It was created by man...That's why the bible condemns your religion in so many places...And prophecies the end of your religion in the book of Revelation...
After all the Apostles died, the men they ordained continued in the Apostles doctrine, whether they received the teaching by letter ( Scripture ) or by word of mouth ( Sacred Tradition )
The other Catholics are going to spank you for saying that...
I've read the Catholic position enough times to know that the 'tradition' received by word of mouth is not the same as the written tradition...Thus, giving your religion to make up it's own tradition as the centuries floated by...
now, the local churches planted by the Apostles soon compared notes with each other, compared and shared what they each received from the Apostles and what did they discover? THEY RECEIVED THE SAME FAITH, WHETHER ONE WAS IN JERUSALEM, CORINTH, INDIA, GREECE, TURKEY, EGYPT OR ROME. this “universal” Faith became known as the Catholic Faith,
It did not...This is mythology at it's finest...
now, the local churches planted by the Apostles soon compared notes with each other, compared and shared what they each received from the Apostles and what did they discover? THEY RECEIVED THE SAME FAITH, WHETHER ONE WAS IN JERUSALEM, CORINTH, INDIA, GREECE, TURKEY, EGYPT OR ROME.
Really??? How did they do that??? Hundreds or thousands of local churches just memorized all the teaching, word for word since the people back then were too dumb to be able to know how to write...
it was the Church that compiled the books of the NT, using the oral Tradition to determine the genuine books from the spurious.
When you are writing your own history, you can make it up as you go along...What do you mean by using oral tradition???
God said he would preserve his words for the generations...It has nothing to do with your Catholic, man made traditions...
so where do we find any controversy on infant baptism in Church history? the answer is we don’t until the 16th century.
Oh, you mean at the beginning of the Reformation...When God's word was universally put into the language of the people so they could read and find out for themselves that there was no justified baby baptism in the scriptures???
You seem to forget that the Reformers were devout Catholics...And the Reformed were devout Catholics...
So what's a Catholic to do when he/she gets his/her eyes opened to the words of God???
Many if not most leave your religion and follow God...
Does anyone not believe the same thing would have happened in the 1st or 2nd century if infant baptism was not an Apostolic teaching, received by the Universal Church everywhere?
There is no Universal Church in Christianity...That's a name your religion gave itself...
And of course the early church would not have baptized babies...That was added by your corrupt religion to hold the people in bondage to your religion...And it still works today...
When you infallibly define that your are infallible when speaking in accordance with your infallibly defined (scope and subject-based) formula (thus rendering the assertion of infallibility to be infallible) then any such interpretation of Tradition, Scripture and history cannot be challenged, but it it what it is (said to be).
It was the charge of the Reformers that the Catholic doctrines were not primitive, and their pretension was to revert to antiquity. But the appeal to antiquity is both a treason and a heresy. It is a treason because it rejects the Divine voice of the Church at this hour, and a heresy because it denies that voice to be Divine...
I may say in strict truth that the Church has no antiquity. It rests upon its own supernatural and perpetual consciousness. Its past is present with it, for both are one to a mind which is immutable. Primitive and modern are predicates, not of truth, but of ourselves. — Most Rev. Dr. Henry Edward Cardinal Manning, Lord Archbishop of Westminster, The Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost: Or Reason and Revelation (New York: J.P. Kenedy & Sons, originally written 1865, reprinted with no date), pp. 227-228; http://www.archive.org/stream/a592004400mannuoft/a592004400mannuoft_djvu.txt.
The other Catholics are going to spank you for saying that...
► Archbishop Roland Minnerath, who was a contributor to the Vatican’s 1989 Historical and Theological Symposium, which was directed by the Vatican’s Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences, at the request of the then Cardinal Ratzinger’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, on the theme: “The Primacy of the Bishop of Rome in the First Millennium: Research and Evidence,” has made the admission that the Eastern Orthodox churches “never shared the Petrine theology as elaborated in the West.”
In the first millennium there was no question of the Roman bishops governing the church in distant solitude. They used to take their decisions together with their synod, held once or twice a year. When matters of universal concern arose, they resorted to the ecumenical council. Even [Pope] Leo [I], who struggled for the apostolic principle over the political one, acknowledged that only the emperor would have the power to convoke an ecumenical council and protect the church.
