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You would say, wouldn’t you, that the Catholic Church was the original Church, established byJesus, would you not? Yet there are so many practices and beliefs adopted by the Catholic Church over the centuries, that it’s much different from the original Church. Catholic defenders say the Church merely “developed,” but since so many of these beliefs and practices contradict Scripture, evangelicals believe that changes aren’t greater revelation of what was already there, but a moving away from the original Church’s foundation.

That would seem to have a lot to do with the formal church leadership largely accommodating the world, becoming as I wrote in another post here like a corporation and earthly kingdom, where the priesthood offered a comfortable, secure life (in a time where there was much hard toil and uncertainty otherwise). That’s not to say there weren’t any sincere believers among Catholic clergy, but that overall the priesthood took to creating and preserving the comfortable, powerful world of the highest leaders. Only God Himself knows what happened, is happening, and will happen in the hidden spiritual lives of every professing Christian and body of believers. What people can see, though, are the fruits that are produced by individual and bodies of believers.

And to speak of the Church as established by Jesus Christ during His Incarnation also isn’t quite the truth, either. The Church has believers who lived before His time on earth, and the Bible reveals that Jesus was the Lamb slain *before the foundation of the world* (that is, before God even created the world and Adam and Eve sinned). So there were Christians before Christ, and in an eternal sense the Church didn’t begin during the Incarnation.

And, too, while we might see the Apostles as the first Christians in a way, Christians weren’t even called “Christians” at first, as God’s Word tells us that believers in Jesus as the Messiah were first given that name later on at Antioch. Was it part of God’s eternal plan from the beginning, then, that they would at the proper time and place be given that name? It seems so.

So there is no use in trying to settle such disputes by using secular - worldly - sources as ultimate authority, because their viewpoint is unbelieving, and they only see the worldly, not the eternal, and only look at man’s actions, and don’t acknowledge God, much less that He is in control and acting to bring about His plans throughout history. EB and Wikipedia aren’t going to acknowledge Jesus as the Lamb slain before this world existed, or see Abraham, Moses, David and Elijah as Christians, but merely as Jews, because of their worldly perspective. As the Bible says, the natural, or unbelieving, man doesn’t understand spiritual things and have the mind of Christ. So, then, we shouldn’t have a worldly perspective on the Church, but seek to know and understand God’s. That’s the question.