Did Constantine Corrupt the Church? (w/ Joe Heschmeyer)

the thesis and maybe you've heard this before because i certainly did as an evangelical is that there was this pristine uncorrupted early church that at some point often people point to constantine as the as the point this happened it became corrupted it became romanized became politicized it became something different than it used to be in in his teachings now surely the church has changed over time and certainly there are politics in the church and so there's corruption in the church this much is true but was the early church was one of the earliest christians who were taught by the apostles did they believe something radically different than what what the catholic church taught were they more like protestants or or were they actually sounding and believing and teaching and preaching things that were really catholic was there a corruption that took place in the church this week i'm joined by catholic anthros apologist johash bayer to dig into that question we're going to look at what the earliest christians those who learned from the apostles what they believed and what they taught and try and and figure out well were those things distinctly catholic or were they more protestant and the catholic church came along and corrupted those things this is such an important question to ask and to have answered because if we want to live the authentic christian life we want to live in a way that looks like the way the church did closest to christ closest to the apostles was that a church that looked catholic or was the catholic church a corrupting force that came along later this is a fantastic episode i think you're going to love it we dig in very deeply here and joe is just the guy to do that please enjoy hey friends welcome back to the show thank you for watching thank you for listening if you are listening on podcast thank you please leave a rating and review if you can on spotify or an apple podcast and find us on youtube if you want to watch what you're hearing on youtube.com the cordial catholic if you are watching on youtube thank you welcome and we're also on podcasts everywhere find podcasts or found an even not great podcast we're we're on there as well so do check us out please the cordial catholic this week i am joined by catholic answers apologist joe heshmeyer he is the author of some fantastic books including pope peter defending the church's most distinctive doctrine during a time of crisis and uh just out from catholic answers press the early church was the catholic church the catholic witness of the fathers in christianity's first two centuries it's also a regular guess on catholic answers live and all kinds of other things but uh joe welcome back to the show thanks for being here and thanks for having me back i appreciate it i realized halfway through the introduction there that you do all kinds of things you're regularly blocking still and you're you're appearing different places you're you're you're a phenom i think joe good way of putting it um in in a good way is that a bad thing no it is very flattering you're a force of nature your books are fantastic i mean but you're we had you back on this show a while ago talking about the pope pope peter in the book you've written on the pope and i do think still that that that is uh one of the most fantastic books to defend the papacy i highly recommend that to anybody that i see who asks those kinds of questions so that's a fantastic episode if you want to dig deeper in the archives to find joe on there we had you also uh on a crossover with austin suggs and gossip simplicity and and uh dr gavin ortland talking about uh kind of this topic actually kind of the the early church and and does that uh was early church catholic and so i i i i'm gonna guess because this is what happens with this show you came on the show i asked you some amazing questions really got your brain thinking and a book was produced based on on my insights into i'm sure you're half kidding but there's a there's a shred of truth to that in that um certainly in the chapter on baptism yeah there's a point in the conversation with gavin where i i mentioned the the church fathers just aren't baptists like they don't believe in baptismal regeneration and he is one of the best protestants on patriotic stuff and i i don't remember his exact response but i didn't get the impression that he actually disagreed yeah that he wasn't saying look at all these fathers who who are totally baptist on uh you know the issue of baptism that there was just nobody who who came out there now i i don't want to he it was one of those things where there's a back and forth maybe he has a brilliant response but certainly in terms of writing the book it was like well right if if someone that well read on the church fathers approaching from a very different perspective than i am doesn't have someone who they can even like claim maybe is on their team on this that's a really good confirmation that i'm not you know just missing some really good counter argument that i've overlooked oh it's fantastic that's fantastic that was a great conversation also you find that in the archives for the show too so the topic that i want to kind of hone in on this week is i think a really good one that you kind of open open your book talking about and it's this idea that that okay so the early church was this pristine kind of uh really uh christian thing that jesus founded it was great in the beginning and somehow got corrupted by by someone like constantine or or rome it got romanized right and this is a really pervasive even today a really live issue to tackle i'm thinking of my own background i was i was evangelical from the age of 15 onward and in a pentecostal