A
Axion
Guest
Your “challenge” is of course a logical nonsense, impossible to answer on your terms - in that you demand a written form for an oral tradition!But Mary’s IC and sinlessness is said to be part of “oral tradition.” That which is said to be not written but “orally” handed down from the Apostles.By definition “oral” tradition is rooted in Apostolic teaching. Just as the written, N.T. Scriptures are.No. The challenge I’ve put fourth in all of my posts on this thread is for proof that any Apostle taught the IC conception or the sinlessness of Mary. No one has met that challenge yet - including you.
The fact is that all the direct Apostolic writings and statements irrefutably known to the early Church were assembled in the New testament. Being an Apostolic writing, or Apostolically verified gospel were the criteria for inclusion in the New testament. Therefore, by definition, no more direct quotes are available - and you should know this.
Your second logical failure is to assume that if no surviving writing of an Apostle states Doctrine X, then Doctrine X was not taught by an Apostle! The fallacy here is to assume…
A) That the Apostles EVER wrote down a complete encyclopaedia of doctrine and worship. The Apostolic writings are specific letters to respond to certain specific controversies that arose in the early churches.
B) That everything the Apostles taught ended up in their surviving letters. We only actually have letters from a minority of the Apostles - so presumably the others taught nothing of note? I don’t think so. Nor were anything like all their teachings in their letters. Presumably if the Gospels had not survived, you would be denying an awful lot of other Christian teachings as “not having been taught by a named apostle?”
C) You also naively assume that what few documents survived through the systematic persecutions of the Roman era are all there ever were.
Tradition is not listed with Apostle X taught Y. Tradition is the complete systematic belief of the Church as passed down from the Apostles. If these things were held without dispute in the early Church by those who learnt at the feet of the apostles, these things are the teachings endorsed by the original Church. There are plenty of disputed teachings that were considered novel and widely disputed. The sinlessness of Mary is not one of them.What “tradition” of yours gives us the name (or names) of the Apostle through which Jesus disclosed (through the Paracletos) this otherwise impossible knowledge regarding Mary and her mother and father? So far I’ve only been quoted other men’s opinions, and you yourself dodged the challenge.