Several stories are cited as if they were biblical/canonical Christian teaching: Peter deliberately keeps his own daughter paralyzed to prevent men from being tempted by her beauty (Acts of Peter, Berlin Coptic Papyrus 8502); the child Jesus curses a boy to wither for draining his rainwater pools (Infancy Gospel of Thomas, Greek A, ch. 3); the child Jesus strikes dead a boy who accidentally bumped into him (IGT ch. 4); and the child Jesus strikes dead a teacher who struck him (IGT ch. 14).

This objection rests on a category error — treating texts that were never part of the New Testament canon, at any point in mainstream Christian history, as if they were scripture or authoritative Christian teaching. That is an equivocation on the word 'Bible'/'Christian teaching': the mere fact that a text mentions Jesus or an apostle does not make it part of the canon any more than a modern novel about George Washington makes it part of the founding documents of the United States. **Neither text was ever canonical, and the exclusion is ancient and well-documented, not a modern retrofit.** The *Infancy Gospel of Thomas* is a mid-2nd-century composition — a full century-plus after the canonical Gospels — and the *Acts of Peter* is later still. The patristic record shows these were recognized as spurious from very early on: Eusebius, *Ecclesiastical History* 3.25, explicitly classifies the *Acts of Peter* among the νόθα ('spurious'/rejected) books, distinct from both the recognized and the disputed categories. The Muratorian Fragment (c. 170-200 AD) already reflects a canon list excluding this kind of legendary infancy and apocryphal-acts material at a remarkably early date. Athanasius's 39th Festal Letter (367 AD) gives the first extant list that matches the 27-book New Testament exactly, and it excludes both texts. This is not selective modern cherry-picking; it is the consistent, centuries-long verdict of the church's own canon-discernment process, applied while these texts were freshly circulating. **The Infancy Gospel of Thomas's incoherence is itself evidence the canon process worked, not evidence it was arbitrary.** IGT's child-Jesus is capricious and vindictive in a way strikingly, deliberately at odds with the canonical Gospels' unanimous and morally consistent portrait of Jesus as one who blesses children, forgives enemies, and heals rather than harms (even the later, later-added 'reversal' episodes in the Greek text, where child-Jesus is made to raise the boy back to life, are widely read by scholars as an embarrassed later scribal correction of the story's original moral shock value). That ancient Christian readers, not modern apologists, recognized and rejected this material as theologically discordant with the apostolic deposit is direct positive evidence that the canon-discernment process was discriminating and worked as intended — correctly excluding exactly the kind of theologically incoherent legendary material this is — rather than evidence of arbitrary or self-serving exclusion. **The recognized criteria these texts fail are well documented.** The standard scholarly treatments of historical canon formation — Michael Kruger's *Canon Revisited* and Bruce Metzger's *The Canon of the New Testament* — identify the criteria the church actually applied: apostolic origin or direct apostolic association, orthodoxy/theological consistency with the received apostolic teaching, and widespread, ancient, and continuous ecclesial usage in worship. The *Acts of Peter* and *Infancy Gospel of Thomas* fail all three: neither has a credible claim to apostolic authorship (both are pseudonymous, written long after the apostolic period), both contain content in tension with the earliest apostolic teaching about Jesus's character, and neither achieved anything like the widespread, continuous liturgical use across geographically dispersed churches that the canonical books demonstrably did.

The very existence of a large, well-attested body of apocryphal literature that the church consistently and early identified as spurious — and did so on articulable, applicable criteria rather than by arbitrary fiat — is positive evidence for the reliability of the canon-formation process as a discerning historical mechanism, not a rubber-stamp for whatever texts happened to survive. The stark moral and theological contrast between the sober, consistent, restrained portrait of Jesus in the four canonical Gospels and the legendary embellishment visible in texts like IGT is itself a data point supporting the antiquity and comparative reliability of the canonical material, which by contrast shows no comparable trend toward escalating miracle-inflation or moral incoherence across its independent early attestations.