"If I said, “In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue. He wanted to find India but instead arrived in North America,” you could probably tell that the first half of the sentence came from a different source. And you’d be right. “In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue” is a pre-existing nursery rhyme that helped schoolkids memorize this fact. Likewise, there are certain phrases in the New Testament that were meant to help Christians memorize beliefs about Jesus. These statements are called “creeds,” and there are a few of them that are easy to identify. And just as I didn’t invent the Columbus nursery rhyme, it can be said with very high confidence that St. Paul and the other New Testament writers did not invent these creeds."