Please do not mistake your private interpretation (and indeed denial) of Scripture with Scripture itself. Jesus clearly said "This is my Body" and this is how the early Church understood it. Any attempts to deny what our Lord said are unconvincing.
I am always amazed that catholics do not worship a God who is both Sovereign and Omnipotent. As a Christian, my confidence is in Him. It always takes me by surprise that people who claim to be Christians see God as weak, ineffectual and unable to carry out His will.
Nice attempt at trying at avoiding the question at hand. God works through human agents, as He did with Moses and the prophets. Unless you are claiming direct inspiration, how did God communicate to us what is, and is not, Scripture? The early Church gave us the doctrines and praxis of the faith as well as the canon of Scripture. It is either trustworthy in all or in none. If we cannot trust the Church in its doctrine and praxis then we cannot trust it in deciding the content of the Scriptures.
You wrote...
"Please do not mistake your private interpretation (and indeed denial) of Scripture with Scripture itself. Jesus clearly said "This is my Body" and this is how the early Church understood it. Any attempts to deny what our Lord said are unconvincing."
1. To be clear. There is absolutely no restriction in Scripture against any believer in Christ interpreting His Word. In fact, Christians are exhorted to work hard at it."Nice attempt at trying at avoiding the question at hand. God works through human agents, as He did with Moses and the prophets. Unless you are claiming direct inspiration, how did God communicate to us what is, and is not, Scripture? The early Church gave us the doctrines and praxis of the faith as well as the canon of Scripture. It is either trustworthy in all or in none. If we cannot trust the Church in its doctrine and praxis then we cannot trust it in deciding the content of the Scriptures."2. Tens of millions of other Christians believe the identical thing, so there is nothing private at all.
3. Christ also said He is the door among other things. Metaphorically He told the truth about both items.
1. Despite your claims for the early Church, it was God who worked to inspire His word, identify it and perserve it. Really, you guys could learn a lot from Baalam's ass - that humble beast that knew God used him, but never bragged that it made him an Infallible Ass, like so many FRomans do on this site.2. You would like to make God's use of the early church to help preserve Scripture into a blanket endorsement of everything. Church history doesn't back you up on that. Based on my extensive reading, in every age the church has had failures. It also got some things right. During the time, it always managed to think it was right about everything. Don't feel bad about the later Roman church being wrong repeatedly. It is the human state. Israel failed many times also.
3. As it turns out, we now live in 2014. We have a complete Bible. Your faith adds a few more books. My faith felt they did not meet the tests sufficiently to be included. Setting aside the differences, we agree on the lion's share of the Bible. This discussion isn't today about which books are inspired. It is about what they say and what they mean. The great thing about the time since the Reformation is that God's Word has been examined systematically and the truths correlated. While it often has value to read things from the Fathers, often they do not agree with each other. They provide some historical backdrop, but unfortunately not an unbroken chain to the NT church.\ Best