At the heart of the estrangement that progressively arose between East and West, there may be a historical misunderstanding. The East never shared the Petrine theology as elaborated in the West. It never accepted that the protos in the universal church could claim to be the unique successor or vicar of Peter. So the East assumed that the synodal constitution of the church would be jeopardized by the very existence of a Petrine office with potentially universal competencies in the government of the church (How Can the Petrine Ministry Be a Service to the Unity of the Universal Church? James F. Puglisi, Editor, Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, ©2010, pgs. 34-48). http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2011/06/archbishop-says-eastern-orthodox-never.html
Orthodox research institute:...throughout the first ten centuries Rome never claimed to have been granted its preferred position of jurisdiction as an explicit privilege” (Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism by Methodios Fouyas, p. 70). Avery Dulles considers the development of the Papacy to be an historical accident. “The strong centralization in modern Catholicism is due to historical accident. It has been shaped in part by the homogeneous culture of medieval Europe and by the dominance of Rome, with its rich heritage of classical culture and legal organization” (Models of the Church by Avery Dulles, p. 200) http://www.orthodoxresearchinstitute.org/articles/ecumenical/maxwell_peter.htm
► [Pro-Orthodox author] While the early Church Councils conceded to the Papacy the position of primus inter pares, "first among equals," this did not give to the Popes any special authority. Second place in precedence was acknowledged for the Patriarch of Constantinople by the Ecumenical Council II of 381, though this was somewhat resented by the older Patriarchates at Alexandria and Antioch. The elevated status for Constantinople was because, of course, this had become the seat of the Emperor, beginning with Constantine, and the principal capital of the Roman Empire. Even when there was a Western Emperor, his seat was no longer at Rome, but in Milan and Ravenna. Indeed, more of the Ecumenical Councils were held in Constantinople (II, V, VI, VIII) than elsewhere -- and Council IV was held just across the Bosporus in Chalcedon.
In Constantinople it was unmistakable that the Emperor imposed a unity on the Church that it would not otherwise have, and that would not otherwise be claimed until the Papacy began arrogating powers to itself that otherwise had belonged only to the Emperor or to Church Councils. — http://www.friesian.com/popes.htm
► The Roman Catholic writer Francis Sullivan, in his work From Apostles to Bishops (New York: The Newman Press), painstakingly works through all possible mentions of “succession” from the first three centuries, and concludes from that study not only that “the episcopate [development of bishops] is a the fruit of a post New Testament development], but he interacts with the notion that there is a single bishop in Rome through the middle of the second century, and he flatly dismisses it. [Sullivan, 221-222].
Klaus Schatz, in his Papal Primacy: From its Origins to the Present, not only acknowledges that in the case of the process of the development of “the historically developed papacy” the initial phases of this long process “extended well into the fifth century” (Schatz pg 36) http://beggarsallreformation.blogspot.com/search/label/Klaus%20Schatz
► Klaus Schatz called “Papal Primacy: from its origin to the present:”
Jesuit Father Klaus Schatz on Priesthood, Canon, and the Development of Doctrine in his work, “Papal Primacy”:
..if we ask whether the historical Jesus, in commissioning Peter, expected him to have successors, or whether the authority of the Gospel of Matthew, writing after Peter’s death, was aware that Peter and his commission survived in the leaders of the Roman community who succeeded him, the answer in both cases is probably “no” (page 1)
.. if we ask in addition whether the primitive church was aware, after Peter’s death, that his authority had passed to the next bishop of Rome, or in other words that the head of the community at Rome was now the successor of Peter, the Church’s rock and hence the subject of the promise in Matthew 16:18-19, the question, put in those terms, must certainly be given a negative answer. (page 2)
"If one had asked a Christian in the year 100, 200, or even 300 whether the bishop of Rome was the head of all Christians, or whether there was a supreme bishop over all the other bishops and having the last word in questions affecting the whole Church, he or she would certainly have said no." (page 3, top)
We probably cannot say for certain that there was a bishop of Rome [in 95 AD]. It is likely that the Roman church was governed by a group of presbyters from whom there very quickly emerged a presider or ‘first among equals’ whose name was remembered and who was subsequently described as ‘bishop’ after the mid-second century. (Schatz 4). http://thulcandra.wordpress.com/2007/11/30/klaus-schatz-on-priesthood-canon-and-the-development-of-doctrine/
► Peter Lampe is a German theologian and Professor of New Testament Studies at the University of Heidelberg, whose work, “From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries,” was written in 1987 and translated to English in 2003. The Catholic historian Eamon Duffy (Irish Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Cambridge, and former President of Magdalene College), said “all modern discussion of the issues must now start from the exhaustive and persuasive analysis by Peter Lampe.” (“Saints and Sinners,” “A History of the Popes,” Yale, 1997, 2001, pg. 421).
