Accounts of what? The Bible has "accounts" (and poetry, and other literary genres) of countless different events. Do you want to know who established the canon? Or who wrote and assembled the books in the first place? The latter is an entire field of scholarly inquiry.
There are not "hundreds of accounts" to deal with in the first place.
Regarding the OT: There are specific works, and not that many in all, that were universally recognized in Judaism as the works of recognized prophets. We have no records or evidence of any formal process of canonizing these books. By the time of the inter-testamental period, there was unanimity regarding the canonicity of these books. Likewise there was unanimity regarding the status of the Apocrypha: works that were useful for history or piety, but were not considered to be scripture.
Regarding the NT, the situation is pretty much the same. Works which could reliably be attributed to an apostle, or one of the close associates of the apostles, were widely recognized by the early church as scripture.
A few books that were "spoken against," meaning there was not unanimity regarding their apostolic provenance. These are known as the "antilegomena," and were placed into a separate category. They were subordinate to the other books, and were not used as the primary sources for any particular doctrine, but were still highly regarded. For the record, the antilegomena are: Hebrews, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, James, Jude, and Revelation.
There are several lists of NT books extant which are largely consistent with one another, but with some differences. See the Muratorian Fragment for one such example.
A third category of books were also recognized: books which did not have apostolic authority, and thus were not considered to be scripture, but were useful theological treatises and widely disseminated. The "Shepherd of Hermas" was one such work. The Didache is also often considered to be such a work.
Outside of this, there were many late works which were never considered to be part of the recognized canon. These are often, and inaccurately, referred to by modern authors as "lost books of the Bible." However, they were never "lost", and were known by the early church fathers to be works of late authorship, and thus lacked apostolic provenance. In other words, they recognized them as forgeries, and the church never took them seriously.
Regarding any "official" canonization of the books of the Bible, we have no extant official pronouncements until the Council of Trent in the late 1540s. Some suspect that the Synod of Hippo Regius made a determination regarding the canon, but as those proceedings have been lost, it is an open question. Regardless, all extant evidence demonstrates that the NT canon as we know it was settled by the mid 2nd century.
> Likewise there was unanimity regarding the status of the Apocrypha: works that were useful for history or piety, but were not considered to be scripture.
Was there? I thought this didn't really become a question in Christianity until Luther.
No, it's been an issue since at least Jerome (and certainly before, really), but it's an issue on which there is disagreement between the Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox traditions (and not one on which there were necessarily definitive authoritative positions, much less unanimity, as early as described upthread.)
To be clear: I was not referring to the manner in which the Christian church later regarded the apocrypha, but the manner in which the Jews in the inter-testamental period regarded it. The Jews then, as today, did not regard the apocrypha as scripture. However, I must limit what I wrote above to the Jews in Palestine and the establishment of the Tanakh. There were Jews in Egypt who considered the apocryphal books part of their canon.
Well, if nothing else, it certainly seemed anachronistic to have everybody agreeing on Martin Luther's theology that far back. Thanks for setting me straight.
There is a misconception at work here regarding Luther and the apocrypha. The question of the apocrypha's canonicity was not a significant point of discussion during the Reformation, likely because his position was a common one in the Roman church itself (Occam, for example, was of the same opinion as Luther on this point). Luther's German Bible included the apocrypha in a separate section between the Old and New Testaments, describing them as books that, while not Scripture, were profitable to read. This is very nearly a translation from the Glossa ordinaria in which Luther was schooled. In fact, Luther and his fellows regularly quoted from the apocrypha and even preached from it, without controversy. In this regard, Luther's understanding of the apocrypha represented the theological training he received prior to his period as a reformer.
It was not until the Council of Trent that any controversy arose regarding the apocrypha between the Lutherans and Rome, when Rome formally declared the apocrypha to be inspired and canonical. For more on this topic, see the Examination of the Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent by Martin Chemnitz.
"The apocrypha" has no universally accepted bounds. The works for which your description is approximately correct are those that the Catholic Church deemed deuterocanonical, not those it considered apocryphal if useful in the sense you discuss (e.g., the Clementine apocrypha); both sets of those are within the ambit of what those following Luther's position consider "apocrypha".
As to the relation to the Jewish canon of the intertestamental period, there is some ambiguity as to where some "apocrypha" works lie (in which the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves play a role.) The position you've put forward is common and goes back to at least Jerome, and holds that the works which were accepted as the Jewish canon, in the Hebrew form they were found in, at much later dates than the intertestamental period, accurately reflect the canon of the earlier period. Which isn't an implausible assumption, and for a long time there wasn't a concrete reason to suspect any particular variance though there was very little reason to assume no variance, either.
I am not arguing that the apocrypha has a universally accepted bounds. There is certainly variance regarding what was considered apocryphal, no question.
However, regarding whether the Tanakh in the inter-testamental period, namely those books that were "laid up" in the temple at Palestine: We have no evidence or reason to suspect that the canon preserved by the Masoretes, was in some part different from the Tanakh.
We know of the dispute between Jerome and Augustine, which appears to be due to ignorance on Augustine's part, who thought the Jews counted the apocryphal books as part of the Tanakh. He was obviously wrong.
Jerome's opinion was shared by Gregory the Great, and even, somewhat ironically, by Cardinal Cajetan in Luther's day. Luther simply followed the best scholarship of his day.
Several collections have been formed. Perhaps most pertinent to your inquiry is the Vulgate, a translation commissioned in the 4th century by the 37th Pope.
