Replies

Only a truly ignorant person says there is “no proof” when he has simply not examined the proof.

I'll let the "ignorant thing pass."

I'll address your other claim.

1. I specifically asked you for proof a number of years ago. I've made the same request of others here. You failed to demonstrate the practices before 100 ad. If I remember the conversation correctly, you did dig up things from the catacombs hundreds of years after Christ. No unbroken chain of custody as you claim.

2. I've read thousands and thousands and thousands of pages of church history as part of my seminary training. What you claim is not there. It is perhaps a cherished belief you hold dear, but it isn't there. Not in Christian literature, not in Scripture, not in secular writings or art before 100 ad.

I worded "Only a truly ignorant person says there is 'no proof' when he has simply not examined the proof..." as a generalization, in order to state it in a way we could both agree with, and to avoid flinging it as a snark at you as an individual, personally.

(I hate this Kindle autocorrect. It turned "snark" into "shark" and "proof" into "poof". Proof into poof! T'was brillig! I'm Louis Carroll!)

OK now, seriously.

If you insist on defining Sacred Tradition as the doctrines and practices of the Faith which we know of per documentary evidence and that were seeded, sprouted, and grown to maturity all before 100 AD, I gotta hand it to ya, you win. It's a slam dunk when you can define your own terms to suit a pre-selected conclusion.

But those are not the parameters that establish the reliability of Sacred Tradition --- and if you had proved that, then you had proved too much. Because the Canon of Scripture was not even settled until well into the Fourth Century, AFTER the Faith had been taught by 10 generations of bishops, AFTER the development of the first creeds and the first liturgies.

For the first 300 years of Christianity, there was no Bible as we know it today. Christians had the Old Testament Septuagint, and literally hundreds of other books from which to choose.

The Canon is, per definition, the writings approved for use in the Liturgy. There were many, many other Christian writings --- you must know that, because Luke says so in Luke 1:1, "many" undertook to write these things; St. Paul alludes to "other" gospels also, many of them false, and he was writing his first Epistles and planting his first local churches before the first Gospel was even written. Of all these writings, only four (4) Gospels, not one of them signed, made it into the Canon.

There were likewise many Apocalypses written in that time period. Only one of them is canonical.

There were countless letters ("epistles") going back and forth. But we know which ones are canonical.

But we --- you and I --- would NOT know which were to be believed de fide and which were not, unless the Church on the basis of Sacred Tradition (the bishops' teachings, the creeds and liturgies) --- had winnowed them and set forth the Canon as truly reflecting the Faith that had been handed on to Her, and thus worthy of belief.

IF-- IF -- you were to succeed in establishing that there is no real "unbroken chain of custody" as you say, then there is no reliable chain of transmission for Scripture.

Hit the Delete key on Tradition, and Scripture vanishes from the screen.

But tell me: who established your Canon? And when? Where? And on what basis? I would be interested to know.

As for the church history, of which you, as an overburdened seminarian, were forced to read "thousands and thousands and thousands of pages" for apparently no good reason, why did your professors have you read them if they revealed nothing of the guidance of the Holy Spirit and the the continuity of the truth --- always reeling, always embattled, always by the skin of our teeth, but there it is.

If this continuity of custody and transmission did not exist, or petered out at the death of Paul, then the Muslims would be quite right to say that the corrupt Christians screwed up their Scripture so early that it's all null and void and abrogated by the ipsissimi verbi of the perfect Quran.

And, oh heck, maybe ol' Bart Ehrman was the only one savvy enough to really see through the Catholic Errors of the Ages. Because if the Church wasn't doing the Right Thing in recognizing, canonizing, preserving copying and transmitting the true Word of God from Pentecost to Nicaea, Rome, Carthage, Hippo, Florence, Trent, and beyond, the whole thing is a sieve that doesn't hold water. It's a jigsaw puzzle with a thousand drunken copyists and ten thousand missing pieces: fables, apprentices' errors and spin.

That, or: the Church preserved the Word of God.

Via Sacred Tradition.