C
CentralFLJames
Guest
Where did it come from?The same place the bible originally came from - Church Tradition.
The NT books were taught orally for many years and not much was originally written down. It was only after false Christian teachings started developing (e.g. Marcionism) that Catholics (or if you prefer “Christians”) started writing things down and later assembled them into a list of “inspired” books considered the real thing. Keep in mind in the early days of the church hardly anyone could read or write and oral teaching was the normative way to communicate. Parchment writings were rare and only the wealthy and the few scholarly had them - often Jewish converts, tax collectors and so on. Recollect that not that many original apostles could read or write either - they were mostly common fishermen afterall. After a few hundred years after Christ there were about 300 known “christian” appearing texts in circulation - most of them being fakes and spurious writings by false teachers who wanted to jump onto the Christian bandwagon (and get free food and housing from those the easily impressionable and duped by their teachings). So Catholics, under pope Damascus assembled an official “cannon” (list) of the books that were considered inspired and St. Jerome translated all the different Greek texts and the Septuagint (OT books) to publish the first bible in 382 AD. Notice that this is over 350 years AFTER Christ’s resurrection. The bible however was never intended to be a complete teaching of everything Jesus or the apostles ever said. We know for example that many of Paul’s works were lost to us since he mentions letters in his NT books that we never found. Further the bible itself tells us in various places to follow the apostolic TEACHING and TRADITIONS that were HANDED DOWN to us. Catholics retain additional teachings in our apostolic traditions and the teachings we received. The Bible is incomplete without the teachings behind the words.
Why do you insist on a written record of oral tradition? As a flippant example how would you “record” the odors of incense used? The traditions are our family traditions and not things that are always written in parchment. Our traditions in many ways are written into The Church itself and in her people . If you want more concrete examples I might suggest you look into the Old Apostle’s Creed or the early Church Fathers many writings that tell us that the early church practised confession and partook of the Eucharist and many other things.
James
I’ve always found Confession to be a very rewarding experience. Not to mention very humbling. Anyone can admit their sins to God - He already knows it anyway - but it takes guts to admit your sins to a priest - even though he’s not going to tell anyone. And besides, why would Jesus give the apostles the ability to forgive sins when they didn’t need to forgive anyone else’s sins? They could have just sent the people to Jesus, but they didn’t. They acted as the first priests when they used their God-given ability to forgive the sins of others. 
shaw:
Well said!! 