My apologies, Michael, I wasn’t chastising you. You wrote a very good and accurate piece here. My only complaint is that you didn’t appear to want to dive deeper. Some people don’t want to know; I get that. For me, it became life-changing when I found out that these books weren’t actually written by the Apostles and that it was little more than man-made tradition that set them into the Bible in the first place. GOD didn’t put them in the Bible! Men did.

I also cannot disagree with the notion that they are not fully forgeries. I can logically see that there are some nuggets of truth, various quotes of Yeshuah that survived to be harvested from the rubble of what each of these books became after some 200 years of copes of copies of copies, etc. But at the end of the day, these books became little more than a rubber stamp for Pagan (Gentile) Roman Church’s culture and teachings which bore little resemblance to the Gospel the very Jewish Jerusalem Synagogue (Church) the Apostles themselves taught.

And you are right, the books did not appear out of thin air, but that does not answer the real question—because we know them to be forgeries, do they contain untruths, pagan dogma, even outright lies masquerading as “God’s Word”? And if they do, how do we discern the historical truth from the pagan fiction? (It’s more of a rhetorical question.)