BEYOND GODS AND SCRIPTURES by Joseph Mani

Author:Joseph Mani
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Notion Press
Published: 2018-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter II

My Church Is Divenly Guided

A Historical Perspective

Jesus is supposed to have founded the Catholic Church with Peter as its head (Mathew 16:18). Is this true? Jesus never founded any religion or Church. It is his followers who started the Church.

The New Testament as we have it now has been put together by the Catholic Church keeping what suited it and excluding what did not suit it. Decisions about which Books to be accepted and which to be rejected had more to do with the survival of the Church than to the inherent merit of the Book. The Church needed a set of Books which proclaimed that if you want to attain salvation, you had to go through the Church. It could not afford to have a set of Books like the Gnostic Gospels which maintained that each human being has the potential for salvation within himself; that all he needs to do is to look within himself and actualize that potential. So the Church had to suppress the Gnostic Gospels though they were as ancient as the other gospels.

To maintain this position the Church had to insist that the Fathers who cherry-picked the canonical Books were divinely inspired and anyone who questioned this assertion was a heretic. It could not admit that the criteria for picking the “right” Books were political expediency and not divine inspiration. Once the Church got people to accept that its ancient Fathers and present Popes and bishops were divinely guided, then it was smooth sailing for the Church.

The Church existed before the gospels were written. It is the Church that came first, then the Church decided on the Scripture around 400 CE. The Church decided on the New Testament Books based on what it was already teaching. It is not that the gospels were first written and then the Church teaching the gospels. It is the other way around. That is why many Catholics maintain that the Church is above Scripture and that the Church’s interpretation of the Scripture is the only right interpretation because the Scripture is the Church’s Book.

Catholics quote the New Testament to prove that Jesus founded only one Church and that Church is the Roman Catholic Church. Quoting a Book which you have put together to prove that you are right!

Even in the early Church there was no unanimity about which Book is Scripture and which is not. The Book of Revelation was rejected by many in the early Church as not being inspired; on the other hand, a letter written by St. Clement, the third Pope was considered Scripture and used to be read during Mass along with other readings from the official Bible.

Some Catholics thinkers are of the view that the four Gospels are historical documents and not inspired texts and should, therefore, be evaluated using the same criteria that historians would use to evaluate any historical account.

Protestants are in a bind. They say they follow solely the authority of the Scripture and not the authority of the Catholic Church.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.