im sorry, that's not how it works. you made a statement, and i correctly pointed out you didn't offer any evidence to support the two things you put forward. i don't need to offer any evidence because it is observation of a fact. the evidence is your post.
i never said the reformers were less intelligent.
that the reformers had access to a fraction of the information we have is fact, not opinion. they were limited by their resources - working with late medieval manuscripts, extremely limited access to greek manuscripts. for example erasmus didn't even have a complete new testament in greek and had to complete his by translating latin into greek from a differnet manuscript. the reformers were working with what had been preserved in european monasteries and libraries, which is a small portion of what we have now.
they had roughly a dozen or so greek new testament manuscripts from the late byzantine period, many from lectionaries. we have nearly 6,000 today, plus tens of thousands in latin as well as eastern languages like coptic and syriac which make up the ~24,000 we have plus over 2,000 lectionaries. much less things we didn't even have until the 19th/20th century - dead sea scrolls, codex sinaiticus, early papyri, the didache, nag hammadi library, etc.
that doesn't get into other things "around" the scriptures, like contextual evidence from the ancient near east, e.g., the baal cycle and ugaritic texts which weren't discovered until 1928, and clay tablets like this are still being translated. these give huge insights into the ancient world the hebrew scriptures were written in and to. or other archaeological finds like the capernaeum synagogue or the pool of bethesda.
on top of all of that there is a mountain of patristic evidence they didn't have - the church fathers have over 1 million citations of scripture that could be used to reconstruct the entire new testament at a minimum, and possibly the entire canon of scripture. most of what they had were limited to the latin fathers (augustine, ambrose, jerome, some of the early councils) with some of the more major eastern figures like limited citations from john chrysostom.
like their scriptural manuscripts most of what they had were late medieval, limited to latin with a small amount of greek, and almost completely excluded syriac, coptic, or other languages. most of what they had were from secondary compilations rather than direct documents, or they had fragments of texts. things that are "basic" patristic docs for us like the didache, the writings of st clement of alexandria, or even st irenaeus against heresies were either wholly or partially unknown in the reformation.
they worked from something like a few hundred texts at most, whereas today we have writings from over 100 church fathers, with dozens from many. even what they had of augustine was extremely limited - today we have over 1,000 sermons, writings, and letters, most of them unavailable to the reformers. on the whole its probably something like 5-10% of what we have, and what they had were often corrupted copies with textual discrepancies.
we have more volumes of greek and latin patristic writings than they had documents.
because of that there was a strong regional bias to the latin fathers, with a narrow view of early christianity that was skewed hard toward medieval western theology.
they didn't have access to the majority that you and i have today, and certainly not with the ease we have.
