Response to protestant accusations of Catholic “errors”
by tantamergo
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I did a post the other day which attracted a protestant partisan who wanted to shock me out of my britches with his accusations against the Church. My response became long and involved, and I even held some things back, but I put enough effort into it, I thought I'd make you suffer through it.
First, his accusations, then, my response:
As a Christian I am in search of the truth. If the Catholic group editing these replies let’s this go through, I am wanting real answers to questions that I cannot get Catholic Answers or anyone in the church to respond.
The first question: In the Torah, the Jewish Bible, the 10 commandments were originally given to Moses on the mountain and God wrote the inscriptions into the stone. When Moses found his people had made an idol, he was so furious he broke the stones and made a return trip to the mountain where he took the words of God and wrote the words with his own hand.
The commandments were NOT numbered, but the essence of the message was clear and the words concise. The Catholic Bible completely eliminated the 2nd commandment and split the 10th commandment as given to Moses into two separate commandments so as to keep the 10. All one has to do is read the Torah and then compare it to the Catholic Bible. This is a corruption I cannot accept because it came directly from God to us. Why does the POPE not fix this problem?
The second question: The Catholic Bible was created from the Alexandrian Manuscript. The video from the Church I watched intently specifically says it came from Alexandria, Egypt. This cult was started around 200 A.D. and was very corrupt in that it took the manuscripts that were part of the Textus Receptus (certified copies of the original scrolls created by the disciples) and proceeded to create incredible deviations, alterations, and changed the words and meanings to large numbers of the sacred scrolls. When the dead sea scrolls were found, (2,000 years after written) the words were found to be exactly as the King James Bible and not the Catholic Bible. I’ve been told there are a few versions of the Catholic Bible, but NONE OF THEM follow the Textus Receptus certified copies of the original scrolls. The question is: If one is to accept an infallible interpretation, how can one believe anyone using a corrupt version of the BIBLE that is being interpreted?
Third question: Protestants do not believe a person can enter heaven because of the good works he or she does. The primary reason Marin Luther stood up against the church were because of two reasons, primarily; 1) Salvation does not depend on works and if it did, no one would enter heaven and no one should have to go to a priest to confess their sins because the priest has no authority to forgive anyone and the Bible is very clear as it is Stated in Ephesians 2: 8For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: [it is] the gift of God: 9Not of works, lest any man should boast. 2) second reason was all the corruption in the church at the time.
My response. I didn't have any resources to hand, so this was all by memory. I think I did a fair job:
First of all, your questions are not questions, they are accusations.
There are many different versions of Catholic Bibles. I do not recommend any version produced after 1900, and prefer those compiled no later than the early 1800s. Virtually all 20th century Catholic Bibles, especially the New American Bible produced by the USCCB, are infected to varying degrees with modernism (as are many protestant bibles). NABs prior to 1968 are OK (there is a 1964 version that is pretty fair), but anything beyond the 60s is utterly corrupted with modernism. I will not speak to any of those.
Regarding your statement on the ostensible 2nd Commandment, there have been numerous different numbering schemes for the Commandments dating back to the earliest Church. Numerous different sources disagreed with one another. Almost no early Christian sources (that would be, Catholic sources) followed the Jewish numbering scheme. I assume by 2nd Commandment, you are trying to allude to the injunction not to allow graven images. From the Douay-Reims Catholic Bible, which actually provided much of the foundation for the “sainted” King James Version, and which predates it by several decades:
And the Lord spoke all these words: [2] I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. [3] Thou shalt not have strange gods before me. [4] Thou shalt not make to thyself a graven thing, nor the likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, nor of those things that are in the waters under the earth. [5] Thou shalt not adore them, nor serve them: I am the Lord thy God, mighty, jealous, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me:[6] And shewing mercy unto thousands to them that love me, and keep my commandments.
That Catholic Saints like Augustine combined the injunction against graven images – so misunderstood and abused by protestants, in order to provide justification for their rape of Church assets (which, in the case of England and Scotland, at least, was the prime purpose of the revolt against papal authority) – into the First Commandment, provides no special problem. The denunciation of pagan worship of gold statues and things of the like remains, and is totally different from the golden cherubim that adorned the Jewish Ark of the Covenant, or images in Catholic, Orthodox, Coptic, and other ancient churches. These latter images are not worshipped in themselves as “gods,” as so many protestants try to claim. Note, even here, there is huge disagreement among protestant sects – Lutherans, Anglicans, and some others have churches adorned with great amounts of liturgical art – statues, paintings, etc, while even more liberal sects like the Baptists and evangelical communities pretend these things are profane.
