I think I’m going to have to agree with you. With these writings being copied and recopied and words changed, how can we ever hope to know what was originally written in the Old and New Testaments. what we have today may be completely opposite of what was originally written. Yes, you can’t trust those old hand copiers.
Parody understood, but the issue so much reliance with the writings of so-called church "fathers" is not so much that of a question of reliability, though I believe we have far far more mss evidence for Scripture, while only a relatively small portion available for examination out of what all ECFs are estimated to have written;
But the real issue is that these uninspired writings simply do not warrant the weight Caths place upon them to provide what Scripture does not, and often is contrary to, while CFs can disagree with each other, and Rome, as well as Scripture.
Faced with the absolute absence of even one prayer to anyone else in Heaven but the Lord, despite the Holy Spirit recording approx. 200 prayers in Scripture, and the lack of any created being being able to hear and respond to prayers address to them, Caths turn to the writings of certain "fathers" who adopted this late unScriptural tradition.
But even more unwarranted is the veracity attributed to the Roman magisterium which decrees which of the many traditions of CFs warrant being doctrine, and can declare belief in such as binding even almost two millennium after it allegedly was believed.
And despite the lack of early evidence for it, but which is justified under the premise that the church can "remember" was history does not evidence, and her own scholarship was heavily opposed to.
Like cults, having autocratic declared herself (conditionaly) infallible, then history, Scripture and tradition only consist and mean what she says they do.
Nice try. There are thousands of manuscripts in fragments, scrolls and codices of the Bible texts in the original languages as well as the writings of leaders where nearly all of the books of the Bible are quoted so that it could be recompiled from them even if we had no manuscripts.
We continue to have the more sure word of prophecy because the Holy Spirit is the author.