Oh my goodness, so many...I'd have to go write a couple pastor friends to know the whole amount. If you look up the First Council of Nicea (where the Nicene Creed comes from) that is when the books that made it in the Bible were decided for the most part.

and Creationists come back with the Old Earth argument. there is also no proving it is 460,000,000,000 years old either...carbon dating past a couple thousand years is pretty fickle.

I'm not saying it IS 6,000 years old, just to be clear. I'm also not saying dinosaurs were on the ark as some Christians claim. There is a whole branch of schooling called Apologetics where Christian scientists do logically explain things just as reasonably as aethiest scientists.

I have experienced a couple very horrible evil things that have solidified in my mind that evil exsists...and have experienced things that can only be considered spiritual in nature. Yes, I could go into exploring that it was my instinct and the 90% of my brain I don't use playing tricks on me, etc...but I feel that in general humaity is spiritual, and that for me tells me that there is more out there.

I get emotional when alone in nature, and emotional in church sometimes. Maybe it is awe, maybe it is hope, I don't know.

The Gnostic Gospels have definitely been published, I have a copy at home. You could probably start digging around the internet to find other stuff. It's pretty overwhelming, because there is a lot of stuff out there.

yeah, that is why you need four years of schooling to shift through it all. crazy!

OK. So, I just had a discussion with my friend who got a church related degree and is married to a pastor. Wanted to make sure I had things straight before I wrote it here. (I only had a couple years of education on this not the 8 plus she has)

SO...the Council of Nicea met in the 300's and that was to unite all of the small churches that were spreading like crazy throughout Europe. They decided on basic doctrine and agreed on the books collected being the books of the Bible. These books were already in place, but this was the confirmation of setting the books as canon.

From my friend: "the Catholic church includes the apocrapha which has 1 and 2 Maccabees as books, among others. There are also Peter and Stephen, which were never considered by 1st century Christians to be worth anything at all"

The New Testiment was made up of letters written by the followers of Jesus to the churches to help guide them in living the way Jesus taught. The Peter and Stephen letters, when read by people who knew them, were deemed fake. The others were authentic...once again, because the people they were written to knew these men personally.

The letters were written to specific congregations, who passed them around to each other, and that basically makes up the New Testiment. The Old Testiment has been around obviously much longer and pieces are in Muslim and Jewish faiths as well.

My friend doesn't know much about the apocrapha because she is Lutheran, not Catholic...but says the gnostic books are throwaway, like the books of Mormon. They were meant to supplement the Bible, but aren't "God's Word" and most were discredited early on.

So that's what I've got. Christianity was very much a grassroots oganization to start with and, as usual, humans ruined it and turned it into a political power way back when and have been abusing it every since.

How do you discredit one piece of fiction from another?

Zing!

The problem is that there is never a shortage of people who claim that their words are divinely inspired. And I'm sorry, but just because a body of men with authority decided that this book is "real" but this other book is "fake" doesn't make any of it true. How did the dudes in the year 300 personally know the dudes who wrote the gospels -- that means they were written hundreds of years after Jesus was dead.

Nope, the authenticity of the books were decided shortly after Jesus' death, and, like I said, the Council made it canon (official). And they personally knew the men that wrote these letters, so yeah, it was easy for them to decide.

And no matter who you think Jesus was, he WAS a real person, and the disciples were real people and really died horrific deaths for their religion. There are many historic facts, you can't discredit everything just because you don't believe the spiritual parts. That is like saying Cleopatra wasn't real because you can only find her likeness and story in a couple historical references.

Any book that outright makes shit up at least half the time is high on the list of suspicious bullshit.