> “Nowhere in Scripture are men instructed to claim that Scripture isn’t enough and to add their own traditions to it.”
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True, in fact the Lord Jesus Christ roundly condemned the adhereance to oral traditions held by the Pharisees, and the only author in the NT that didn’t speak against “traditions” in every way, Paul (yes, the same Paul that most of our Catholic attack postors call ‘wacky’) said, in reference to the teachings in his, and others’ epistles, to “hold firm’ to the traditions they had been taught in one verse only.
From the misinterpretation of that one verse, we now have world wide Catholic apostasy.
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Seriously, what would you say to be the correct interpretation.
I have elsewhere tried to lay a basis for distinguishing between 'the traditions of men' or what you call (In the words you quote) 'their own traditions'.
We will, I think reasonably, continue to claim that Sacred Tradition is not "our own" or "of men," but we can address that in detail another time, I guess.
What it looks like to me, though, is a kind of unexplained discontinuity, whether the canon was closed late in the 1st century or a couple of hundred years later.
The role of some 'books' is indisputable; the Bereans were indeed noble. But still there was verbal instruction, there may even have been notes scratched on a, koff koff, semi-eradicated palimpsest (gotta love it) such as, "Grouchy says be urgent in season and out of season, gotta take it up a notch. Buy more wine."
So in what seems to have been a gradual process of closing and certifying the canon, it seems your side is proposing that one day 'the faithful' said, "Okay, gang: canon's closed; forget everything else, from now on, it don't say 'Hanes' unless the canon says it says 'Hanes'."
I suppose that could have happened ...
And Catholics seem to feel that that one verse gives them license to call anything they feel like making up *tradition* and raising it to the level of Scripture itself.
I seriously doubt that many of the traditions that the RCC holds to today were even thought of in the time of the writing of the NT. Especially since so many of the writings of the *church fathers* which Catholics like to refer to were written hundreds of years AFTER the NT letters and books.