"No use clinging on to the four gospels as definitive."

"Who does Steve?"

Well what else is there for the poor old ordinary Christian to go on? It takes a fair bit of scholarship to dig out those many non-approved gospels (and they are most decidedly non-approved, which hardly helps when it comes to trying to include them as part of the big picture). Then there are the ones, possibly many, which were deliberately destroyed as they were seen to be rather inconvenient, failing to follow the line that St Irenaeus dictated when he nominated the famous four as the canonical gospels. It's a fair bet that most Christians are ignorant of this early, very murky history of selective inclusion and destruction of writings. It's quite entertaining to read of the wrangling that went on. What we have left is the sanitised stuff that was supposed to make a good shot at being the basis for Christian theology. Forgive some of us for being extremely sceptical not only of the content of what we're left with but also of the motives of those early church fathers. Begrudging kudos to them, I suppose, for managing to convince so many people down the centuries of their contrived nonsense. Best not to take their success as an indication of veracity, however, to say the least.