I do think there was and has been a type of prestige for having writings handed down over the generations in the Catholic church...the popular thing to do like professors in colleges etc. do...or scientists do today...much of their “fame” is not that they teach but what they write. In fact most believe what they write is far more important than what they teach. I think in the Catholic Church...for centuries....it has been the same type of mindset.
Also the Catholic Church is big on storing all these writings, as different authors build their writings on top of the others who preceded them. Like a major library of their theological thoughts mingled with history as they saw it and wanted to believe it as.
The Greeks did this as well...they enjoyed hanging out with one another and have intellectual intercourse of their thoughts and writings. We have many of their writings as well. Mohammad did that too only his was to create his very own personal religion using Jewish beliefs and tweaked it to suit his culture and what he wanted to instill in his followers...even to making his own book and claiming it Holy...and from the pagan god of that time. Many other faiths over the years have in a sense high-jacked the faith to meet their own idea of what that should be...and they still do it today. They all believe they are right too...or found the “missing” book or had it delivered to them...or some were “lost”. Then each tweaks it to suit them in order to distinguish it's real “truth” from all the others....and writes today their own writings only they are called books today.
Arthur is referring to the Gospels, and to all those other books defined by the Catholic Church to be inspired and inerrant. We call that scripture 'the Bible'.
There's a reason why the Aquarian Gospel, the Babylonian Gospel and all those other Gnostic gospels aren't in the Bible. It's because the Catholic Church rejected them.
There are many outside of the formal Catholic Church who yet cling to the Bible, the body of scripture that the Church has declared inerrant. They implicitly trust the choices made by the Church, on the authority given it by Christ.
Anyone opening the New Testament for the first time will find a book that does not attempt a systematic explication of the Gospel, but is a collections of writings loosely related. It alluded to people and events unknown to us. We do not find the names of the authors of of many of these texts in the writings themselves. It cries out for an authoritative interpreter, so that we must say with the Ethyiopian encountered by the deacon Phillip. “How shall I know what this means unless someone interpret it.” We do know by reading it that there is something called the Church. We do know from history that the Catholic Church has existed since that time, has a history that you deride. We do know that Protestant bodies have existed for less than 500 of those years and have a history of their own, with what Catholics can claim, inventions of their own,” in addition to the ones that stand in direct opposition to papal authority, and which cannot be traced back to the time of Christ.