Replies

You claim I’ve been led astray “by “fools and slanderers,” who have concealed the truth”, and that I “ have had no free choice to follow the true Church which Jesus, himself, founded” - and you don’t consider that an attack on my beliefs?

OK........

Did Jesus establish priests? No. There are no priests mentioined in the NT except for Jesus as High Priest, and all believers offering a sacrifice of good deeds, thanksgiving, etc. There is no Purgatory in the NT, although IF Purgatory existed, it would be a powerful tool to intimidate people into fearful obedience. There is no mention of indulgences, and the entire tenor of the NT rejects the concept completely and totally.

Further, Jesus Himself described the extent of the OT. Why should we look to a Church Council in the 1400s when we have the words of Jesus?

THAT is why I reject Catholicism. Its doctrines are divorced from the plain meaning of scripture, which is why the Catholic Church opposed vernacular translations - because wherever they appeared, people started noticing the huge divide between the Catholic theology and the scripture.

“Jesus did not leave us a list of inspired Old Testament books. However, following the traditional Jewish view of the canon, he referred to the Scriptures by the threefold division of the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms. The term Psalms was another way of referring to the third major category of the Hebrew canonical writings, commonly known as the Hagiographa, of which the Psalms held the most prominent place. Thus, if we can determine which books comprised each of these three categories for the Hebrews, we will then know which books Jesus believed inspired.

Historically, the Old Testament canon was divided into three major categories under the general headings of: the Law, the Prophets and the Hagiographa. As mentioned above, this threefold classification is referred to by Jesus, but there are many additional witnesses as well, proving that this was not just the personal view of Jesus, but the tradition of the Jewish nation as a whole.”

From Josephus:

“For we have not an innumerable multitude of books among us, disagreeing from and contradicting one another, [as the Greeks have,] but only twenty-two books, which contain the records of all the past times; which are justly believed to be divine; and of them five belong to Moses, which contain his laws and the traditions of the origin of mankind till his death. This interval of time was little short of three thousand years; but as to the time from the death of Moses till the reign of Artaxerxes king of Persia, who reigned after Xerxes, the prophets, who were after Moses, wrote down what was done in their times in thirteen books. The remaining four books contain hymns to God, and precepts for the conduct of human life. It is true, our history hath been written since Artaxerxes very particularly, but hath not been esteemed of the like authority with the former by our forefathers, because there hath not been an exact succession of prophets since that time; and how firmly we have given credit to these books of our own nation is evident by what we do; for during so many ages as have already passed, no one has been so bold as either to add any thing to them, to take any thing from them, or to make any change in them; but it is become natural to all Jews immediately, and from their very birth, to esteem these books to contain Divine doctrines, and to persist in them, and, if occasion be willingly to die for them.”

As F.F. Bruce has written:

Our Lord and his apostles might differ from the religious leaders of Israel about the meaning of the scriptures; there is no suggestion that they differed about the limits of the scriptures. ‘The scriptures’ on whose meaning they differed were not an amorphous collection: when they spoke of ‘the scriptures’ they knew which writings they had in mind and could distinguish them from other writings which were not included in ‘the scriptures’.

http://www.christiantruth.com/articles/Apocryphapart1.html