[ronnietherocket3]

“It then becomes clear that at the time of Judas Maccabeus - around 170 B.C., a surprisingly innovative period - prayer for the dead was not practiced, but that a century later it was practiced by certain Jews.” — Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, p. 45, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

So Purgatory was a belief present in Judaism by around 70 BC and shows up in the Catholic Church and you want to make the claim it entered the Church after the time of the Apostles? By the way, it shows up in the only branch of Judaism that survived the destruction of the temple.

[daniel1212]

So Purgatory was a belief present in Judaism by around 70 BC and shows up in the Catholic Church and you want to make the claim it entered the Church after the time of the Apostles? By the way, it shows up in the only branch of Judaism that survived the destruction of the temple.

Meaning, you want to valid an unScriptural practice based upon the premise that some Jews did it during the very late intertestamental period, which followed a surprisingly innovative period???

Under such Roman reasoning you need not stop there, but can adopt many many more things, such as the many superstitions recorded in the Talmud.

If you do happen to drink an even number of cups of wine and so leave yourself a target for demons, there is a way to protect yourself: “He should take his right thumb in his left hand, and his left thumb in his right hand, and say as follows: ‘You, my thumbs, and I are three, which is not a pair.’ ” If a demon should overhear this and try to turn the tables by adding, “You and I are four”—which is an even number—then you can do him one better by saying, “You and I are five.” If the demon says six, you say seven, and so on indefinitely: On one occasion, the Gemara relates, “there was an incident in which someone kept counting after the demon until he reached a hundred and one, and the demon burst in anger.”

And there are other ways to defeat a demon. One man was tricked by his vengeful ex-wife into drinking an even number of cups of wine—after he drank 16 cups, he lost count, understandably enough—and so he was bewitched. He solved the problem by hugging a palm tree, whereupon the demon was transferred to the tree, which dried up and burst. (According to an alternative interpretation, however, it was the man himself who burst.) -http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/148936/daf-yomi-54 [Talmud - Mas. Pesachim 110a; http://halakhah.com/pdf/moed/Pesachim.pdf]