Sir David Dalrymple gathered together the early Church fathers' letters, from which he said (except for only 7 verses), he was able to reconstruct the entire New Testament using just quotations. An added qualifier they used was whether a book came with the power of God. There's something about reading the one-and-only Bible that just comes up and hits you in the eyes. It comes with the power of God. You can't get that from something whipped up by man. So those are some very effective filters used to give us the Bible. The process was the opposite of careless, casual, or haphazard; PART 2 - IS THE BIBLE A HISTORICALLY RELIABLE DOCUMENT? The 2nd test is the “Internal (Eyewitness) Test," which considers the credibility of the authors and truthfulness of what was written. The 3rd is the External Test (historical events, geography, archaeology, and cultural consistencies). As far as test 2, those collaborators for the Bible did not compile it willy nilly. Instead they asked logical qualifying questions like whether the author of a potential book to be included was an apostle of Christ (they spent a lot of time with Jesus), and also whether a book agreed with the rest of the Scripture (God doesn’t lie or contradict Himself), had been accepted by the early Church (they were there at the beginning), or had it been quoted by the early Church (they must have believed the quote was from God).