The picture that finally emerges from Lampe’s analysis of surviving evidence is one he names ‘the fractionation of Roman Christianity’ (pp. 357–408). Not until the second half of the second century, under Anicetus, do we find compelling evidence for a monarchical episcopacy, and when it emerges, it is to manage relief shipments to dispersed Christians as well as social aid for the Roman poor (pp. 403–4). Before this period Roman Christians were ‘fractionated’ amongst dispersed house/tenement churches, each presided over by its own presbyter–bishop. This accounts for the evidence of social and theological diversity in second-century Roman Christianity, evidence of a degree of tolerance of theologically disparate groups without a single authority to regulate belief and practice, and the relatively late appearance of unambiguous representation of a single bishop over Rome. Review of this work, from Oxford’s Journal of Theological Studies. — http://reformation500.blogspot.com/2008/08/review-of-from-paul-to-valentinus.html)
► Roger Collins (http://www.shc.ed.ac.uk/staff/hon_fellows/rcollins) has written a very thorough history of the papacy: http://www.amazon.com/Keepers-Keys-Heaven-History-Papacy/dp/0465011950/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1236398577&sr=8-1
“There was … no individual, committee or council of leaders within the Christian movement that could pronounce on which beliefs and practices were acceptable and which were not. This was particularly true of Rome with its numerous small groups of believers. Different Christian teachers and organizers of house-churches offered a variety of interpretations of the faith and attracted particular followings, rather in the way that modern denominations provide choice for worshipers looking for practices that particularly appeal to them on emotional, intellectual, aesthetic or other grounds (15-16).
This is not an esoteric or a “liberal” interpretation of history. This is a mainstream historical position. — http://reformation500.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/historical-literature-on-the-earliest-papacy/
► Major Catholic Biblical scholar Raymond Brown (twice appointed to Pontifical Biblical Commission) states,, “The claims of various sees to descend from particular members of the Twelve are highly dubious. It is interesting that the most serious of these is the claim of the bishops of Rome to descend from Peter, the one member of the Twelve who was almost a missionary apostle in the Pauline sense – a confirmation of our contention that whatever succession there was from apostleship to episcopate, it was primarily in reference to the Puauline tyupe of apostleship, not that of the Twelve.” (“Priest and Bishop, Biblical Reflections,” Nihil Obstat, Imprimatur, 1970, pg 72.)
The Catholic historian Paul Johnson goes a bit further than Brown, in his 1976 work “History of Christianity”:
By the third century, lists of bishops, each of whom had consecrated his successor, and which went back to the original founding of the see by one or the other of the apostles, had been collected or manufactured by most of the great cities of the empire and were reproduced by Eusebius…– “A History of Christianity,” pgs 53 ff.)
Eusebius presents the lists as evidence that orthodoxy had a continuous tradition from the earliest times in all the great Episcopal sees and that all the heretical movements were subsequent aberrations from the mainline of Christianity.
Looking behind the lists, however, a different picture emerges. In Edessa, on the edge of the Syrian desert, the proofs of the early establishment of Christianity were forgeries, almost certainly manufactured under Bishop Kune, the first orthodox Bishop.
In Egypt, Orthodoxy was not established until the time of Bishop Demetrius, 189-231, who set up a number of other sees and manufactured a genealogical tree for his own bishopric of Alexandria, which traces the foundation through ten mythical predecessors back to Mark, and so to Peter and Jesus.
Even in Antioch, where both Peter and Paul had been active, there seems to have been confusion until the end of the second century. Antioch completely lost their list; “When Eusebius’s chief source for his Episcopal lists, Julius Africanus, tried to compile one for Antioch, he found only six names to cover the same period of time as twelve in Rome and ten in Alexandria. http://reformation500.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/historical-literature-on-the-earliest-papacy/
Before the second half of the second century there was in Rome no monarchical episcopacy for the circles mutually bound in fellowship. Peter Lampe's extensive work, "From Paul to Valentinus," chapter 41, pages 397 http://beggarsallreformation.blogspot.com/2010/08/this-bridge-should-be-illuminated.html
► we are fairly certain today that, while the Fathers were not Roman Catholics as the thirteenth or nineteenth century world would have understood the term, they were, nonetheless, ‘Catholic,’ and their Catholicism extended to the very canon of the New Testament itself.” (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology, trans. Sister Mary Frances McCarthy, Theolgische Prinzipienlehre ]San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987], p. 141.)
► American Roman Catholic priest and Biblical scholar Raymond Brown, in “Priest and Bishop: Biblical Reflections,” could not prove on historical grounds, he said, that Christ instituted the priesthood or episcopacy as such; that those who presided at the Eucharist were really priests; that a separate priesthood began with Christ; that the early Christians looked upon the Eucharist as a sacrifice; that presbyter-bishops are traceable in any way to the Apostles; that Peter in his lifetime would be looked upon as the Bishop of Rome; that bishops were successors of the Apostles, even though Vatican II made the same claim.. (from, "A Wayward Turn in Biblical Theory" by Msr. George A. Kelly at http://www.catholic.net/rcc/Periodicals/Dossier/Jan-Feb00/Article5.html)
More:
at least my organization was not founded by Charles Taze Russell in the 1870’s.
it hard to have a discussion with anyone who rejects the Trinity. if you don’t understand who God is, what basis do we have for a discussion?