Was the Bible forbidden in the Middle Ages, as some have claimed?

[Mannyfit75]

My ancestry is also Scotch/Irish but they came here very early. And my church believes that we are the remnant of the real Catholic Church, the one that Jesus founded, not the one that Rome took over and introduced paganism into it. We believe the Scriptures tell us all we need to know about faith and morals, in fact the Scriptures themselves tell us that.

The Catholic Church in the beginning consisted on Rome, Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Constantinope. There were no introduction into paganism as such. The only thing incorporated was pagan customs but not beliefs. Such as the introduction of Eastern into the Liturgy. So whatever your Church professed is not supported by history.

In the first two centuries, the Catholic Church taught that if it can’t be proven by Scripture, then tradition is false. In fact most of the early church fathers as late as the 4th and 5th century believed that. The Catholic Catechism today still states that. The problem is that they interpret Scripture falsely. With the dogmas and doctrines present today, Scripture has to be changed too much to be true. It is being translated wrong and Christ Himself warned about that. He also warned about the “traditions” of men and that is what the RCC is founded on.

That is hardly a true statement. The New Testament is part of the Oral Tradition. Jesus didn’t write any text. He told his disciple to preached the Gospel. It was not until the 3rd century that local African Synod compiled a list of books that should be canonical.

Rev. Henry G. Graham wrote in his book, Where We Got the Bible: Our Debt to the Catholic Church stated the following:

Before the collection of New Testament books was finally settled at the Council of Carthage, 397, we find that there were three distinct classes into which the Christian writings were divided. This we know (and every scholar admits it) from the works of early Christian writers like Eusebius, Jerome, Epiphanius, and a whole host of others that we could name. These classes were:
(1) the books “acknowledged” as Canonical
(2) books “disputed” or “controverted”
(3) books declared “spurious” or false. Now in class (1) i.e., those acknowledged by Christians everywhere to be genuine and authentic and to have been written by Apostolic men, we find such books as the Four Gospels, 13 Epistles of St Paul, Acts of the Apostles. These were recognized East and West as “Canonical”, genuinely the works of the Apostles and Evangelists whose names they bore, worthy of being in the “Canon” or sacred collection of inspired writings of the Church, and read aloud at Holy Mass

((Continue))

 

[Mannyfit75]

((continue quotation from Rev. Graham))

But there was (2) a class — and Protestants should particularly take notice of the fact, as it utterly undermines their Rule of Faith, “the Bible and the Bible only” — of books that were disputed, controverted, in some places acknowledged, in others rejected; and among these we actually find the Epistle of St James, Epistle of St Jude, Second Epistle of St Peter; 2nd and 3rd of St John, Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Apocalypse of St John. There were doubts about these works; perhaps, it was said, they were not really written by Apostles, or Apostolic men, or by the men whose names they carried; in some parts of the Christian world they were suspected, though in others unhesitatingly received as genuine. There is no getting out of this fact, then: Some of the books of our Bible which we, Catholic and Protestant alike, now recognise as inspired and as the written Word of God, were at one time, indeed for long, viewed with suspicion, doubted, disputed, as not possessing the same authority as the others. (I am speaking only of the New Testament books; the same could be proved, if there were space, of the Old Testament; but the New Testament suffices abundantly for the argument.) But further still — what is even more striking and is equally fatal to the Protestant theory — in this (2) class of “controverted” and doubtful books some where to be found which are not now in our New Testament at all, but which were by many then considered to be inspired and Apostolic, or were actually read at the public worship of the Christians, or were used for instructions to the newly converted; in short, ranked in some places as equal to the works of St James or St Peter or St Jude. Among these we may mention specially the “Shepherd” of Hermas, Epistle of Barnabas, the Doctrine of the Twelve Apostles, Apostolic Constitutions, Gospel according to the Hebrews, St Paul’s Epistle to the Laodiceans, Epistle of St Clement, and others. Why are these not in our Bible today? We shall see in a minute. Lastly (3) there was a class of books, floating about before 397 A.D., which were never acknowledged as of any value in the Church, nor treated as having Apostolic authority, seeing that they were obviously spurious and false, full of absurd fables, superstitions, puerilities, and stories and miracles of Our Lord and His Apostles which made them a laughing-stock to the world. Of these some have survived, and we have them today, to let us see what stamp of writing they were; most have perished. But we know the names of about fifty Gospels (such as the Gospel of James, the Gospel of Thomas, and the like), about 22 Acts (like the Acts of Pilate, Acts of Paul and Thecla, and others), and a smaller number of Epistles and Apocalypses. These were condemned and rejected wholesale as “Apocrypha” — that is, false, spurious, uncanonical.

