I trust you do understand that it took 400 years of debate and negotiation and arguing over which books to include and which to leave out? That letters/books thought to be written by certain people at that time long ago are now proved not to be? That there were problems with translations and copying? That many words, quotes, stories were changed or added to versions of the books hundreds of years later?
Not saying it’s not “true”…but saying that human error is abound.
The councils that “decided upon” the books were made up of bishops who sat in rooms and debated and voted over and over for centuries.
Bishops are human, too, right? And therefore, prone to human error?
The Bishops were human, no denying that. But were Matthew, Mark, Luke and John not also human? Was St. Paul not human? Was St. Peter not human? If the Holy Spirit could protect the sacred writers from error, and give them the gift of infallibility, why could He not do the same to the Bishops in union with the Pope?
You said it took many years of debate to determine which books are infallible. Agreed. But it also took years to write the whole Bible, isn’t it? Yes, the books of the Bible underwent a series of editing and copying, and errors could have crept in. But that is exactly why we needed the Church. The Church is the Teacher given by Christ the authority to decide which books and which edition will be taken as part of the Canon. Indeed, it was the Catholic Church that made that determination, and whether they like it or not, the whole Christian world owes the Bible “as we know it” to the Catholic Church. Without the Catholic Church, none of the Christian Reformers would know what the books of the Bible were or what they contained The Bible they held in their hands was from the Catholic Church. Do you know why? Because the originals are missing. We do not have the original texts anymore. Some of the books of the Bible were destroyed during the Roman persecution. Some were destroyed naturally because of the poor paper quality. Some were simply lost. What we have, and what the Reformers had, were
copies of the original texts. These copies might be in their original languages- for example, Hebrew and Greek. And many of them were also in Latin, from a translation by St. Jerome. But where did all these copies come from? The Catholic Church! Because the bibles were copied painstakingly by the monks and religious of the Catholic Church. In spite of some errors in copying, the whole world owe the Bible to their devotion, for they did all this work
before the invention of the printing press in 1450 A.D.
And that is another point. For centuries until the invention of the printing press, Christians lived and learned their religion from the Catholic Church. Not many people had copies of the Bible. Only the rich and the nobles could afford them. You would normally find a copy in a monastery or convent. But they were practically absent in the homes of most people. If we rely only on
sola scriptura, if we say that only the Bible is infallible, then that means that for centuries, not just for years or decades, the People of God lived without an infallible guide. But that is not so. Christ did not write a bible. He founded a Church, an infallible Church, to teach all men. It was the Church that was entrusted the task of evangelizing all nations.
shaw:
Why do you think that the Church is wrong?)