Exactly, mm. The NT should be FULL of Catholic teachings and doctrines. If this was the Mother Church, then where are all the instructions that match up with Catholic rituals and rites? I’m pretty sure God would not have left such vague Catholic instructions between the lines of His PERFECT word to us. And gee-whiz, there would be NO need for catechism if Scripture was understood as God’s word to fallen man, and God’s reaching out to us. Who in their right mind would think they could add to or take from or change what God has clearly spoken in His word?
TO me this is circular. If the Bible is what we say it is and the Church is what we say it is, then neither one is what those who disagree with us say it is.
Unarguable. And it doesn't move the ball an inch down field.
There can be no real reasoned discourse with those who state, emphatically, without reading Paul’s participation in the Jerusalem Council OR his letters or Epistles, that Paul was a Catholic priest.
Why not? Can you say why not, as though explaining it to an inquisitive five year old? (I'm not asking you to do so, I'm asking you if you think you can.)
TO me it's another instance of a circle. I disagree with your premises, so you disagree with my conclusions. Fine. Nothing to write home about there. If that weren't true you'd be Catholic or I'd be a dispensationalist. Horse races and all that.
To me, the thing is that you have a notion of the the 'real' Church is, and a notion the the Catholic Church isn't it. And if we accept your notion it follows that Paul was not a kind of almost 'proto-bishop'.
But we have other notions. TO us they make a sense consistent with the proper use of Scripture and the repudiation of that oligarchy which consists of rejecting the opinions of people who are not currently alive (as Chesterton sort of said.)
For me the Jerusalem Council is very important. Among the many implications is that the church progresses by adventuresome leaps into the new which are followed by controversy, review, and the establishment of principles.
So I can well imagine that in the early Church there were chaotic liturgies with the presiders praying, as I think Justin says, to the best of their ability. And then, as problems and differences arise, little by little the concepts emerge and are articulated.
And as befits a group led by someone in the shoes of the fisherman, it proceeds slowly, in fits and starts and reversals, with many missteps. And as befits a group led by the Spirit (as we see it) rather than decline from an initial purity, it advances, despite the human aspects of itself, in wisdom and grace.
It is, after all, the Buddhists who think that the Dharma declines from the height of the time that Shakyamuni taught through successive ages until a new enlightened one arises to turn the Dharma Wheel again. That is the world's idea. Ours is that God continues to save and guide.
Gotta go punch down the dough.