The real issue is that Protestantism relies on a set of books as infallible but doesn't know where it came from.
Christianity predates the Bible. The Bible was compiled for the faithul by the Church. Jesus didn't leave a list and didn't say what to put into the Canon, and so He delegated that task to His Church. Protestants unknowingly put trust in the council fathers who decided and promulgated the Canon, except then rejecting seven entries, more than a full millennium later. After that confusion, the Church then ratified the original Canon.
The scriptures themselves say the Church is the pillar and foundation of truth, not vice versa. KJV onlyism is a subset of Sola Scriptura, which is itself untenable.
Additionally, the original KJV includes the deuterocanon (the books rejected by most protestants today), and was illegal to print without it until much later. As an added bonus, there is a conspicuous omission of references to tyrants in it, almost assuredly at the request of that English king.
Well stated
Adding you to my list 🇻🇦🫡
I remember my nearly shocked state when I really absorbed that the Church predated the Bible. It didn’t drop from the sky all ready to go, then birth the Church. The Church wrote the New Testament. The Church selected the canon. The Church, who clearly from the early fathers, was sacramental (real presence, maybe stated differently), bishops, deference to Rome. All there, first.
My reaction too. It was a no-brainer, though. Of course someone had to write the books of the New Testament, and of course someone had to choose which ones went into the Canon. The Holy Spirit didn't dictate the Scriptures, nor the list of the Canon, but they reasoned, prayed, and allowed the Holy Spirit to work through them to do so.
The other thing to note is that the Jews didn't have a set Canon, despite what Protestants want to believe. The Sadducees only had the Pentateuch, the Pharisees had the Torah (which I think is smaller than our Canon), and IIRC the Essenes had a much larger Canon (possibly all that was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls). The Church had to determine for Herself what was to go into the Church's Canon.
Interesting I didn’t know the Jewish part.
This all, for me, destroyed solo scriptura.
If the Church birthed the scriptures, then it can’t be solo scriptura. In fact the word is in some ways secondary. The Word became flesh. The very presence of God, now sacramental, is the fount of the Church. The Eucharist is the “source and summit” as JP the Great stated.
So knowing the writers of the New Testament were either priests consecrating at mass or at least attending mass, it makes you look
at John 6, and all the other Eucharistic passages, in a much clearer light.
The Church is Christs continued presence on earth, the Incarnation continued in a way.
This is another reason I don't like calling Holy Scripture the 'Word of God' in that exact phraseology. Holy Scripture doesn't call itself the Word of God. Rather, it says the Son is the Word, and the Word became Flesh. The Holy Scriptures written by the Church are witness to the Author and Perfecter of the Faith, the Source and Summit of our Faith, the Word made Flesh, Jesus Christ Himself.
We do worship the Word, which was with God, was God, and became flesh. We however do not worship Scripture, the witness of the Word.
Amen! We worship Christ, God the Son present physically, truly and sacramentally at the Mass. We are not a religion of “the book”. Christ and His Church come first. Scripture AND tradition. 🙏🏽
The Church didn’t birth the Scriptures.
Vatican I, one of your own ecumenical councils, explicitly rejects this idea.
Roman Catholics are so desperate that they slander their own religion just to lead more people to Satan ☠️
It is interesting that bringing our cannon in line with the Jews much later canon was Luther’s excuse for dropping 7 books from the Old Testament which were problematic for him.
Of course he also wanted to heavily redact the New Testament too, which is rarely mentioned.
Yep. The protestants don't want to admit that's what happened. Martin Luther was a bad dude with daddy issues and a tendency to despair. Only way to cope was to remove the parts that made him feel bad and convince a third of Europe to apostatize with him.
I have compassion for him, scrupulosity is something I struggle with. But he fell into sin, trying to avoid the very thing he felt guilty of.
One of the best homilies I’ve ever heard described the original sin of Adam this way. If Adam and Eve didn’t know good and evil in a literal sense, they couldn’t have sinned. The sin was claiming the knowledge of right and wrong for themselves, instead of it belonging to God.
You people actually mention it at pretty much every opportunity, which is hilarious, because tons of Roman Catholics in Luther’s day agreed with everything he said on the canon issue, INCLUDING CARDINAL CAJETAN 🤣
How do Roman Catholics always fail at history this hard?
You embarrass yourselves EVERY TIME.
Besides that, the Codex Vaticanus has a longer provable provenance than any other manuscript of the Scriptures.
The authorship of books of the Bible is rarely part of the book of the Bible either. Usually those are the “traditional authors” but not mentioned in the actual text.
Several of the criticisms leveled here don’t make sense to me.
This is the other note that is a powerful confirmation, but I imagine not as convincing to Protestants. Just because one translation is super old and has been used and unchanged for millennia doesn't exactly mean that it is the most reliable, most authentic, authoritative, etc. However, as a Catholic, I take great comfort in those facts, because my trust in the Church is yet more confirmed.
There is not a single complete manuscript of the gospels in existence that doesn’t have the name of the author at the beginning or the end, except ones that are missing one or the other
Why would you lie about this?
You didn’t say Gospels.
I didn’t lie.
This is such a cope. Your criticism doesn’t even make sense if it’s not about them because the other books tell you who wrote them in the body.
You obviously just tried to get away with saying something untrue, expecting I wouldn’t know any better.
I’m used to dealing with your kind. The book of Hebrews is not attributed. And it was common practice during the Old Testament period to write under pseudonames, often a famous name, because it increased the survivability of the manuscript.
You have now shifted the goal posts twice and displayed ignorance of basic concepts essential to any serious study of the canon and provenance of Scripture. Would you like to try again?
Further, neither Matthew or Mark directly name their author. John only does so indirectly as “the disciple Jesus loved.”
What are you on about?
Name a complete manuscript of those gospels that doesn’t have attribution or you’re a liar.
You won’t he able to, because it doesn’t exist. You’re literally lying.
You realize the titles of the books, chapter numbers, verse numbers… none of that is original. Right? None of that is inspired by God, and there is no reason to believe it existed in the original autograph.
What does Stephanus’ numbering system have to do with the authorship, which is in every single manuscript?
You’re just making things up. The names are original. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be there. God preserves his word as-is.
Well, that’s an opinion, not a fact supported by evidence.
Save your energy. This is a troll. Shake the dust off your feet.
In the Hypothetical-Durkheimian sense, there’s no religion that isn’t a cosmology at the same time speculation on the Divine providence!
Religion is inspired by the simultaneity of determination & indeterminacy by the need for contingency!
We don't have to respect religions as we have to respect people. Asking that the two be equivalent is a filthy manipulation to go back to the 19th century & crime of blasphemy...
Where did this comment come from?
> We don't have to respect religions as we have to respect people.
Why must we respect people, and why does that not include their religion?
Exactly, that’s the impression it gives me when non-religious people want to silence those who dare to oppose different religions. By doing so, they think they’re on the side of tolerance, while they’re complicit in oppression from religions…
I realize that religion has always been a highly political body, which hasn’t been able to apply the deep truths of the laws of Nature to the moral needs of humanity. Gurus are powerless to understand ancient science & secret of Mysteries. https://image.nostr.build/3ac72cc350ed1ff4eaa92846587e6cd6bd3fa4e39e17c398235d8bba7111380d.jpg
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