Historically speaking, the “Canon” is NOT Catholic and was not decided by any Popes but was a mere list of books that were recognized for two and three centuries as the Word of God. They are intra-consistent, intra-corroborating, supported by nearly three dozen NON-Christian historical sources like Tacitus, Seutonius, writings of Roman prefects, evidence without end. Even the Babylonian Talmud written by his enraged enemies, the religious rulers of the Jews, wrote about Jesus Christ in the most vile terms, just as the Bible reports them saying after his Resurrection.
The testimony of the Resurrection, witnessed by at least 500 eyewitnesses, as reported by Paul, powered the spread of the Gospel at a speed that was lightning fast for those days. That testimony was augmented by the fact of more than 300 prophecies in the Old Testament pointing to him, including his rejection by “his own”, meaning the Jews, and the historical context. Daniel foretold the fall of Babylon, the rise of Medo-Persia, the swiftness of the conquest of Alexander and the Greeks, the rise of the Roman Empire, and even following Christ’s resurrection, the later divide of the Roman Empire into two and its present-day mix of regime types.
The Resurrection testimony was so powerful that it only took about 30 years to reach enough people that Nero was able to use them as scapegoat for the fire of Rome and the SECULAR historian wrote.
Peter admonished the earliest disciples that Paul’s epistles were the Word of God.
The reason the bishops got together and made a list was because the Gnostics from Alexandria were growing, because “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9) The Gnostics had given up on trying to distort the gospels and the epistles and had started circulating these bogus frauds to confuse the picture, with lots of opportunists looking for filthy lucre.
Kind of like the modern smarter-than-thou willfully ignorant that write books about which they know nothing, and don’t even make the slightest pinky effort to get straight.
Polycarp, Irraneus, these were church fathers that walked with the apostles before it was corrupted. Polycarp is witness to John’s unshakeable faith, based on his having known Christ intimately for three years and then seen him killed on the cross and then his risen body days later.
The intellectual mental block that Christ-deniers have is that they refuse to accept as evidence any early witness to the truth of the Bible. In other words the people who follow the evidence become believers, so there’s no much in between. But to reject all that evidence means they will never ever believe.
They’re like the prosecutor who says “But judge, these five hundred people who swear on the witness stand that they saw John Smith giving a speech at 7:00 PM at the time the murder occurred at 7:00 PM, well, we cannot accept their testimony as evidence because they actually BELIEVE they saw him there giving that speech. You must find this man guilty!”
It’s like denying George Washington ever existed because you can’t believe anybody who actually wrote that they saw him or knew him! Give me OTHER corroboration, they say! Give me evidence from somebody who didn’t believe it!
Okay, we have that too. The Roman historians who hated the Christians give witness to the Gospel story, the Babylonian Talmud written by his enemies of the day, the undeniable fact of the rapid growth in the number of believers, the writings of all the earliest church fathers, manuscript evidence.
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