(ii) This then being the state of matters, you can see at once what perplexity arose for the poor Christians in days of persecution, when they were required to surrender their sacred books. The Emperor Diocletian, for example, who inaugurated a terrible war against the Christians, issued an edict in 303 A.D. that all the churches should be razed to the ground and the Sacred Scriptures should be delivered up to the pagan authorities to be burned. Well, the question was what was Sacred Scripture? If a Christian gave up an inspired writing to the Pagans to save his life, he thereby became an apostate: he denied his faith, he betrayed his Lord and God; he saved his life, indeed, but he lost his soul. Some did this and were called “traditores”, traitors, betrayers, “deliverers up” (of the Scriptures). Most, however, preferred martyrdom and, refusing to surrender the inspired writings, suffered the death. But it was a most perplexing and harrowing question they had to decide — what really was Sacred Scripture? I am not bound to go to the stake for refusing to give up some “spurious” Gospel or Epistle. Could I, then, safely give up some of the “controverted” or disputed books, like the Epistle of St James, or the Hebrews, or the Shepherd of Hermas, or the Epistle of St Barnabas, or of St Clement? There is no need to be a martyr by mistake. So the stress of persecution had the effect of making still more urgent the necessity of deciding once and for all what was to form the New Testament. What, definitely and precisely, were to be the books for which a Christian would be bound to lay down his life on pain of losing his soul?

Citation: catholicity.elcore.net/GrahamOnNewTestamentCanon.html

 

[Mannyfit75]

(iii) Here, as I said before, comes in the Council of Carthage, 397 A.D., confirming and approving the decrees of a previous council (Hippo, 393 A.D.) declaring, for all time to come, what was the exact collection of sacred writings thenceforth to be reckoned, to the exclusion of all others, as the inspired Scripture of the New Testament. That collection is precisely that which Catholics possess at this day in their Douai Bible. That decree of Carthage was never changed. It was sent to Rome for confirmation. As I have already remarked, a Council, even though not a general Council of the whole Catholic Church, may yet have its decrees made binding on the whole Church by the approval and will of the Pope. A second Council of Carthage over which Augustine presided, in 419 A.D., renewed the decrees of the former one and declared that its act was to be notified to Boniface, Bishop of Rome, for the purpose of confirming it. From that date all doubt ceased as to what was and what was not “spurious”, “genuine”, or “doubtful” among the Christian writings then known. Rome had spoken. A Council of the Roman Catholic Church had settled it. You might hear a voice here or there, in East or West, in subsequent times, raking up some old doubt or raising a question as to whether this or that book of the New Testament is really what it claims to be or should be where it is. But it is a voice in the wilderness.

Rome had fixed the “Canon” of the New Testament. There are henceforward but two classes of books — inspired and not inspired. Within the covers of the New Testament all is inspired; all without, known or unknown, is uninspired. Under the guidance of the Holy Ghost the Council declared “This is genuine, that is false”; “this is apostolic, that is not apostolic.” She sifted, weighed, discussed, selected, rejected, and finally decided what was what. Here she rejected a writing that was once very popular and reckoned by many as inspired and was actually read as Scripture at public service; there, again, she accepted another that was very much disputed and viewed with suspicion and said: “This is to go into the New Testament.” She had the evidence before her; she had tradition to help her; and above all she had the assistance of the Holy Spirit to enable her to come to a right conclusion on so momentous a matter. In fact, her conclusion was received by all Christendom until the sixteenth century, when, as we shall see, men arose rebelling against her decision and altering the Sacred Volume. But, at all events in regard to the New Testament, the Reformers left the books as they found them, and to-day their Testament contains exactly the same books as ours, and what I wish to drive home, is that they got these books from Rome, that without the Roman Catholic Church they would not have got them, and that the decrees of Carthage, 397 and 419 A.D., when all Christianity was Roman Catholic — reaffirmed by the Council of Florence, 1442, under Pope Eugenius IV, and the Council of Trent, 1546 — these decrees of the Roman Church and these only are the means and the channel and the authority which Almighty God has used to hand down to us his written Word.

catholicity.elcore.net/GrahamOnNewTestamentCanon.html

 

[Zooey]

To place tradition over Scripture is simply not supported by Scripture…

Now there’s a statement to go down for the ages…I think, if you look up the definition for “circular reasoning” in any respectable dictionary, they probably have this printed there, as a particularly :doh2: example.

