The Bible is a collection of fairytales written by illiterate goat herders in the Bronze Age, and the Catholic Church cherry-picked which fables to include to mind-control tithing peasants.

There are two claims here, one about the authors and one about the canon, and the second one is checkable. Both are worth answering on the evidence rather than on the insult, which is doing more work in the sentence than the argument is.

1. Fairytale is a category mistake. Fairytales are stories about fairies and magic told to entertain children. The Bible contains law codes, genealogies, poetry, letters, prophecy, and apocalyptic visions, addressed to adults in real historical settings, with named officials and datable events. Whatever it is, it is not a fairytale collection, and calling it one skips the work of reading it.

2. The authors were not illiterate. Moses was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians (Acts 7:22). David was a king and a poet. Luke was a physician (Colossians 4:14). Paul was a trained Pharisee and a Roman citizen (Philippians 3:5). Isaiah and Jeremiah were sophisticated literary prophets. Yes, Amos was a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore figs (Amos 7:14-15), and manual work is not evidence of stupidity. Ordinary people have produced extraordinary literature in every century.

3. Bronze Age is an insult, not an argument. That era produced the pyramids, cuneiform writing, Hammurabi's law code, and the alphabet. Whatever the date tells us about technology, it tells us nothing about intelligence. Every generation thinks the one before it was naive, and every generation is wrong about something itself.

4. It is a library, not a book. Roughly several dozen authors, writing in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, across well over a thousand years, from every social class: kings, shepherds, a physician, a tax collector, fishermen, prophets. Its internal coherence across that range is itself a phenomenon that needs explaining, and nobody who has actually read it end to end describes it as one voice.

5. Nicaea did not choose the canon. The Council of Nicaea in AD 325 dealt with the Arian controversy. The canon of Scripture was not on its agenda, and Constantine did not vote on which books belonged. Athanasius's festal letter of AD 367 lists the twenty-seven New Testament books as we have them, and the councils of Hippo and Carthage recognized the same list within a generation. Michael Kruger documents this in Canon Revisited.

6. The church recognized books, it did not invent them. The criteria were apostolic origin, agreement with the rule of faith, and widespread use in the churches. That is a different process from a committee choosing texts to serve an agenda. And the process took centuries of argument, which is not how you describe a conspiracy. Conspiracies are fast. This was slow, public, and disputed.

7. A control document would not look like this. This is the turn. If the point was mind control, the editors made bizarre choices. They included Paul opposing Peter to his face (Galatians 2:11), a letter rebuking a whole church for tolerating sin, and stories in which the leaders are cowardly and slow to understand. Revelation warns its own readers about false teachers in their own congregations. No committee engineering obedience includes the memo where its hero gets it wrong.

8. The manuscript evidence is unmatched. There are thousands of Greek New Testament manuscripts, many of them very early, which allows careful reconstruction of the text. Bruce Metzger and Daniel Wallace have both documented this at length. Variants exist, and the scholarly consensus is that none of them affect a central Christian doctrine.

9. The Bible tells you to check it. Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord (Isaiah 1:18). The Bereans were commended for examining the Scriptures daily to see whether what Paul told them was so (Acts 17:11). A book that instructs its readers to test the claims of its own teachers is a poor instrument of mind control.

10. Concede the misuse. Scripture has been cited to defend slavery, segregation, and the persecution of dissenters. That is real history and it is not excused by pointing at someone else. But the misuse of a text is not an argument about what the text says, and in each case the abuse was eventually overturned by appeal to the same book.

The sentence is funny and the scholarship is thin. The authors were farmers, kings, physicians, and prophets, not illiterate goatherds, and the canon was recognized over centuries of public argument rather than fixed by a single committee. Judge the book by what it says. It asks you to.

Sources: Michael Kruger, Canon Revisited; Bruce Metzger; Daniel B. Wallace; Kenneth Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament; Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity.

Related challenges:
• So you believe in a book full of contradictions, one that endorses slavery, incest, murder, drowning babies, genocide and stoning homosexuals?
• Dennis McKinsey single-handedly disproves Biblical inerrancy in his book, "Biblical Errancy" - your team should read it.