The Pope does not fix the problem, becuase it’s not a problem, and it is highly debateable that he would be able to make such a change, anyway. And even more, every decent Catholic Bible that I have ever read maintains the injunction you claim is missing. Given that the Jews rejected Christ, it makes no sense for protestants to point to Jewish sources as somehow more pure and holy than early Christian ones. But that was never the point, the point was convenience in advancing protestant claims.
The Catholic Bible is not based on some Alexandrian Gnostic cult. Please. There were a large number of ancient manuscripts upon which the Bible was built, including copies of Scripture in the Vatican, at Alexandria, the Samarian versions of Scripture, the Septuagint, etc. There was a manuscript was Alexandria, but there was also an enormous library there and also a totally orthodox Catholic Church. That a gnostic sect existed there contemporaneously does not establish that the Alexandrian version, to the extent it was used (and its use was only as part of many other copies of the books of Sacred Scripture), was somehow “corrupted.” This is the same defamatory “Babylonian mystery cult” crap that evangelicals always try to use to prove the early Church went off the rails and into apostasy. Read some early Church history, like Jurgen’s Faith of the Early Church Fathers, Vol. 1-3, and you’ll find, my friend, that EVERYTHING the Catholic Church knows to be Truth was beleived by the earliest Church going back to the 1st century. But, to answer your question, you’re wrong on all counts, King James does not magically “match” the Dead Sea Scrolls, and yet again, King James has been very well proven to derive extensively from the Douay Reims version, which was the first Bible translated into modern English. Your statements are actually so vague as to be meaningless.
On your third accusation, yet again, you’re wrong. First of all, far from preserving Scripture intact and pure, the earliest protestant revolutionaries butchered Scripture to their own end. Luther added the word “alone” to Romans 3:28, and tried to have the Book of James removed. Because, that same Book of James provides the direct rationale for Sacramental Confession (Jm 5:16),, just as James strongly endorses works as being necssary for salvation. But not only that, St. Paul himself makes plain that works are also necessary for salvation. What protestants do not understand, with their private interpretation and deformations of Scripture, is that what St. Paul is referring to when declaiming the efficacy of good works in various Letters, is that works done according to the Old Law are useless – but not works done in Grace under the New Law. Works done in a system of Grace are embraced by St. Paul, and trying to claim otherwise makes Paul contradict himself. I don’t have the Scripture quote to hand, I don’t have all my references with me, but it is there.
The whole problem, which I stated in the post, is that protestants wrest Scripture to their own destruction. Private interpretation was essentially discredited by St. Peter in that same 2 Pet 3:16. You find a few bits of Scripture to hang enormous doctrinal shifts on, taking them often out of context and decoupling them from the whole, which has resulted in the deformation of the Faith. If protestantism be so correct and right, why has it warred and split against itself hundreds and thousands of times? Baptists reject Calvinists who reject Lutherans who reject Pentecostals, ad infinitum.
Everything I said above, is not just the Catholic position, it is also the belief of all the Churches that date from ancient times – Catholic, Orthodox, Coptic, Chaldean, even Nestorian heretics. It was the protestants who introduced massive novelties.
There is a straight line of advancing cultural decay and collapse ever since the protestant revolutionaries first shattered the unity of Christendom. The first protestant reformers OK’d divorce right out of the gate, making the sanctity of marriage a lie and leading to steadily worsening cultural calamities. The Baptists, as of 1970, approved abortion as moral by an act of their entire Convention. It was only Catholic defense of life and changing political attitudes that led Baptists to later claim abortion was a sin. If they can’t even get that right, what else have they got wrong? All the evils afflicting our culture today can be traced directly back to Luther’s apostasy in Wurttemburg in 1517.
Some questions back to you. Who compiled the Bible? Who determined which books constituted the New and Old Testaments? When was this accomplished? Who then butchered and removed large parts of Scripture that were found to be inconvenient? Who introduced radical new interpretations of Scripture that had never been accepted before, and many of which had already been refuted by heresies in Church both East and West?
But the fundamental damnation of protestantism is, and always will be, its disunity. Christ founded One Church, not 80,000 warring little churches.
This took a long time to write, and really isn’t what I want to be doing – engaging in endless Scripture wars with an individual protestant. If you’re not satisfied with my responses, I highly recommend you go to Steve Kellmeyer’s blog and throw these same things at him. He’ll do an even more thorough, efficent job of refutation.
I might allow a little discussion on this, but, again, this is not how I envision spending my day. If it gets annoying, I'm shutting off comments.
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