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I reply that you shouldn't be looking for someone to tell you what to think; you should be reading the Bible for yourself. It's much harder.

Reading Holy Scripture is an excellent exercise and should be practiced daily. In my Maronite Catholic Church, when the priest has finished reading the Gospel, he elevates the Bible and proclaims - "This is the Truth!"

The problem resides in personal interpretations which, as I have already pointed out, result in conflicting understandings and hence, discordance amongst christians. All of this has been done for you, based on texts written in their original format - Koine Greek, Aramaic, Hebrew, etc. Why reinvent the wheel?

Christ established one Church with one set of beliefs (Eph. 4:4–5). He did not establish numerous churches with contradictory beliefs. To see which is the true Church, we must look for the one that has an unbroken historical link to the Church of the New Testament. Catholics are able to show such a link. They trace their leaders, the bishops, back through time, bishop by bishop, all the way to the apostles, and they show that the pope is the lineal successor to Peter, who was the first bishop of Rome. The same thing is true of Catholic beliefs and practices. Take any one you wish, and you can trace it back. This is just what John Henry Newman did in his book An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.

He looked at Christian beliefs through the ages. Starting with the nineteenth century (he was writing in 1844), he worked backward century by century, seeing if Catholic beliefs existing at any particular time could be traced to beliefs existing a century before. Back and back he went, until he got to New Testament times. What he demonstrated is that there is a real continuity of beliefs, that the Catholic Church has existed from day one of Church history, that it is in fact the Church established by Christ.

Newman was not a Catholic when he started the book, but his research convinced him of the truth of the Catholic faith, and as the book was finished he converted.

The Bible also tells us that private interpretation is not to be the rule for understanding the Bible. Peter declares this to be a matter of prime importance, saying, "First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation" (2 Pet. 1:20). Later he warns what can happen if a person ignorantly approaches Scripture on his own or is unstable in clinging to the apostolic teachings he has received. He states of Paul’s letters, "There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures" (2 Pet. 3:16). Private interpretation and instability in clinging to the doctrines passed down from the apostles can thus result in one twisting the scriptures to one’s own destruction.

The Bible also denies that it is sufficient as the Church’s rule of faith. Paul acknowledges that much Christian teaching is to be found in the tradition which is handed down by word of mouth (1 Cor. 11:2, 2 Tim. 2:2). He instructs us to "stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter" (2 Thess. 2:15). We are told that the first Christians "devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching" (Acts 2:42), which was the oral teaching that was given even before the New Testament was written.