A rebuttal by Bill Jackson of

"Catholic Religion Proved by Protestant Bible"

Distributed by Our Lady of the Rosary Library, Louisville, KY

Note: There are dozens of paragraphs, all of which we will not have time for now. I will start at the front of the book and cover the topics as they come up. My rebuttal is in bold type.

CRPBPB Comment: If reading the Bible were a necessary means of salvation, Our Lord would have made that statement and also provided the necessary means for his followers.

We do not believe that reading the Bible is necessary for salvation. Jesus did make means for others to hear by sending forth preachers and inspiring some with apostolic gifts that, along with the (already written) Old Testament, was sufficient for the needs of His people.

The Protestant Bible itself teaches that the Bible does not contain all Our Lord’s doctrines.

The scriptures he uses are John 20:30 and 21:25, “And many other signs did Jesus in the presence of his disciples which are not written in this book.” “And there are also many other things which Jesus did . . .” John is not talking about doctrine.

The New Testament itself teaches that it doesn’t contain all that Our Lord did, or consequently, all that He taught. (The same two scriptures are used.)

Writing that there were many unwritten things Jesus did does not in any way prove that there were unwritten teachings that were necessary either for salvation or a successful Christian life. . See John 20:31, “But these are written . . .” The Greek for written is grapho, which means to write, with reference to the form of the letters; to delineate (or form) letters on a tablet, parchment, paper, or other material; to write, with reference to the contents of the writing; to express in written characters; to commit to writing (things not to be forgotten), write down, record.

Since the Bible is incomplete, it needs something else to supplement it, i.e., the spoken or historically recorded word which we call Tradition.

Historically recorded word is an unsure term. Was this Tradition written; if so, by whom? There are numerous traditional teachings found in Rome’s catechisms which are simply untrue. For instance, the Catechism of the Council of Trent said the Apostles’ Creed came from the Day of Pentecost when each of the twelve Apostles shouted out one sentence of the Creed. We do not even have to examine the monstrous false decretals (of which the Donation of Constantine is probably best known) which were, before they was debunked, part of Roman Catholic Canon Law.

The Church has carefully conserved this “word of mouth” teaching by historical records called Tradition.

Then why does the Catholic Encyclopedia (1912 edition) say, “Substituting of false documents and tampering with genuine ones was quite a trade in the Middle Ages,” and “Writers of the 4th century were prone to describe many practices as of apostolic origin which certainly had no claim to be so regarded.”

Traditional statements passed through “the Church” have no divine approval. 1 Peter 1:19 speaks of a more sure word of prophecy.

Shortly before 400 A.D. a General Council of the Catholic Church, using the infallible authority which Christ had given to his own divine institution, finally decided which books belonged to the New Testament and which did not.

The Council of Carthage, referred to above, was not a General or ecumenical (world-wide) Council. It was a local Council, and no infallibility was ever guaranteed to a local Council. Likewise was the Council of Hippo and the Council of Laodicea. The former agreed with Carthage; the latter omitted the Book of Revelation. The whole question about whether this Council was even Roman Catholic is important. This system, which is probably dated from the decree of Roman Emperor Theodosius toward the end of the 4th century that made what he termed “the Catholic Church” the favored religion of Rome, was by no means universally accepted in 397 A.D. We understand that the true Church, the Body of Christ, was not identical with the institutionalized church that became, through its development, the Roman Catholic Church. Further, we know that identifying certain books as the Bible did nothing to establish the Bible. You might correctly identify my car as a Honda, but you didn’t establish this identity. It was a Honda since its manufacture.

If our non-Catholic brethren today had no Bibles, how could they even imagine following the “Bible-only privately interpreted” theory; but before 400 A.D. New Testaments were altogether unavailable.

God spoke through the Gifts of the Holy Spirit to those who had no book. However, by the end of the first century, most if not all churches had some portion of the Bible, and the inspired books were quickly accepted by Christians. That is why, as Alex Dunlap wrote, when Councils defined the books of the Bible, it only brought a stifled yawn from Christians who already loved God’s Word, even if, for a time, that was not completed. See www.dodone.org/Book.html

The true Church was necessarily infallible, being as St. Paul said (1 Timothy 3:15) “the pillar and ground of the truth.”

There is a difference between being the truth and being the pillar and ground of the truth. The pillar upholds the truth, and the Lord Jesus reminded us that it is God’s Word which is truth. The Body of Christ containing all believers is that which holds high the Word of God. Over the centuries the Roman Catholic church has never been friendly to the Word of God. They may say that now they read it and uphold it, but such is not historically the case. The Catholic church claims to be the Mother of the Bible; if this be so, we have a classic example of child abuse.

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