I will not give him more credit above all the men who wrote the epistles of the New Testament.
That’s good, because no one venerates St. Athanasius as an Apostle. He is a Church Father, a Champion of Orthodoxy, indeed, he is often called The Pillar of Orthodoxy, and Apostolic, but not an Apostle. He would be the first to object to being venerated over the likes of St. John the Beloved Disciple or St. Peter or St. Paul, or indeed St. Mark the Evangelist, who was the founder and first bishop of the Church of Alexandria.
Nor give him credit above Erasmus or such like him who translated the books of the NT.
St. Jerome was a contemporary of St. Athanasius and an ally against Arianism. However its also a point of lesser relevance in the fourth century, because St. Athanasius was working with the original Greek scripture, which was understood by the majority of Christians then alive. And those who spoke Latin and Syriac were accomodated even before the Vulgate and the Peshitta.
Athanasius for his part was not a translator; I would liken him more to, for example, Martin Luther, in that he objected to and struggled against an erroneous belief which, due to Imperial influence specifically of the immediate successors of St. Constantine in the Eastern Empire, such as Emperor Constantius I, became for a time dominant. The Empire under Constantius was determined to reject the decision of the Council of Nicea presided over by St. Constantine in 325, so under the influence of Eusebius of Nicomedia and a handful of other Arian bishops who managed to slip under the Nicene radar, a new council was convened, with handpicked delegates, in order to rubber stamp a decision already made by Constantius and Eusebius, that being that Athanasius was to be deposed, replaced (uncanonically) by a new Arian bishop they personally selected, and exiled to Trier, which as you may know is a charming town in Southern Germany which in the mid 4th century represented the limit of Imperial influence, beyond which lived various Frankish, Gothic and Germanic tribes who would eventually rise up against the Western Empire and ultimately sack Rome itself at the turn of the seventh century.* Exiling someone to Trier was the fourth century equivalent of exiling someone to Siberia, only worse, in that the legions stationed there and elsewhere along the German frontier (such as Koblenz) were all that stood between a town like Trier and an invasion of actual Wotan-worshipping barbarians.
Because the people of Alexandria despised the illegitimate bishops sent to replace St. Athanasius, he continued to shepherd his flock from afar; friends of his in the Western Church ensured that his pastoral encyclicals (instructional letters intended to be circulated amongst all the churches of his diocese) reached the churches of his diocese and those of the neighboring dioceses whose bishops collectively comprised the Holy Synod of the Church of Alexandria, as well as other bishops in the region who supported him.** The Paschal Encyclicals St. Athanasius sent were extremely helpful, in that they contained the date Pascha, the Feast of the Resurrection, frequently in English referred to as Easter (just as the Feast of the Nativity is often called Christmas and Pentecost historically was called Whitsunday), was to be celebrated on, according to the Paschalion, or rule for calculating the date of Easter, adopted at the Council of Nicea.
After a change in the direction of the political winds finally allowed St. Athanasius to return home after three decades in exile, he continued to write his Paschal Encyclicals, and his thirty ninth such encyclical contained the first definitive canon for the books of the New Testament. It was this canon which was universally adopted, and is today used and recognized by all Christian churches. There is some debate about what goes into the Old Testament, whether the Greek Septuagint, or translations from Hebrew and Aramaic such as the Vulgate or newer Bibles which use the Judaic Masoretic Text are superior, and also what books belong therein, with most Orthodox favoring the Septuagint (except for the Syriac Orthodox, who favor the somewhat obscure translation of the Old Testament found in the Peshitta), the Roman Catholics favoring the Vulgate and derivatives thereof, and the Anglicans favoring the King James Bible, also known as the Authorized Version, and all three groups, Anglicans, Orthodox and Roman Catholics, favoring the inclusion of the deuterocanonical books (which are in the KJV, just not most recent printed editions of it), and other churches such as the Lutherans, Baptists and Presbyterians generally preferring the 22 book canon of the Jewish Masoretic Text.
