid us in this respect, but they are not the Paraclete, nor are they the uncreated Word, rather the Word is Christ, and Scriptures (graphe) are the God-breathed record of the Prophecy of His Incarnation, His Incarnation in the nature of and salvation of the race of Humans, and the counsels of His Apostles, and the Prophecy of His Return, a guide that assists us in finding Christ, but not a substitute for Christ or the means of Grace in His Ordinances, the Sacraments of Baptism, the Eucharist and other things such as Holy Matrimony and the Annointing of the Sick with Oil, the uncreated Love of God the Father, the Grace of God the Son and the fellowship of God the Holy Spirit, ever one God.
Since this thread is about what Adventist's teach and the Adventist denomination was formed in the 1860, a point in time when even the most stubborn Bible student would know that the 66 books of the Bible were accepted by all denomiinations (with a few denominations accepting the 66 a few more) how is it you get stuck on whether all 66 books should be accepted for doctrinal gospel teaching????
In reply to this, firstly, it is not my point that all 27 books of the New Testament should be accepted - I support the Athanasian Canon. Rather, I am commenting on a historical reality. It was not the case, even in the 19th century, that all Christians - that is to say, all true Students of the Bible (a phrase we Nicene Christians should reclaim because the phrase “Bible Student” is abused by the Arian group known as the “Watchtower Bible and Tract Society” which paradoxically discourages Scriptural scholarship and critical thinking about the Bible) had access in the vernacular to all 27 books of the New Testament or to the various Old Testament canons (regarding which I would note that at the time the majority of Christians, and at present, to this date, the six largest denominational groups, namely the Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Anglicans, Oriental Orthodox, Lutherans and Calvinists, either use deuterocanonical books, or permit their use in the case of Lutherans (while also using some as canticles, since Lutherans and Anglicans both inherited Matins and Benedicite Omni Opera from the Longer Version of Daniel found in the Septuagint, the Greek translation that many prefer to the Masoretic text), or in the case of Calvinists, are members of a denominational group whose founder regarded Baruch to be protocanon, and some Calvinists also like these books; only a minority of Christians are actively opposed to the use of such books.
Which poses another issue, since Hebrews refers to 2 Maccabees, Jude quotes 1 Enoch (which only the Ethiopians have preserved in their canon, and which there are problems with as
@Jipsah has pointed out particularly for denominations which would interpret it using the Antiochian literal-historical method of exegesis; the Ethiopians do not use it as a source of doctrine but regard it as allegorical Christological prophecy, which I believe Jude was also doing), and other aspects of the New Testament quote other parts of Deuterocanon, for example, the Golden Rule stressed by Christ our God first appears in Tobit, likewise Christ did not introduce the idea of forgiving others in order to receive forgiveness in His incarnation, but rather, this central Word, was, Logically, expressed beforehand - we find it in the Wisdom of Sirach, also breathed by God the Holy Spirit, and St. Paul’s study of idolatry and the human difficulty recognizing God in Romans 1:20-32 is based upon a meditation in Chapter 13 of Wisdom (chapter 2 of which is a clear and explicit prophecy of the Passion of Christ very simiilar to the Songs of the Suffering Servant of St. Isaiah the Prophet, albeit of Solomonic inspiration, in a work compiled just over 93 years before that Passion, which is one of many reasons why that work was so important to the Early Church, so that even among those who did not regard it as protocanonical favored the use of Wisdom for catechetical purposes.
If Adventists regard hearing Revelation as a requirement for understanding the Gospel and at the same time take the opposite view with regards to the Deuterocanon, that would be very problematic.
