What's Going on in the New Testament?

There was never any official council that decided what was in the new testament. The canon was an organic growth out of the church spreading throughout the ancient world, and books being copied and recopied. Certain ones, over those early centuries, rose to the top. And so we can just kind of conclude with this, it's the letters that we have in the new Testament as the letters that preserve the coarse statement about the gospel of those closest to jesus in the first century. It actually arose out of the history of god's people - which is beautiful because its messiness speaks for itself.