[MHGinTN]

What you call nonsense is anything but. You can read the Levitical laws, but you refuse to believe they applied to the absolutely observant Jew, Jesus. On the night before He went to the Cross, He would have profaned the Passover Seder had he offered blood to His disciples, thus negating Him as The Lamb of God Who takes away the sins of the world. THAT is how we know that He offered wine as the sacred spiritual metaphor, because as GOD with us He would not be duplicitous. The Passover Seder was about HIM, and He gave His disciples to know that by telling them that thereafter, when they celebrated the Passover to do so as a remembrance of HIM.

[Steelfish]

But that’s not what the early followers of Christ believed. i.e “a sacred spiritual metaphor.” Nor is this supported by the text. Nor did those who after cross-checking the several hundreds of fragments of texts over 300 years in assembling the Books of the Bible thought so either. Nor did the early martyrs of the Church. Nor have the hundreds of converts from all parts of the world, from all religions, atheists included, and all walks of life from philosophers, and theologians and scientists to the Church think so either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_converts_to_Catholicism

[ADSUM]

I read the defense he wrote of his decision, his Apologia pro Vita Sua. I read his extraordinary Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. In particular, I read where he wrote, “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.”

I sat bolt upright as though my chair were on fire. What? To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant? But that was only the beginning of birth pangs. Newman went on to say it is “easy to show” that the Christianity of history was not Protestantism.

In fact, he insisted that if the kind of church I pastored at the time ever existed in the early centuries of the Christian history, there’s no record of it. “So much must the Protestant grant, that if such a system of doctrine as he would now introduce ever existed in early times, it has been clean swept away as if by a deluge, suddenly, silently, and without memorial.”

It was at this point that I decided to take up Newman’s challenge. I would read the Church Fathers straight through, in order and in context. I wanted to know if there was truth to what Newman was saying. And anyway, why not see what these men had to say? After all, these were Christianity’s first bishops, theologians, apologists, saints and martyrs. St Irenaeus, I learned, was the disciple of a man who himself had been a disciple of the apostles.

You can read the whole article here:
How the Early Church Drove Me Toward Catholicism

http://www.catholic.com/blog/ken-hensley/how-the-early-church-drove-me-toward-catholicism