…and the fact that the church a few hundred years ago decided the pope was infallible, that was a bad blow. At least the Orthodox are much more like the early church but they also have brought in some false dogmas and doctrines.

Oh, for Heaven’s sake!
Tell, what was your name in this previous incarnation, when you were around to http://bestsmileys.com/magic/6.gifmagically “know” what the Early Church was like? Without any need to look at history, I mean. :dts:

 

[brotherhrolf]

Greetings brotherhrolf,

I doubt that there will be much light in this heated discussion, but I’ll try, a little. Hank and his quest for a decree of nullity is one of my historical hobbies.

You’re right. History is a complicated mess. And there is blame to go around on both sides. And 1234 is right. Henry really tried to play the game, as it was played, back in the day.

His case for a decree of nullity, based, at his insistence, on a supposed divine impediment of affinity in the first degree (divine, as based on the Levitical Prohibition) was quite up to the standards of the cases of dynastic annulments granted, commonly, in the 16th century. Look at the two decrees of nullity that Henry’s sister received, to see how it was done. That Henry’s case would have been stronger, as Wolsey saw, had he based it instead on a undispensed impediment of the justice of public honesty in the original dispensation permitting Henry to marry Katherine is beside the point. What Henry did was commonplace, and he would have received his decree of nullity, had he not been trumped by Charles.

And yes, he was, in the beginning, as Catholic as one could be, given that he had taken the Church in England private, the culmination of a process that can be traced back 300 years or so; asserting the authority of the Throne over the Church in England and weakening the claims of any outside England, with respect to the Church.

OTOH, yes, More, whatever one thought of him, didn’t merit the death penalty, though that was what happened to foks who defied the King and the law in those days. And it was Cromwell who caught the King’s eye with the financial balance sheets of closing the monasteries ( a process even Fisher had followed, in a small way).

History is complicated. And multifacted. And must be understood. Which requires one to get into it, a little. Deep, even. You are right.

GKC

Anglicanus Catholicus

Thank you GKC! Bro is not nuts in insisting that history must be understood. Yep, we could actually go back to Henry II to look at the roots of the relationship between HMC and England in later ages.

And, yes, Spain was the 600 lb. gorilla in the early 1500s and isn’t the relationship between England and Spain during the 16th century absolutely fascinating? A century earlier and it was England and France. The entire 16th century is fascinating and like I have said, there is plenty of blame to go around on all sides.

And no one has yet brought into account the impact of the Black Death and the rise of the middle class afterward and its impact on the reformation.

 

[brotherhrolf]

I confess that I know very little about the history of England, Scotland and Ireland. I am still too busy tracing my family to think of history there but World history used to be taught in schools and I still study that, mostly as world history pertains to religion however now.

Slaves were extremely important. My family owned many in the late 1700s and early 1800s. However, according to our family history, the slaves were well cared for and remained on when they were freed. They were made sharecroppers and made a good living off the land that they had been working as slaves.

Old Scholar, you are missing my point. My point is that history is a very complex subject and cannot be iterated as black and white. World history or American history as taught in high school and freshman college courses is naught but an over view to familiarize students who couldn’t point out Rome or Athens on a map. When you add in the propaganda of the victors (e.g. the Catholic church banned and burned books) and accept it at face value, you cheapen the memories of those who lived during the age.

Frankly, I was ashamed to find that one of my ancestors owned and sold slaves in Louisiana. The mere idea of holding a living human being in thrall is anathema to me. But, make no mistake. I am a Southerner and for all the Yankees’ revisionist history that the War of Northern Agression was caused by slavery, I can show that the primary cause of The War was states’ rights…and do we not have echo after echo after echo of this to this present day (e.g. the practice of some northern states in allowing homosexual marriages).

The same thing applies to the reformation. Scripture has little to do with it. Scripture was involved, of course, in the justification of actions taken. But to call the reformation some kind of righteous crusade in which the prostestant reformers corrected 1500 years of living according to the Magesterium of HMC ignores history and ignores the far greater socio-political issues which were at the root of it. And so, the bumper stickers…“Hell no, I ain’t fergettin” - shallow, vapid, and every bit as offensive as a Jack Chick tract.