kind of church charismatic and it wasn't overtly into catholic like some of these are and i know listen to this show might be in some more of those anti-catholic camps and are emerging from those places i didn't experience that but what i experienced was the air we breathed was in a sense pervaded with this myth the idea that okay so the early church was this thing that was great and the catholic church corrupted that and we're not catholics because we're trying to get back that early even it wasn't it wasn't overtly said every sunday but it was in the air that we breathed and this is kind of ironic given this conversation we're having here and what happened a week or so ago joe but i regularly opened this show by talking about this experience with this pastor i worked for and how he kind of got me on this journey and this this podcast is an outgrowth of that journey looking into the ancient faith and i became catholic based on this journey and this this this guy the singular guy this pastor that i worked for at the non-denominational church joe i think apart from my wife and marrying her i think he had the biggest impact on my life because he really launched me on this journey towards becoming catholic which really has changed my life in a drastic way right and he he asked this question he was he was a non-donational pastor the student church i was working for he was doing his master's in early church studies and was raised catholic wrestling with these questions about the early church and then patristics and how to understand it and he was i was a sounding board so he asked me it would ask me questions about what i thought about this and this and the bible and tradition and and how the church did things and that launched me on on this journey but recently we keep in touch still occasionally he's now gone to do a phd in historical theology he he pastors a nonsensical church that needs in a warehouse in montreal in quebec up here in canada and he's remains remains obviously uh evangelical non-denominational christian never became catholic well i became catholic but he recently posted this thing on facebook this quote from augustine talking about how important it is to interpret scripture properly and really wrestle with it and i i being a guy who loves to look at the sources i i put the quote into google and found the source where that quote came from because i thought this sounds a bit a bit fishy that this quote in context a good sentiment you know dig into scripture and to read it properly but when i opened the full quote a couple paragraphs a couple of sentences later in the same paragraph augustine tells us how we read scripture properly and it's in relationship with the catholic church it's quite clearly right there in print you know interpret scripture properly here's how you do it with the catholic church in historic continuity and so i sent that off to him just kind of globally on on facebook messenger and said hey let you know this this is what else he says about reading scripture and his response was kind of along the lines of yeah that's great and there's there's good things that that augustine you've got to be careful about what what stuff he says that then romanized that's been corrupted from its original kind of meaning and i thought how interesting that was that yeah here's a here's a guy arnold the guy that got me on the journey to become catholic but here's the guy who can look at augustine and find value in him and find value in the early church fathers he often quotes them in different places but then we suddenly hit against this wall of okay that's good but then it got romanized then it got corrupted by something and whatever that original early church was it wasn't catholic the catholic church is is a corruption of that early church so it's remarkable because i've heard not that exact thing but i've heard very similar things even going back to saint ignatius of antioch oh well when he says catholic church he means something else by it and and so it is not even enough apparently for the church fathers to announce that they're catholic even that doesn't prove they're catholic they have to you know uh announce that they're catholic and look and sound like they're from the 19th century and anyone else you know before or after that well that's not really catholic because it doesn't fit the caricature of what we imagine a catholic looks and sounds like uh and it's quite uh similar in some ways to a remarkably bad article i saw on uh medium which is you know a great place for really bad articles to flourish and it was claiming the lord of the rings was not a christian book and the argument was it's not super preachy it doesn't beat you over the head and it basically isn't like the movie fireproof and so since it's not that therefore it must not be a christian book and what it really proved is like this guy had a very weird understanding of what christianity was he may have had his own if i'm guessing he coming from more of a fundamentalist protestant background uh based on the descriptions he gives of christianity and because it doesn't fit into that caricature he's like ah therefore tolkien wasn't christian and his book wasn't christian even though tolkien is passionately christian passionately catholic and acknowledges that he's bringing that to like the telling of the story that that he calls it a catholic book unintentionally at first and then intentionally in the kind of editing process uh so it's not enough to say he is they're still gonna say well you don't fit my caricature of what i imagine that to be like well it's the same thing here the church father you got augustine saying yeah i'm catholic and you got to follow the catholic church and interpret scripture i would not