[quote=@Meta] I'm not arguing that we know who wrote every book. It's only really relevant in the four gospels, and we do know who wrote those as you mentioned. I'm not saying that all of them wrote something either. We have evidence of authorship in "the major ones in the Bible," and the ones in the Bible are the only ones in referring to. It seems as though you think I'm referring to external authors. Now we're getting somewhere. I'll argue that the breadth of disputed books is much narrower than 20 books—it's closer to a cap of 5 with some fringe sects believing otherwise. The main 66 are well established and widely adopted, and the significance of the disputed books is minimal. If we're going to talk about [i]translation[/i], however, I totally agree that KJV is not an authoritative source of accuracy. I do believe that you are overstating the significance of the disparacies between that version and the original, but keep in mind that this was the first translation of the Latin scripture into English, so the process wasn't exactly as ideal as it is now. But when compared to ESV (widely regarded as one of the most accurate translations), there aren't particularly any theological differences. Fortunately, we have access to extremely early texts and thousands of samples to determine that the original writings were not corrupted over time. You seem to be referring to what many believers read as "Bible books," even if they're not part of the actual scripture (which is what your statement regarding what they follow as canon seems to get across). Correct me if I'm wrong in this, but the difference is that I'm not exactly interested in sources the layman will follow outside of the main biblical text because those aren't sources of the main theology. Finally, when I refer to the "early Church," I mean before the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire or even the Catholic Church itself. At this time, believers were referred to as followers of "The Way" until they were initially called Christians at Antioch. Even before the Council of Nicaea, these early Christians had already established amongst themselves what would be considered literary canon (save discussions on books like James and Revelation, as previously mentioned). [/quote] That depends on what you mean by "the layman." The problem with your definition of the early church is that at the time that I think you're referring to, several of the common canon works hadn't even been written yet, and several came from other areas where those people would not have access to the works from yet. The latter part of that is only problematic for the OT, since there have been variations in the... I'm blanking on the accurate term at the moment, so I'll substitute "jewish" for it, the jewish canon between the first writings in the NT and latter writings, some of which then affected the christian canon. Further, there's the issue ARAMAIC WAS THE WORD, I'm 75% sure. The jewish and growths from judaism that the holy books for which were written in aramaic languages, specifically. The further issue is that the group you're referring to is after the jewish bible had been translated to and then from latin with some changes before becoming the OT that was used. This leads to the creation of Hell as a concept in place of the judaic afterlife, the integration of every hasatan into the singular Satan (name) due to the King Solomon passages, and a few minor and varying in importance translation issues. Though since this only included the OT and very earliest NT stories, it's not really worth a tangent and we've been over them before anyway. I believe one example, and correct me if I'm wrong, is the removal of the story of the death of Cain. As far as I'm aware, it was either not included in that compilation or was removed since then, and is a good example of such instances. Then came the issue of the apostle who I can never remember which one, who occasionally made up words which have then been translated with varying accuracy. Not a big issue, but surprisingly important in the issue of homosexuality as it is the only mention of it being wrong in the NT that was not a repeating of the OT, barring some variations like we're talking about. But yes, if you consider the literary canon to begin at that compilation, then you'd have a strong case against many of my previous point in other discussions, since they occurred before that time and therefor you could consider to not be "christian canon," depending on the variant texts we're discussing.