Not exactly. Let me suggest you go back to Posts 180 to Mad Dawg, Posts 199 to boatbums, Post 200 from boatbums to Not gonna take it anymore, and Post 223 to you.
Furthermore, it is my contention that the Fathers of Tradition, the patristics, hijacked the control of the local Christian assemblies, and made it into a sacral society from which few escaped with their lives, texts, and true faith until the 1600s. Dr. Thomas Strouse is right in his description, "Constantine embraced the Platonic catholicity of the Patristics to form the Roman Catholic Church (RCC), with its one head in the bishop of Rome, with its entrance through the baptism of infants, and with its persecution of all dissidents. This visible catholic ecclesiology, initiated by Ignatius and his ilk, propagated by Irenaeus and Cyprian, and popularized by Augustine, became the orthodox position for Christendom until the Reformation."
Having read through not only Kenneth Latourette's 1477 pages of "A History of Christianity" as well as many other works and treatises over the 42 years of coming to saving faith, having been raised as a PK in the Methodist Church, I find Dr. Strouse hits the railroad spike smack on the head and drives it deeply into the morass of Romanist doctrine and culture.
Of the post-Apostolic "church fathers" (to me seducers), "Many of these writings are extant and indicate that these Patristics embraced Platonic philosophy and practiced faulty hermeneutic principles,resulting in proto-Roman Catholic theology" and were influenced by, rather than rejected, the worldliness of the Greco-Romasn society into which the Christianity of Jesus and His believing Disciple/Apostles came.
There's more, a lot, and justly applied. This is the answer to your question regarding the very early submersion of The Original Faith until the day that Luther escaped the hangman's noose, when the seeds of both religious and political freedom sprouted, and it became possible to announce the Gospel of Free Grace without facing the auto da fe in free countries, like the nascent United States of America a hundred or so years later. Is the point getting across?
HREF="http://www.ccel.org/">Christian Classics ethereal Library.
this is not a Catholic site and is accepted by every legitimate Christian religion and several that aren't.
1600s. Dr. Thomas Strouse is right in his description, “Constantine embraced the Platonic catholicity of the Patristics to form the Roman Catholic Church (RCC), with its one head in the
you have to laugh when you read that Constantine formed the Catholic Church, anyone who believes such nonsense i guess will believe anything....like Jesus did not turn water into wine for instance!