Some people seems to be confident that if the Catholic teaching is not in the Bible, then it’s immediately wrong.
It’s common that some people say that the CC has unbiblical practices. But, how do the CC properly explain that it’s okay?
From some research in Catholic internet sources, I know already that not everything needed to know about Christianity is written in the Bible, some are passed on orally and some are traditions passed on by the apostles, they can be written in other books. There is history that the New Testament is written by Catholics after the ascent of Jesus, and generations later, the real Bible books are differentiated from the fakes first by the Catholics especially the New Testament that exactly has same books in both Catholic and Protestant Bibles of today. Written material is easily faked while a group of people around the world having one belief from a lineage is not easily faked like the CC. It’s an example of the importance of Catholic lineage because nobody else can confirm the authenticity of the real scriptures from an intelligent source. The clergy has succession of being chosen as keepers of Christianity beginning from Jesus and the apostles so It also gave them authority to give new teachings just like Biblical apostles do because they are the new apostles(is this right?). That’s my explanation for now, I hope Catholics here can help me.
The idea that religious doctrine had to be Biblical was actually invented by a man named Marcion of Sinope of the 2nd century A.D./C.E. He was once a Catholic bishop, but Gnostic belief had seduced him. The Gnostics taught that “salvation” was only possible for a select group of people to whom God graced with “life-saving
knowledge” or in the Greek, GNOSIS. This GNOSIS could be gathered from study but oddly enough only through study of holy writ.
Marcion agreed, except he believed that if this “select class” taught others what they learned from holy writ, these followers could also be “saved” if the “select” taught them. As holy writ, Marcion created a “rule” (in Greek KANON) for what books in Christianity were filled with GNOSIS. Rejecting all the Hebrew Scriptures, he created a “canon” of scriptures that consisted of an edited version of Luke’s Gospel and some select epistles of Paul. Marcion was reported to have been surprised when he found himself excommunicated by Church authorities. His ideas, supported by devising “proof texts” from his canon was one of the longest surviving heresies in the Church. To some degree it has never left.
Eventually the Church took into consideration the need to set its own rule or canon of Scripture. After the fall of the Second Temple, Judaism had already begun to do the same. By the 4th century the New Testament was set. And although the Church had since its beginning accepted the Septuagint as its library of Hebrew Scriptures, Judaism would not have a set Hebrew canon until the Masoretic Tradition finalized the face of Jewish Scriptures between the 4th and 7th centuries.
While the Bible is authoritative, it is not possible for all doctrines of either Judaism or Christianity to each be Biblical. For instance, the Scripture canon that each accepts is unbiblical. There are no commands in the Mosaic Law stating that a written library of Scriptures should be central to Jewish worship. This is the same with Christianity. Jesus did not tell the Church that reading, studying and basing doctrines upon the Bible are requisites for salvation.
The canon of Scripture was set by religious authorities, Jews and Catholic, authority they each had respectively from their religions. There is no list of what books belong in the Bible, what qualities a book should have, how to determine what is or isn’t inspired of God. All that came from the religious leaders of these two religions. Their decisions are not based on any Scripture.
Marcion’s “proof-texting” still remains popular among many religious movements, especially those that arose from the Second Great Awakening. Beginning in the late 1700s, the Second Great Awakening was an American phenomenon among Protestants that developed into the various groups that are known as NRM or New Religious Movements.
Many of these NRMs adopted the Marcion view that their leadership or members were the restoration of the true Church, and as such they were composed of a “select group” or only ones who were to be saved.
Evidence that they were “select” was the claim that they had special knowledge from God that allowed them to interpret the Bible, as they held the Bible as the ultimate revelation from God and salvation limited to those who could unlock its “secret truths.”
Two of the religions among the NRMs are most noted for this. Jehovah’s Witnesses, which grew from Adventism, is a group that claims that a small number among them, often called the “remnant of 144,000” and now limited to their Governing Body, is the only select group that can decipher life-saving truths found only in the writings of the Bible.
The other group took the idea that salvific truth was limited only to writings so far as to create its own “Bible,” the Mormons, and their “select” has been limited to their prophets, beginning with Joseph Smith. Claiming that one had to have knowledge not only from the Bible but the newly discovered Book of Mormon to be saved, the Gnostic belief that salvation is based on truths that are based on written texts, as if written revelation is superior, still lives on.
