This is snippets of something I came across a few years ago,some “food for thought”
None of the Church’s doctrines come from scripture.
They all come from the apostles, who learned directly from God, and not from scripture.
While God has made known some of his knowledge through Abraham, Moses, scripture, etc. it is only through Jesus that He has made known everything regarding salvation.
It is not Moses, Isaiah, St. Paul, the bible, scripture, etc. which is the fullness of all revelation, but Jesus Christ.
Jesus taught the whole Gospel only to His apostles.
Jesus communicated “everything” to His apostles when He taught them the Gospel and He sent the Holy Spirit to teach them again and explain what He taught and to give them the power to remember all He taught.
The apostles were taught “everything” and “all things” directly by God. So the Church teaches this Gospel they preached contains “the fullness of the truth which God has enabled us to know about himself” and as the Church has always taught it was to be “the source of all saving truth and moral discipline”
The origin of the doctrines the Catholic Church teaches is not scripture, but Jesus and the Holy Spirit who taught the apostles directly.
Since Jesus directly taught His Church “everything” then there is no doctrine of salvation the Church could have learned from scripture.
Jesus said Salvation comes from believing the Gospel the apostles proclaimed.
Jesus did not say salvation comes from reading the four Gospels, which are the narratives of the life of Jesus.
Jesus did not say salvation comes from believing the scriptures, or reading scripture, or by studying the scripture, but only by believing the Gospel the apostles proclaimed.
Now, we cannot reduce this Gospel to a few verses, because Jesus spent three years teaching His apostles and the Holy Spirit taught them “all things”. It was so much that He had to send the Holy Spirit to “bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.”
This full and living Gospel was handed down entirely in Tradition.
The Church teaches in the Catechism:
”In order that the full and living Gospel might always be preserved in the Church the apostles left bishops as their successors. They gave them their own position of teaching authority.” Indeed, “the apostolic preaching, which is expressed in a special way in the inspired books, was to be preserved in a continuous line of succession until the end of time.” This living transmission, accomplished in the Holy Spirit, is called Tradition, since it is distinct from Sacred Scripture, though closely connected to it. Through Tradition, “the Church, in her doctrine, life and worship, perpetuates and transmits to every generation all that she herself is, all that she believes.”
The “full and living Gospel” is handed down entirely in Tradition. Thus, “all that she believes” is handed down entirely in Tradition, not scripture.
Scripture is a witness to this. First, Jesus commanded His apostles to preach this Gospel that they learned from Him. He did not command them to write the Gospel they learned from Him.
Second, the apostles had to take Jesus as an example. Since Jesus did not write a word of scripture when He taught the Gospel, the apostles had to follow His example and also proclaim the Gospel without writing a word of scripture. And since Jesus taught them EVERYTHING, they had to teach their successors EVERYTHING.
There is not a single book of the Bible, not a single chapter of the Bible that claims to be a summary of this Gospel that the apostles taught and preached. Therefore we cannot learn it from reading the bible. It must be proclaimed by the Church. 875.
“How are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without a preacher? And how can men preach unless they are sent?”[390] No one - no individual and no community - can proclaim the Gospel to himself: “Faith comes from what is heard.”[391]
The reason the Church says scripture always must be interpreted according to Tradition, is because ONLY Tradition contains the full entire Gospel that Jesus taught to His apostles. Scripture only contains “certain elements” of this Gospel, and these certain elements are seldom clear.
So what was the content of this Gospel the apostles taught and preached?
Since Jesus said salvation comes from believing this Gospel, and not from reading scripture, we must know the content of this Gospel.
Now, even an atheist can know exactly the content of this Gospel the apostles taught, even though they never wrote it. It is easy, all we have to do is learn the teachings the early Christians learned from the apostles. If we read what they wrote, we notice that they all believed in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, the mass, prayers to the saints in heaven, the authority of the Church, etc. In other words, the early Christians who learned directly from the apostles believed the same teachings the Church teaches today. In other words, the early Christians who learned from the apostles were all Catholic. So the Gospel the apostles taught was the Catholic faith.
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