Dear Gabriel,

I was thinking of you when I expressed my doubts about religion to a friend on a long train journey.

He was telling me that the Bible was only codified at the Council of Carthage in 397. So the ‘Bible’ is a human creation. Great chunks of unorthodox apocryphal gospels were left out. So when people say we should only consult the Bible literally and nothing else they should acknowledge that the original Catholic Church, a few bishops sitting in Council, decided what it should be.