Mark Gagnon

Of course, there are, you know, smaller churches and congregations of people gathering to spread and discuss the life of Jesus Christ, but it's not how it is now.

One church in Syria might read the Gospel of Thomas, a church in Rome might read the Gospel of Mark, and a group of Egypt might be reading the second revelation of John, trying to understand what it all means and if it squares with their philosophy.

And then came Emperor Constantine.

he converted to Christianity and he wanted unity.

He didn't want 50 different versions of Jesus and, oh, there's this Jesus, and then there's this God, and then there's the feminine creator God that created all things.

He wanted one religion across the entire empire.

And the man who kind of swung the hammer was the powerful bishop of Alexandria, a man named Athanasius.

Now, Athanasius was an Orthodox Christian who believed in the resurrection, the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and of course, the authority of the church.

Now, I say Orthodox Christian like he was much more in the mainstream understanding of Christianity today.

Now, this guy was not a fan of the Gnostics, nor another group that was around the time called the Arians.

The Arians were a group of Christians who believed that Jesus was created by God rather than being God himself.

And he called these guys all sorts of names, wicked demons, antichrists, all sorts of stuff, and basically labeled them all atheists.

as heretics then in the year 367 a.d athanasios wrote a famous letter called the festal letter and in it he listed the 27 books that he approved of matthew mark luke john acts romans first and second corinthians all that stuff and he basically said

These are the foundations of our faith.

This is what he says, the fountains of salvation.

Let no man add to these, neither let him take aught from these.

And this basically became the first time that we ever see a compiled list of the New Testament that we know today.

But it was also a death sentence for every other book because Athanasius strongly condemned all these other texts as heretical, that they ultimately deviated from the true teaching of Jesus Christ.

They didn't tell an accurate picture of creation, who God is, and basically that they were just in conflict with what it means to be a Christian.

So if a book was on this list, it was heresy.