[Sobeh]

The current Bible is comprised of the Tanakh (you're likely to think of it as the Old Testament) and then a collection of texts that make up the New Testament.

During and shortly after the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth, teachings were likely conveyed orally. Writings began to appear as early as 50 AD, so roughly 20 years after Jesus' death. There were numerous people all under the impression that they understood what Jesus was all about, and they all produced writings to their purposes. Marcionites, Gnostics, Jewish-Christian authors like the apostles James and Peter, the proto-Orthodox group of writers such as Paul... anyway, a shit ton of writing.

After Emperor Constantine decided to allow the burgeoning Christian religion to exist legally within the crumbling Roman Empire, he convened a Council at Nicea to delineate what the religion was, and what its tenets would officially be. This council was widely attended and debates were held, and the result was (a) the Nicene Creed, and (b) a collection of texts which were believed to be Revealed, which is to say, beyond the limitations of human inspiration.

The Catholic Church doesn't 'hide' any texts, or try to keep information from people - frankly, in its own view, it has as full a picture of God and Life as there can be, and at the same time uphold that salvation can come from non-Catholic sources (it's in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the result of the Vatican II council).

Protestant varieties of Christianity critique certain books in Catholic Bibles based on the political nature of the Nicean Council, and so dispense with certain of them, like James. These disputed texts are known as the Apocrypha (and there are Apocryphal texts which chronologically belong in both the New Testament part as well as the Tanakh).

Churches and denominations also disagree on which translations are authentic; whether the Tanakh is best translated from the original Hebrew or the Septuagint, and whether the King James version is divinely inspired or not, amongst other disagreements.

With respect to magic, the main issue taken by the Catholic Church with it is that, according to them, it is an example of the belief that human beings can achieve their ends without God, which is something they cannot abide. It has nothing to do with magic per se, only with the idea that magic makes God an unnecessary facet of existence.

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The larger issue is that religion as promulgated in 'official' sources is almost never the religion as practiced on the ground, so critiquing *people* based on the official pronouncements of their religious institutions is in bad faith. How many American Catholics use birth control? How many Christians think Friday the 13th is 'bad luck'? These aren't supposed to be part of Christian life, yet are. So 'religion' is never something you can use to generalize about people. If a person uses those religious pronouncements to guide their life, you can critique them, but one ought not simply say all X are Y and expect to be taken seriously.