Then why, in the book of Revelation, did he address "The Seven Churches which are in Asia" and leave out the church in Rome?
You catholics need to think thing out a bit better :-)
You catholics need to think thing out a bit better :-)
It's nutty talk like this that keeps mankind fighting each other over religion.
We'd all be a lot better off if there were more Agnostics in the world and less fanatics.
You catholics need to think thing out a bit better :-)
Rome isn't in "Asia," which, at the time Revelation was written, meant what is now western Turkey. The "seven churches" were what we would call today "seven dioceses"; that is, seven churches in seven towns with an overseer (a bishop) and presbyters (priests) in each. All of them were part of the universal (Gk "kataholos," from which we get "Catholic") Church of Christ. (The older usage of "church" is still used; Protestants may use "Church of Rome" to mean the whole Catholic Church, but to Catholic ears, "Church of Rome" properly means the Rome diocese.)
Incidentally, by your logic, Jesus didn't found any of those "churches," because he never set foot in Asia, but lived and died in Judea and Galilee.
Scholars argue about when Revelation was written. However, we know that John died around AD 92. Eighteen years later, the bishop of Antioch, a man named Ignatius, wrote letters to the Christian communities he passed on his way to martyrdom in Rome. One of the letters was addressed to the bishop of Smyrna -- one of the churches mentioned in Revelation -- a man named Polycarp, who is elsewhere mentioned as a disciple of John the Apostle. Polycarp would himself die a martyr's death a few years later.
Ignatius, in his letters, directly identifies himself as "the bishop of the Catholic Church in Antioch".
You need to "think thing" a bit better, and also learn some more about your Bible, and more about Church history.
Uh...last I heard, Rome is in Europe not Asia.
Keep trying.
Uh...Last I heard, Rome is in Europe, not Asia.
Keep trying.