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I'm new here and I sense there is come confusion about the history of the canon. I'll share what I know. I don't want to add to the confusion, I'm just trying to clarify matters.
As far as the NT goes, it would be naïve to assume there were only four gospels ever written. the early Christian community was very divisive, each sect probably having its own gospels. There could have been 50, 100 gospels written. Who knows? We do have 42 gnostic gospels alone, which tell a very different story about Christ, but nevertheless they are gospels and n illustration of the divisiveness in the early church. And there is also extra-biblical material that one wonders why it was never included n the canon. One major example is "Paul and the Acts of Teekel." It was quite popular in the East, to the extent that Teekel became sainted. But, alas never made it into the canon. It is not clear why. So some degree of arbitrariness was going on in selecting what's canon and what's not. Also, as I recall, "Revelations" was not canonized by the East until the sixth century. And, as we will see, there always was debate and controversy as to what books are canon and what not, all down though the ages. Luther, for example, called "James" a "straw epistle" and put it in a kind of appendix, separate from the other NT books, in his Bible. Incidentally, he also said that "Ester" should be thrown in the river.
The OT is a good example of such debate. There were at least two different versions of the OT, one in Hebrew, and one in Greek. The latter is called the Septuagint, as legend his it that 72 scribes all translated it from the Hebrew, with the exact, same wording. It differend from the Hebrew, because it contained more books, commonly known as the Apocrypha. In the 19th century, a theory was advanced that somewhere between 90 to 110AD, there was a major conference, in Jamnia, to decide which version to go with. Result? No agreement. The Alexandrian Jews stuck with their Greek. The eastern Hebrew Jews, their Hebrew. However, there is no definitive evidence such a conference ever took place.
When Jerome wanted to produce what is sometimes called the Vulgate Bible, meaning in the language of the people, he debated over which source to translate from. Initially, he chose the Hebrew, as it is,after all, the original language. But it proved very difficult to translate fro Hebrew into Latin. It's far easier with Greek, so he went for the Seotuagint. He did have reservations about whether this was the right way to go, however. All this was in the midst of an ongoing controversy over the canon. Marcion, for example, is said to have taken a pair of scissors and cut out the entire OT. Augustine cheered on Jerome, but sais other fathers might not agree.
When the Reformation came along, there was concern about whether the Protestant Bibles should contain the Apocrypha, as it was a major part of the Catholic Bible, and no Protestant wanted t to trust Catholics, plus the Apocrypha was not in the original language. Luther included it in his Bible. The KJV originally contained it, too. However, given that it wasn't in the original language and given that the clerics were in a witch-hunt mentality, by the 1640's, it is pronounced a thing of the devil and dropped. During the Counterreformation, the Council of Trent again ratified it as holy, in the Catholic Church.
So again, as you can see, there always was controversy and some arbitrary human decision-making over what is canon and what not.
I don't know what Wikipedia said. I don't always trust it. I recommend students avoid it, except for quick references. I'm pretty sure I got it right on the history of the canon. I better. I have an earned doctorate in theology and teach on the university level.
