Perhaps no area in Catholic-Protestant apologetics involves as many outright falsehoods as the history of the Bible. To be sure, there are lots of theological topics on which Catholics and Protestants disagree, but for sheer number of popular Protestant arguments that are explicitly and undeniably false, nothing tops the question of where the Bible comes from and how many books it has.

Of course, there are plenty of historical debates both in and out of Christian circles. For example, there’s the annual fight over whether Christopher Columbus was a great or terrible man. That’s an issue upon which reasonable people, looking at the same evidence, may disagree. But imagine if one side of that debate claimed that there was no evidence Christopher Columbus even crossed the Atlantic. That’s the level of argument to be found in the surreal world of many Protestant versions of the history of the Bible: that of outlandish claims and easily disproven falsehoods.

For example, you may be familiar with the young-earth creationist Ken Ham and his website Answers in Genesis. The site sells a DVD called Why 66? The Canon of Scripture, presented by “the acclaimed British theologian and Bible teacher Brian Edwards,” identified as “one of Ken Ham’s favorite apologists.” Edwards spends nearly an hour trying to defend the idea that the sixty-six-book Protestant canon is the correct one, and his presentation is riddled with egregious factual errors. Perhaps the most galling of these is his claim that “it’s true that some of the early Church leaders beyond the New Testament quoted from the Apocrypha, though compared to their use of the Old Testament very rarely, but there’s no evidence that they treated them as Scripture” (Edwards asserts this at the 16:26 mark in the video).

No evidence that they treated the “Apocrypha” (more accurately, the deuterocanon) as Scripture? Rubbish. In book II, chapter 8 of On Christian Doctrine (c. A.D. 397), St. Augustine listed “the whole canon of Scripture on which we say this judgment is to be exercised,” and his list was exactly the Catholic (seventy-three-book) canon. After listing the entire Catholic canon (including the deuterocanonical books) he explains that these books are the full expression of “the authority of the Old Testament.”

Or consider what the entire Church taught at the First Council of Ephesus in 431, which quoted Sirach 32:19 and referred to the book as “divinely inspired Scripture.” And evidence points to even earlier recognition of the deuterocanon as Scripture. In a letter to Africanus, Origen (c. 184-253) refers to the story of “Susanna in the book of Daniel, which is used in the churches”—this is a story not found in the shorter Protestant version of Daniel—and later that “the churches use Tobias” (the book of Tobit, which Protestants reject).

Africanus had argued that Christians should use only those Old Testament books considered canonical by the Jews—an argument also commonly used by Protestant apologists. To this, Origen responded,

Are we to suppose that that Providence which in the sacred scriptures has ministered to the edification of all the churches of Christ, had no thought for those bought with a price, for whom Christ died; whom, although his Son, God who is love spared not, but gave him up for us all, that with him he might freely give us all things?

Significantly, he then quoted Prov. 22:28, “You shall not remove the ancient landmarks which your fathers have set,” suggesting that a distinct Christian Old Testament was old news by the early 200s.