Were the books of the New Testament written to be in the Bible?

Answer 1

A:

No. There was no concept of a canon of Christian scriptures, or 'New Testament' until the middle of the second century:

Paul wrote his epistles simply as letters to churches or, in one case, a person named Philemon.

The Gospel of Mark was written by an anonymous author to define early Christian knowledge about Jesus. Later gospels (Matthew, Luke and John) expanded and elaborated on Mark's Gospel to meet the theological needs of their times and communities, and were not necessarily seen by their authors as being read alongside other gospels.

The epistles, other than Hebrews and Paul's epistles, are all considered to be pseudepigraphical and were written in order to have the instructions or ideas of their authors accepted by the Christian community as a whole. The authors might have been surprised could they have lived to see their writings included as scripture.

Revelation was long disputed, but was eventually included in the New Testament just in case it was written by the apostle John.