are you suggesting that christianity is not a religion of the west? this would be equally wrong, but twice as hilarious.

At the beginning of the year 367, Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria sat down to write an Easter letter to his church. He wrote these "festal" letters every year to put his people into the right frame of mind for celebrating Easter.

This year, he saw that church people were being fooled by books that claimed to be scripture but weren't. For instance, they might wonder if the Epistle of Barnabas was to be obeyed. Or they might fall for The Gospel of Peter by the Gnostics, a group who claimed secret knowledge of God. Peter's name was given to the work, to give it creditability, but it was not by the apostle. Athanasius realized that the best defense against error was a clear understanding of scripture... but which writings were actually scripture? In his festal letter, written on this day, January 7, 367, he wrote, "Inasmuch as some have taken in hand to draw up for themselves an arrangement of the so-called apocryphal books and to intersperse them with the divinely inspired scripture...it has seemed good to me...to set forth in order the books which are included in the canon and have been delivered to us with accreditation that they are divine."

The church already accepted the books of the Jewish scripture as inspired by the Holy Spirit. These became our Old Testament. The church also agreed that books and letters written by the apostles or by writers under their direct influence were probably scripture, if the books had been used for a long time by the church. These became our New Testament. Athanasius thought it best to list the trustworthy books. He was the first man to compile a list of New Testament books as we know them.