 

[brotherhrolf]

Well if you would take the time to read those quotes and verify them, you will find that it included all English versions and states the New Testament. The prohibition is not just for the books by the Albigensian heresy but many other Bibles. There is other documentation that forbids even Catholics from reading the Bible.

Old Scholar. Here we go again. First - any Bible; any translation; had to be written by hand particularly in the twelfth century when the Cathars/Albigensians were around. Question to you. Was the world created by Satan? Is the physical world corrupt? I await your answer.

 

[GKC]

Thank you GKC! Bro is not nuts in insisting that history must be understood. Yep, we could actually go back to Henry II to look at the roots of the relationship between HMC and England in later ages.

And, yes, Spain was the 600 lb. gorilla in the early 1500s and isn’t the relationship between England and Spain during the 16th century absolutely fascinating? A century earlier and it was England and France. The entire 16th century is fascinating and like I have said, there is plenty of blame to go around on all sides.

And no one has yet brought into account the impact of the Black Death and the rise of the middle class afterward and its impact on the reformation.

Start with Henry II and run through a long list of Parlimentary acts and Royal decrees, all on just that relationship.

My favorite suppositional history is the proposal for Mary Tudor, and Charles, Duke of Burgundy to wed (per Henry VII) and for the fully blossomed Charles to join with the Princess Mary (per Henry VIII). two blank shots, in the process of the sacrament of marriage as dynastic machine. What an image that presents.

History is complicated. And essential for understanding. Otherwise, people tend to wave cardboard cutouts and shout slogans, whilst heaving dead cats around…

GKC

Anglicanus Catholicus

 

[1234]

And these councils were held in response to the Albigensian heresy. Do you know what that was, or do you just wish to keep sprouting off these anti-Catholic cut & pastes without giving a historical context?

I don’t know for whom this diatribe was intended, but*** I ***was just citing the sources for Old Scholar’s sources, as it appears some poster had overlooked them.

OS was citing references to restrictions on reading the Bible and his citations appear reasonable to me.

People will *always * find a “historical context” to justify anything, Semper.

 

[GKC]

I don’t know for whom this diatribe was intended, but*** I ***was just citing the sources for Old Scholar’s sources, as it appears some poster had overlooked them.

OS was citing references to restrictions on reading the Bible and his citations appear reasonable to me.

People will *always * find a “historical context” to justify anything, Semper.

Historical context might be used to justify, might be used to explain, might be used to understand. In any case, needs to be known.

GKC

Anglicanus Catholicus

 

[Tantum_ergo]

don’t know for whom this diatribe was intended, but I was just citing the sources for Old Scholar’s sources, as it appears some poster had overlooked them.

OS was citing references to restrictions on reading the Bible and his citations appear reasonable to me.

People will always find a “historical context” to justify anything, Semper.

Perhaps you missed the many posts which explained that all these ‘sources’ referred to one specific example–the 12th century (you know, about 300 years before the printing press) Albigensians who wrote a heretical, distorted ‘bible’ claiming that ‘matter = bad, spirit = good’ and who claimed that fornication was all right but marriage was evil, etc.

Would you want your children to read such a bible which claimed the above as what Jesus ‘really taught’, or would you want them to read the ‘real’ Bible?

In the 12th century, the ‘average man’ had a lifespan of about 30 years, the infant mortality rate was close to 50%, there were literally dozens of fatal diseases, accident rates were skyhigh (even getting a scratch from a nail or a splinter of wood could kill you–no antibiotics, you know), war or martial incidents were endemic, soil husbandry was in its infancy, labor was backbreaking, crops failed, cattle and sheep died, adequate nutrition was rare.

And literacy rates. . .rates enough to ‘read’ a HAND LETTERED MANUSCRIPT (itself taking over 2 YEARS to write) thus being extremely costly. . .were abysmal.

According to Wiki, even by the mid 19th century (400 years post printing press, and 700 years after the Albigensians), the average literacy rate for a man in Great Britain was under 40%.

This was well into the industrial age, when more people were ‘off the farms’, when printed material was readily available and cheap even by the standards of the day, and schools existed in every town–as opposed to the ‘earlier’ days when schools did NOT exist everywhere, printed material was NOT cheap or available, and people worked 16 and 18 hour days in the fields before falling into the straw or dirt for a few hours sleep, having existed on one bowl of ‘porritch’, with maybe a crust of barley bread and a swig of ale (nobody drank water, due to the typhus and cholera epidemics found because that same water was full of raw sewage; wine was for the ‘upper class’) if they were lucky.