I think, when we consider his struggle against Arianism, that the work of St. Athanasius is of equal or greater importance to the work of St. Jerome, Erasmus and other translators, because anyone of sufficient learning can translate the Holy Bible from one language to another, whereas it takes a great leader to oppose a heresy which was made, for a few decades, the official religion of the Roman Empire. Indeed, St. Athanasius is frequently referred to as
Athanasius contra Mundum for the whole world seemed to be against him during his exile in Trier. And imagine, if you will, the suffering one would endure: a pastor forcibly cut off from his flock, arrested and exiled in a strange land with very harsh weather compared to his native Egypt, as well as real danger from barbarian raiders who would occasionally cross the border for purposes of plundering.
Nor give him credit above the men who in their day died for having put the books in print. Nor give him credit above those who were threatened with death, and had to go to extreme lengths in order to print the OT and the NT.
In the fourth century, there were no printing presses, so the specific scenario you are discussing is inapplicable. Also I would note that the first and most frequently printed text in the early years of the printing press was the Bible, in various editions. And if an Englishman were discovered in the late 16th century to be in posession of a Douay-Rheims Bible, that would be as dangerous for him, indeed probably much more dangerous, than if a Bavarian or Austrian were found in posession of a Luther Bible. Or indeed, if a Prussian or a resident of Zurich were found in posession of a Luther Bible (the Calvinists became fiercely intolerant of the Lutherans, and so in the late 16th and early 17th century you had the dreadful Wars of Religion between the Roman Catholics, the Lutherans, the Reformed/Calvinist set, and the Radical Reformation groups like the Anabaptists, and equivalent violence in England, namely the Civil War).
Note that all of this happened in Western Christendom. Eastern Christians were too busy being oppressed by Muslims, Hindus, expansionist Western imperial powers like the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Kingdom of Sweden, and the decadent and capricious Russian czars to have time to fight violently among themselves, particularly given the relative doctrinal unity that existed in the East at that time (yes, you had the schism between the Oriental Orthodox, the Eastern Orthodox and the Church of the East, but by the 17th century, a common history of shared suffering had for several centuries caused these churches to draw ever more closely together and exist in a state of amity towards one another).
The creeds were necessary because the common people at that time could not read their own Bible for themselves to know what God said, nor could they look up the pertinent Bible quotes that confirm what the creeds say. So all people had only the creeds to quote as their foundation of faith.
The creeds, or at least the Nicene Creed used by Christian Forums as its Statement of Faith, remain critically important in that they provide us with an interpretive canon, a list of correct doctrines based on the traditional understanding of the entire Christian Church since the year 381 Anno Domini.
The Creeds are what set us apart from the Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Oneness Pentecostals, neo-Gnostics, Unitarians and other non-Christian cults that exist on the fringes of, and in many cases masquerade as, Christian churches.
If someone preaches something contrary to the Nicene Creed, he is preaching a different Gospel and is anathema according to St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (chapter 1, verse 8).
But that method of faith was not what God intended. We can know that because when Jesus was tempted in the wilderness by the devil, He didn't quote from the Jewish commentaries because they had kept the writings of the prophets locked away where no one could put their eyes on the words, but He had free access toe them, memorized them, and directly quoted the scriptures against the devil's temptations.
Forgive me, but that makes no sense at all. The Jewish commentaries, or Targumim, were not creeds, and are not creeds, but rather were an Aramaic exposition of the Hebrew and Aramaic texts of the Old Testament. And, at the time, no one had “locked away” the Prophets or any other part of the Old Testament; indeed, if you read the Book of Nehemiah and the books of Esdras, you will read how St. Ezra or Esdras implemented the thrice daily prayers and reading of the Torah and other Old Testament texts. These thrice daily lessons educated the people on the scriptures. Before the time of the Prophet Nehemiah and his ally Ezra the High Priest, before the Babylonian exile, there were no synagogues, and most Jews only heard the reading of the Torah annually at Feast of Tabernacles, when the nation would assemble in booths in Jerusalem to hear the King read certain chapters of Deuteronomy in which the Law was summarized.
