Why don’t Catholics believe that Bible alone is Enough?

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Because the Bible is the work of man, not God, not to say the Bible doesn’t portray the acts and teachings of God, but the Bible is “tainted” from incorrect translations and multiple translations. Also, the Bible isn’t completely literal, even the Jews who we got HALF the Bible from think of it as allegory and not as literal. On top if that Christ taught in parables, so parables have many interpretations (that’s why he clarifies to the Apostles), but that also hints to the Bible being at least partially metaphorical. I also want to use another controversial example to prove my point, the Muslims have a text they say was written (or at least wrote verbatim) from God himself. They don’t even use the Q’uran literally, on top of that they have multiple religious laws and the quotes of Muhammad. So, what is probably our biggest “enemy” (Remember to love your neighbour) in faith doesn’t take their scripture literally along with the Jews (with the Christ being one of them). In reality the facts just don’t add up, the Bible is used to help guide people by showing Christ and God’s love
Agreed…
 
The bible wasn’t printed or available for 1500 years it was only when it was widely available that people came up with this idea. So for 1500 years the church survived without a written version of the bible available to followers.
 
If I might ask, “Why?” I’d love to hear your answer. 😀
The reason is that while there are “tainted” and “incorrect translations” those are not sufficient to show that the integral message is tainted or substantially incorrect. Besides that, there are sufficient numbers of correct translations that are untainted that we can identify where the errors are.

In fact your point itself depends on that fact, otherwise you could not know with any degree of certainty which translations were the incorrect and tainted ones to begin with.

In short, you couldn’t even make your claim absent a reliable number of untainted and correct translations. You couldn’t know what the errors were without knowing what the correct rendering of the text is.

Short version of why Scriptures are reliable…


Long version…

 
The bible did not fall out of the sky when Jesus ascended it took hundreds of years to come up with it - it wasn’t printed until the 1500s and is still being interpreted and revised all the time.

The Bible alone does not reflect the history of the church. Only new denominations took it on as Bible alone because they abandoned the catholic church its history and traditions so the bible is all they had and thats where it came from.
 
Did you read ‘ALL’ of the three letters, First and Second Timothy and Titus, form a distinct group within the Pauline corpus? Or are you pointing out just 2 versus of 2 Timothy? You yourself are taking just 2 versus out of complete context without complete understanding of the entire Epistle message.
 
God conveyed the complete contents of His Holy Bible - which includes the blueprints to all seven Sacraments - to the Church He founded and authorized to feed His sheep…

Which it has been doing since the first Pentecost in the Upper Room, before the contents of the New Testament were even written down.
 
Alright, thank you. I’m glad I was corrected now rather than saying something stupid in a more embarrassing situation later. 😀 Also, thank you for the resources (videos) to help clarify my “vision”
 
Alright, thank you. I’m glad I was corrected now rather than saying something stupid in a more embarrassing situation later. 😀 Also, thank you for the resources (videos) to help clarify my “vision”
The second video by Daniel Wallace is very informative, but long (> 2 hours) and very detailed. He is one of the world’s foremost experts on textual analysis and provides specific answers to virtually every issue people might have with the reliability of Scripture.
 
It is also significant that the early Church Fathers did not use Sola Scriptura to argue against the Christian heresies that came from the East, but relied as much on Tradition. We stand on the shoulders of giants.
 
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It is like having a mother and father. Having a mother is good, but not enough. A mother and a father are not the same, but complementary, and together add much to the good of a child. Having the Bible is good but not enough. We also need the tradition of the Church, passed down from Christ, for them together so that Christianity can be what it can be.
 
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What about 2 Peter 3:16, in which Peter classifies Paul’s writings as already being Scripture?

“[Paul] writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.”
 
Aside from Peter having written it, that is a good question. Although it does show that the early church in some fashion viewed Paul’s writings as new Scripture, right?
 
I mean, maybe not. Maybe it was written by a heretic seeking to enshrine other heresy. We can’t tell from scripture what is scriptural.
 
Being the Word of God - of and by God, IF all one has is the Bible - one has Jesus.
 