I WISH that people who prate of ‘history’ actually KNEW SOME HISTORY.

 

[Zooey]

Perhaps you missed the many posts which explained that all these ‘sources’ referred to one specific example–the 12th century (you know, about 300 years before the printing press) Albigensians who wrote a heretical, distorted ‘bible’ claiming that ‘matter = bad, spirit = good’ and who claimed that fornication was all right but marriage was evil, etc.

Would you want your children to read such a bible which claimed the above as what Jesus ‘really taught’, or would you want them to read the ‘real’ Bible?

Precisely!!
It would be about as sensible as handing a child of today a copy of the “Gnostic [so-called] Gospels”, and wondering why they were confused rather than inspired.
And of course, when most could not read, they would be at the mercy of any travelling loon who happened to drop in town, a la Jim Jones or David Koresh (or Anton Lavey), announcing that “this is what the bible says”…without, of course, mentioning what bible they were talking about.
Those sorts of people had to be stopped from destroying the lives (and potentially the souls) of the ordinary mediaeval Christian. (Just as, I repeat, I toss the JWs’ trash into the trash).
It was just plain good common sense…a virtue which is only all too uncommon…

 

[Roy5]

**A FAMILY STORY RE CATHOLICISM & THE BIBLE/**B]

 My family background, like many other Americans, is mixed religiously. Both Catholics and Protestants. Mostly French-Canadians and Yankees, with a little Irish, German, Scottish, and native American ancestry thrown in. 

  One story from the Protestant side seems relevant to this thread.

   In 1837 French-Canadians (and some others) waged the Patriots' War against British gentry. They were defeated and many fled temporarily across to the USA.

   A great-great grandfather was among them. Two French-speaking Swiss missionaries did evangelistic work among these refugees from Quebec. They gave them Bibles. A priest came along and told Catholics that they must burn those Bibles. My ancestor refused to do so, eventually began to attend a small French evangelical church in Quebec and embraced Protestantism.

    It seems to me that Catholics years ago seldom had Bibles. They learned many things from the Bible in parochial schools, then very important in our area - rivaling the public schools in enrollment. (Most now closed.) This has changed radically since Vatican II, of course, and Bible study is popular among Catholics around here, even a few ecumenical groups with Catholics and various Protestants together. I favor this. It promotes understanding and tolerance. 

   This Catholic v. Protestant nonsense, too often promoted by postings here in the Catholic Answers Forum, does a disservice to Christianity. We have varying interpretations of scripture, but we are one people. God is much too big for any one church to claim a special monopoly on divine truth. We're all seekers, and I'm sure that God appreciates our interest in eternal verities. 
  
    God bless everybody. No exceptions.

 

[fbl9]

hi Roy 5 those bibles the priest told your ancesters to burn were most likely the authorized KJV which were full of grammar mistakes,mispelled words,deletions of chapters and books,and were very poor if not deliberate mistranslations.

 

[1234]

Welcome back, Old Scholar, and I hope that your grandson is doing fine.

We need a little more light and a lot less heat around here…

 

[1234]

In the 12th century, the ‘average man’ had a lifespan of about 30 years, the infant mortality rate was close to 50%, there were literally dozens of fatal diseases, accident rates were skyhigh (even getting a scratch from a nail or a splinter of wood could kill you–no antibiotics, you know), war or martial incidents were endemic, soil husbandry was in its infancy, labor was backbreaking, crops failed, cattle and sheep died, adequate nutrition was rare.

And literacy rates. . .rates enough to ‘read’ a HAND LETTERED MANUSCRIPT (itself taking over 2 YEARS to write) thus being extremely costly. . .were abysmal.

According to Wiki, even by the mid 19th century (400 years post printing press, and 700 years after the Albigensians), the average literacy rate for a man in Great Britain was under 40%.

This was well into the industrial age, when more people were ‘off the farms’, when printed material was readily available and cheap even by the standards of the day, and schools existed in every town–as opposed to the ‘earlier’ days when schools did NOT exist everywhere, printed material was NOT cheap or available, and people worked 16 and 18 hour days in the fields before falling into the straw or dirt for a few hours sleep, having existed on one bowl of ‘porritch’, with maybe a crust of barley bread and a swig of ale (nobody drank water, due to the typhus and cholera epidemics found because that same water was full of raw sewage; wine was for the ‘upper class’) if they were lucky.

I WISH that people who prate of ‘history’ actually KNEW SOME HISTORY.

