Thank you @TheOldHippie! I was not aware of this chapter in the "Scripture Inspired" book, so I had to go and read it. Guess I should have paid more attention to this book back in my Uber-dub days. But admittedly, I didn't become interested in scholarly discussions of the Bible until after I was mentally out, ironically enough. It is quite interesting, and very relevant to this discussion indeed. Having immersed myself more in scholarly writings of the Bible, I was able to understand much more about this chapter than I would have previously. Going back to our original discussion, I must say that this chapter doesn't really disagree too much with what scholars say about how the biblical canon was established. They do acknowledge how it is something that eventually developed over hundreds of years, and even acknowledge that it was the church fathers' opinions that really influenced the eventual canon. But what I found a bit comical was how WT explains what their own criteria for establishing canon is. Using their own criteria, one could definitely make an argument for leaving out books that they themselves consider "canon". Paragraph 6 of that chapter is quite revealing. In regards to determining canonicity, they write:
"There must be no appeal to superstition or creature worship but, rather, an appeal to love and service of God. There would have to be nothing in any of the individual writings that would conflict with the internal harmony of the whole, but, rather, each book must, by its unity with the others, support the one authorship, that of Jehovah God. We would also expect the writings to give evidence of accuracy down to the smallest details. In addition to these basic essentials, there are other specific indications of inspiration, and therefore of canonicity, according to the nature of each book's contents, and these have been discussed herein in the introductory material to each of the Bible books. Also, there are special circumstances that apply to the Hebrew Scriptures and others to the Christian Greek Scriptures that help in establishing the Bible canon."
There are many things I could point out about their criteria, but I found the highlighted statement most comical. For anyone familiar with scholarly discussions on textual criticism of the Bible, reading that statement would make one believe that only ONE Gospel should be considered canon at most, or that no gospel should be! HAHAHAHAHA!