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To: NYer
Some clarification is required with regard to your question. By "tradition", the Catholic Church is referring to oral communication...

...Also, it took 400 years to compile the Bible, and another 1,000 years to invent the printing press. How was the Word of God communicated? Orally, by the bishops of the Church, with the guidance and protection of the Holy Spirit.

Baloney. The Gospels, and the Pauline Epistles were widely enough known, with copies having widely circulated from the beginning. The way you put it, is like they were reciting the books or passages from memory alone, with no textual support. That was not the case, at all. What can otherwise be seen and has been established by a variety of historians, is that eventually NT canon was limited to that which had been received, handed down in written form from Apostlic sources, and in the case of Luke, and Acts, first-hand accounts assembled from Apostolic sources by another, contemporary to the times of the earliest, most primitive church. It was those same works which had the most heft all along, with other writings never being considered their equal, save for among the heretical.

62 posted on 04/25/2013 8:04:23 AM PDT by BlueDragon (drinking tea leads to right wing racism. gospel according to chrissy the sissy matthews)
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To: BlueDragon; Greetings_Puny_Humans
The way you put it, is like they were reciting the books or passages from memory alone, with no textual support. That was not the case, at all. What can otherwise be seen and has been established by a variety of historians, is that eventually NT canon was limited to that which had been received, handed down in written form from Apostlic sources, and in the case of Luke, and Acts, first-hand accounts assembled from Apostolic sources by another, contemporary to the times of the earliest, most primitive church.

Yes, but none of it was widely available to geographically separated disciples and it wasn't part of "The Bible" until the Councils of Rome, Hippo, and Carthage put the 27 books of the New Testament together in 382 AD, 393 AD, and 397 AD.

There are some instances of Sacred Tradition in the Bible that are interesting. For instance, in Acts 20:35, Paul says the following:

"In all things I have shown you that by so toiling one must help the weak, remembering the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, `It is more blessed to give than to receive.'"

These words are not recorded anywhere else in the Bible, including the 4 gospels, so this is one example of an oral teaching of Jesus being handed on to Paul,who hands it down to us.

Another example of this is in the book of Jude 1:9, which says the following:

"But when the archangel Michael, contending with the devil, disputed about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a reviling judgment upon him, but said, "The Lord rebuke you."

This dispute, between the Archangel Michael and the devil over Moses' body, is nowhere to be found in the written text of the Old Testament. The books of Matthew, Hebrews, Timothy and Corinthians, all contain texts not found in the Old Testament. Sacred Tradition is the oral teaching of Jesus Christ handed on to the Apostles and the Church, which carries equal weight with the Church's book, the Bible.

63 posted on 04/25/2013 8:51:39 AM PDT by NYer (Beware the man of a single book - St. Thomas Aquinas)
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