It is true that there has been a constant battle throughout history to keep the teachings of Christianity pure. Even in this post we see a heroic attempt to resuscitate long dead heresies at the risk of confusing new readers who are not inclined to spend the years of study necessary to understand which is which.

All of the false documents known during the early centuries were, as Sean says, hotly debated as you would expect (we are all taught to "contend earnestly for the faith.") The important point that this post glosses over is that these heresies were rejected again and again and again...

I would also be negligent not to point out where these arguments come from. They are a field of Islamic apologetics which seek to go back and dig up old Christian heresies that will help support the Muslim teachings that disagree with Christianity. (Not saying this is what motivates Sean, merely that these arguments are characteristic of Muslim apologetics - which is where you can go to find a rich set of rebuttals.) In the Muslim case, they are part of an ages old battle to explain why Muhammad's teachings conflict with the writings of the Apostles and their close associates.

So you should read these posts as an interesting recap of long rejected heresies that were rejected for sound reasons.

That's why we have the test of Apostolic Authority - the requirement that a document be traceable back to an apostle in order to be included in the Bible.

This post turns that principle on its head - using non-authoritative, long rejected writings to attempt to undercut those that are truly traceable back to the apostles. Never forget, that is the test that separates true from false teachings - not the other way around.

The errors here pile up sentence by sentence to the point where I literally have to stop reading in despair - too much to refute, too little time - and no likely reader will endure such a point by point rebuttal if I were to make the effort. (Not to mention that by the time I could write it this whole thread will have disappeared from the short-lived attention span of the Steemit system.)

So, for the sake of the unlikely few students that want to do due diligence about all of this, I'll leave this link here for you.

http://www.answering-islam.org/authors/thompson/paul-historical.html

This article as already done the hard scholarly work of rebutting this school of Islamic attack far better than I could do - and it has the virtue of being available right now, while people are still reading this thread!

Here are the two opening paragraphs which may be all you need to see where all this is coming from. If you took the time to read this whole series of posts, you owe it to yourself to devote the much smaller amount of time to reading this single link.

Many Muslim critics assert that the Apostle Paul was not a true Apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ. They erroneously argue that Paul came in after the real Apostles and took over the scene corrupting Christianity with new foreign teachings. Many Muslims assert that the original message of Jesus and his true followers, their supposed Islamic teaching, was in complete disagreement with Paul’s “new” theology. In contrast to this modern Islamic view the Christian position is that history demonstrates Paul was truly converted to Christianity. Christians argue that the evidence shows he was accepted by the original Apostles and by the earliest Christians as a genuine convert with sound theology who was given an important mission from Christ himself.

In this article I will weigh the evidence that both sides offer. When investigating historical issues it is important to use a reliable method to come to truth. I will be appealing to what is known as the historical method in this article as I argue that there are many strong reasons to affirm Paul’s apostleship and no strong reasons to deny Paul’s apostleship. I will utilize historical principles including the concept of multiple independent attestation, early accounts (i.e., the oldest source material), eyewitness testimony, disinterest statements, and the criterion of embarrassment. It is also important to speak to the lack of early reliable evidence for the modern Muslim view concerning Paul. Lastly I will demonstrate that the modern Islamic polemic against Paul is not consistent with many early Muslim traditions which affirm that Paul was in fact viewed as a true Apostle. I believe that Muslims are forced to reject Paul and blame him in trying to explain why their Quran affirms Christian Scriptures(1) and yet teaches that Christianity has false teachings. To the Muslim Paul corrupting Christianity serves as reconciliation to this problem. However, we will see that their rejection of Paul and their accusations are completely erroneous.