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Of the three, who was correct on this point of doctrine? And why should one believe that such a person has the authority to correctly declare such a doctrine?

That's one of my issues with non-Catholic preachers who do pop up from time to time (and I don't mean Luther, Calvin etc., I mean some evangelist ministers), they suddenly pop up and potray themselves as teachers. The Catholic church is a distillation of millions of people who have studied the bible over and over again. Many of the supposedly new issues raised by the new ministers are actually heresies that popped up in the early centuries (Gnosticism etc. ) and were convincingly refuted by the Church -- somewhat similar to (;p) the Jedi versus the Sith -- viz. the Church had proved those heresies wrong and let them disapper, but then forgot about them, so that people centuries later would make the smae mistakes again.