All of this is common knowledge, Tantum.

Calm down.

 

[mschrank]

The average lifespan of 30 in the Middle Ages is a statistical artifact owing to the high infant morality rate. If you made it past the first five years, I believe 50s-60s were the average lifespan.

 

[Old_Scholar]

Old Scholar

so, what you are saying is that there is a good chance that your church subscribed to arianism ?

so, what you are saying is that there is a good chance that your church subscribed to arianism

Actually it was Constantine who embraced Arianism before he died. I believe he is one of the RCC’s heroes.

 

[Old_Scholar]

The Catholic Church in the beginning consisted on Rome, Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Constantinope. There were no introduction into paganism as such. The only thing incorporated was pagan customs but not beliefs. Such as the introduction of Eastern into the Liturgy. So whatever your Church professed is not supported by history.

I am glad you admit there were pagan customs introduced into Christianity. I will admit there are some here who do not know history. It was Constantine in 313 A.D. that proclaimed Christianity as the official religion of the “Holy Roman Empire.” He knew the church had to adapt and adopt pagan practices in order to make Christianity palatable to the heathens. Constantine recognized the need for a union between paganism and Christianity. Rome was a pagan society and paganism was the official religion of ancient Rome. To deny this is to not know history.

Jesus Christ was presented as the “Sun” of Righteousness replacing the “Sun-God.” December 25th was the “Victory of the Sun-God” festival in the pagan Babylonian world. It was a celebration of the Festival of Saturn (Saturnalia), or wintersolstice, in the ancient Roman Empire. This was known as the birthday of the gods—what we now call “Christmas.”

One of the proponents of celebrating Christmas, Robert Myers, wrote a book called Celebrationssays. In it he said:

“Prior to the celebration of Christmas, December 25th in the Roman world was the Natalis Solis Invicti, the Birthday of the Unconquerable Sun. This feast, which took place just after the winter solstice of the Julian calendar, was in honor of the Sun God, Mithras, originally a Persian deity whose cult penetrated the Roman world in the first century B.C. …Besides the Mithraic influence, other pagan forces were at work. From the seventeenth of December until the twenty-third, Romans celebrated the ancient feast of the Saturnalia. … It was commemorative of the Golden Age of Saturn, the god of sowing and husbandry.”

Constantine knew that Christianity had to be palatable to the heathen, so the Roman Church simply took the Festival of Saturnalia and adopted it into Christianity. There were many of other pagan symbols, forms, customs, and traditions that were “Christianized” in order to be acceptable to Christians.

It was the same with the “Virgin Mary” and the “Christ Child.” The pagans didn’t care whether they were worshiping their “Goddess-Mother” and her “Child” under the old names: Isis and Horus, or under the names of the “Virgin Mary” and the “Christ Child.” Either way, it was the same old idol-religion.

It wasn’t until after the Reformation that Godly Protestants in Europe were opposed to Christmas. It was despised in England by the Puritans and Non-conformists. The Puritans controlled the parliament in 1644 and declared that no observation of Christmas was to be had on December 25th. They actually had troops break up Christmas celebrations and tear down decorations, even arresting anyone holding a service on that day. Some were actually thrown in prison.

At one time, it was illegal in Massachusetts to take December 25th off from work. In 1659, Christmas was banned in Massachusetts and remained banned for twenty years. It was Alabama that declared Christmas an official holiday in 1836. They were the first state to do so.

There were many pagan rituals and rites that Constantine introduced into the church but this post is not the proper place to list them all. Many are in use today in the RCC.

I will state one thing however about Jesus. Who knows why Christ came out of the tomb before daylight on the first day of the week?

If you know history, you will know that this was because **at sunrise on the first day of the week, the Sun God was worshiped **and although Satan saw to it that Christ was crucified on a cross (the symbol of which is taken from the first letter of the name Tammuz, who was designated by Satan to be the false Messiah, Christ triumphed by rising and leaving the tomb before sunrise as the Scriptures tell us.

 

[Mannyfit75]

OS,

Although pagan customs were borrowed by the Early Christians and incorporate it into the Christian Liturgy, the worship itself is focus primarily on the Triune God. In the Catholic Church, the only one who is worshipped is God. Not the pagan sun god.

Considering the mother-goddess though. That is not the case. There is no historical record to connect mother-goddess concept to the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary. That concept was invited by some guy idea in the 1800s.

I have no doubt that most of your information is from cut and paste information from dubious Anti-Catholic resources.