The thrice-daily prayer and scripture lessons of Esdras (or Ezra as he is also known) formed the template for the Christian liturgy of the hours or Divine Office, for example, Morning and Evening Prayer in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, or Matins, Vespers and Compline in the offices of many other liturgical traditions (including the Divine Office of the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod as defined in their very excellent new 2006 hymnal, which
@MarkRohfrietsch can attest to).
God has put great importance on His word, and He gave His word to the people,
You are aware that John 1:1-18 is talking about Jesus Christ and not the Bible?
He moved on the apostles to write their God breathed epistles to the believers,
Everyone agrees on this.
and the people made their own personal copies. So that they could put their eyes on those words and speak them. And from those multiple copies were trainslated and printed the Bibles that we can all read and quote from for ourselves today.
Before those Epistles could be included in the Bible, it was necessary to determine which ones were genuine and which ones were not (for example, Laodicians, 1 Barnabas, the Acts of Thomas and the Apocalypse of Peter), and also to establish a rule on what kind of epistles would be considered canonical. Many people wanted certain early Patristic epistles included, such as 1 Clement, and the epistles of St. Ignatius the Martyr, but the decision was taksn to limit the epistles to those written by the Apostles as opposed to those penned even by their immediate successors and disciples (St. Ignatius for example was the fourth Patriarch of Antioch after St. Peter, and St. Clement the third Bishop of Rome; St. Ignatius was also a disciple of St. John the Beloved Disciple). These writings are still extremely important, but it was decided to omit them from the New Testament.
Then, the next task was to determine which allegedly Apostolic epistles were Apostolic and belonged in the New Testament, and this is where there was so much controversy, which was only settled when over the course of the following century, the Christian Church universally adopted the 27 book canon authored by St. Athanasius in his Paschal Encyclical.
Here is the same thing, but with the Nicene Creed:
CF Statement of Faith | Christian Forums
* The Seventh Century was a truly challenging time for Christians everywhere. Old Rome was sacked, and the Islamic Ummayid Caliphate emerged from the desert a few decades later and began conquering much of Eastern Christendom, including Alexandria and the rest of Egypt and the Sudan, Jerusalem, most of Syria, and Mesopotamia. In the years following, Arian Visigoths who were converted to Arianism in the 4th century under the influence of Eusebius of Nicomedia, and most other remaining Arians outside of Italy, converted to Islam, and became fanatical forces; they completely suppressed and destroyed the once-thriving Christian churches in what is now Tunisia, Libya, Numidia and the Sudan. The Ostrogothic rulers of Italy were for a time Arian, and this is reflected in the historic city of Ravenna, which features two ancient baptistries (church buildings purpose built for baptism), one for Christians and one for Arians, both of which are still extant. The Arian baptistry is the only surviving architectural relic of that religion, which together with Manichaenism and Neoplatonism, was one of the three main threats to Christianity before the rise of Islam, after which time the Arians began converting en masse to Islam and Christianity, the Manichaens were ruthlessly persecuted by the Muslims and went into hiding, while Neoplatonism had become extinct by the 6th century.
** Despite centuries of Muslim rule, the Church of Alexandria still lives on; as a result of the Chalcedonian schism there are in fact two of them, but the two churches are close allies, and both currently reigning bishops of Alexandria are named Theodore II, in an amusing coincidence. There is the Greek Orthodox Church of Alexandria and all Africa, which has maybe 150,000 members in Egypt, mainly in Alexandria, but which also manages most of the missionary churches across the continent, and those serving the Orthodox diaspora in South Africa, so with a few million members in total, and the Coptic Orthodox Church, which has ten million members in Egypt and probably a few million in the diaspora in North America, Europe, Australia and elsewhere.