Jesus said the Golden Rule summed up the law. You can argue it alone is sufficient.
When the Apostles and disciples rode into Jerusalem Palm Sunday try to imagine the state of the written Gospels. There was no state. Jesus taught verbally to men. In 3 years a tradition began but was far from what it became.
Less than a week later in a whirlwind of seeing Jesus betrayed, suffer, and die, they scattered in fear. Lost.
At that time, there was no talk or commission of written Gospels. There is none mentioned by Jesus that we know after Easter. A man named Paul of Tarsus ( who began as an enemy of Christians ) penned letters to the early churches. Temporally these became the first parts of what became a Bible with a table of contents.
He was visited by Christ Jesus but no Gospel commissioned by Jesus there.
It seems odd to limit Christian faith to books that had not even been written or commissioned for that purpose. Where Jesus never directed the creation of a Codex of accepted and rejected books assembled by men born 300 years after Jesus.
It began as a tradition and has grown that way since. Along the way, wonderful inspired books were written to give witness and enlighten faith. But they were never the whole faith at that point.
And someone over a Thousand years later declaring that they were seems revisionist on its face.
Origen took the first stab at what was essentially a " theory of the whole.". Ransom Theory.
Saint Anselm a thousand years later developed a different theory of Atonement. Saint Thomas Aquinas honed our modern day theory and a bunch of others developed also. They are not found in scriptures per se. In fact Ransom Theory had the largest number of passages supporting it, if you want to imagine Gospel support as dispositive I suppose.
The Trinity can be gleaned from the Gospel, but the larger theology came later.
The Gospel only idea didn’t come from Jesus or the writers of the Gospel. Or Paul.
 
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At that time, there was no talk or commission of written Gospels.
Jesus’ Gospel unfurled via Jesus over a period of Real Time
After His Resurrection/Pentecost - It was followed by the Oral Gospel
The Oral Gospel was followed by the Written Form

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That is based on what? There were 12 apostles. Paul, and many others.
The Gospels themselves are a limited writing of Jesus Gospel ( according to Luke). He could have written volumes but chose only so much as would form belief.
The Didache for example was," THE LORDS TEACHING THROUGH THE TWELVE APOSTLES TO THE NATIONS. It is a first century book. The first catechism to the Gentiles. The first Church orders, it originated in the same community Matthews book did.
Some Church father’s considered it part of the new Testeiment. Others not, and ultimately the decision was…church tradition
What church tradition decided for you and when? This is a reasonable question.
Luke was by description," one of," many books undertaken to compile a narrative of the events that have been fulfilled among us( Luke 1:1).
What we’re these many books and what happened to them? Who chose them for you? More specifically, who said the oral Gospel you spoke of was written in these books and not those others? Luke himself places his own book within a group all doing the same thing. Someone said," this and not that." That leaves the very foundation of your belief 100% dependant upon a decision of tradition.
 
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Luke says Jesus was the origin of multiple Gospel writers and Gospels, all at the same time. All doing what he was doing. With no commentary on authenticity of contemporary works that had yet perhaps to be written, but could have been, Like is silent.
Your Sola Scriptura compels you to believe that.
Some we know of, some perhaps not.
They all set off at the same time as Luke to COMPILE. LUKE WAS CHOSEN. Other than the tradition that chose him you have no way of assessing his narrative of ," Jesus as origin," from the others claiming Jesus as the origin.
Sola Scriptura originated using the pre-existing choice of texts over a millennium later.
Your problem to me is this:
If tradition is not also inspired, then the selection of the Gospels Luke describes, some of which we know of, not selected via Divine inspiration, defeats Sola. The 4 books you have cannot be distinguished from the inauthentic Gospels Luke mentions. The choice has no inspired basis according to you.
If the choice was inspired that is an admission tradition is inspired. In fact the very foundation for Sola.
And if perhaps you say, well, just this one time, that is arbitrary. You then accept that declaration as inspired and you again reason Sola via tradition that is inspired. Just a completely detached and new tradition.
 
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