It’s telling (and sad) that someone/anyone who professes to be a Christian is completely dependent upon “scripture” to tell them what their own “view” of God is. There were tens of thousands of Christians who knew the God of the New Testament before there ever was a New Testament. They knew that God loved them, and what God had done for them, before a New Testament ever told them so. Some people choose to have a living vibrant relationship with a living resurrected Savior. Others prefer to choose a ‘relationship’ that is dictated to them by what’s between the covers of a book that didn’t even exist when Christianity began. Nor did it exist for the first 300 years of Christianity. Then in the 4th century when the Christian scriptures were bound together with the Hebrew scriptures to become ‘the Bible’...it was kept out of the hands of the people by the Church for another 1200 years. Christians have been without ‘the Bible’ for a whole lot longer than they’ve had it.
The pre-Bible Christians had the preaching of actual Apostles at first, plus they had the Old Testament. In fact, many of them met in synagogues and read OT scripture. Before the Apostles were dead, they had their writings and the writings of their first students. They also had the spoken teaching of ordained successors. None of the early diocese had all the new writings, but they all had some. It didn't take very long for word to get out that some writings were better than others, and the good ones got copied and shared.
So it was never like the original Christians were without guidance, they didn't come up with their own beliefs.