believe the gospel but for the catholic church he says that he's like yeah but he meant vaguely christians dispersed everywhere he didn't he very clearly didn't he's distinguishing the catholic church from these non-catholic christians that he still thinks of as christians even though he thinks that they're outside of the full union with the church that people like the donatists and so it really is quite this remarkable thing the kind of cognitive barriers you know where like like that evidence couldn't possibly be roman catholic because it's too soon for the timeline you know it we don't expect it that early so therefore it must not be real uh i mentioned ignatius of antioch earlier john calvin argued that his writings were forgeries like they seemed too catholic to fit into the protestant timeline and they are too catholic for the premise he was right about that but we we now know and uh jaroslav pelican has has some good research or a good history of like the research surrounding the authentication of ignatius's works and it was mostly protestant scholars who actually vindicated the authenticity of these seven ignatian letters uh so but it is that real that thing where like even very smart protestants who know the church fathers will often approach them with the presupposition they couldn't possibly be catholic and then that kind of prevents certain interpretations from from being open i would argue yeah i think that's a fantastic point i think that's what that's what's happening in large measure it's so interesting and fascinating to to reflect on i i think so i want to i want to begin with setting up this premise here the premise that you do a great job of this in the book as you open it the premise that that constantine or somebody around that time uh my friend rod bennett always says why constantine like why is everyone talking poor guy but you know somebody around that time came and corrupted this this early church so how can we begin to to address that issue what kind of what kind of things we have to tackle when we're going to address that yeah i think we should do a few things in the book i i say i want to go to the pre-teen church and that's a really lame pun for like pre constantine and pre-augustine uh augustine if you want to pronounce it the protestant way that in this context uh i would say number one find the place of agreement so if the person you're speaking to says well the church was corrupted by constantine in the early 300s then say okay so do you do you take seriously christianity in the first 300 years so if i can show you christians in the first 300 years believed what we believe as catholics is that enough or are you just going to say no matter how early a belief is i'll reject it if it's catholic because if that's it then you're not really doing history at all but then the second thing is to really try to hammer out the argument meaning this i say in the very beginning of the book that if you're going to object to catholic doctrine you're going to be making one of two claims one claim is catholics are wrong because they follow the teachings of jesus and jesus was wrong that's not what protestants are arguing i mean occasionally the liberal fringes of protestantism you might find something like that but for the most part the people we're talking about say jesus's original teaching were great they're they're my beliefs you know whatever my beliefs are whether you're dan brown saying he believes what dan brown believes or whether you're a protestant saying that you know he's a protestant or a mormon saying he's a mormon whatever uh that there's some idea that jesus at point a is teaching the things that agree with your theology at some point b maybe it's constantine maybe it's whoever this gets corrupted and that leads to the catholic church the thing that's beautiful about that is that's a historical claim we can investigate that and we can just keep saying okay wherever you put b if you put it at like 313 if you put it at 325 with the council of nicaea if you put you know if you put it with the the establishment of christianity as the legal religion of the empire and i think what is that the 380s whatever point you put on that if we can go back before that and say look these these teachings you claim were introduced then weren't because we find them before point b that's a really good i think refutation of that if i say you know the first iphone came out in 2020 and you say look here's some documentation of somebody with it before that okay well my theory's just falling apart and at a certain point i think a person who loves the truth protestant mormon muslim secularist whoever to be proven wrong that many times about your historical claims should cause some deep soul searching about like why am i getting this much history this wrong this frequently like maybe the people who taught me church history didn't teach it to me accurately maybe they were malicious maybe they're ignorant whatever it was but like maybe my whole vision of church history is wrong because this catholic or these catholics keep my my claims about the first 300 years yeah so you cause you have to you make that claim you have to and this is the interesting thing for me right it was this was a nebulous claim in a sense we'd say the early church or i think okay the early church was like this and at some point it became corrupted and but once you begin thinking with that right what you're saying is you have to pick a time and place not a place because like a time in in in in history i want to agree with you that place is important too like you can't just say well in 400 something happened like do you have an actual theory like who when how like what's the evidence of it you know like if constantine wrote the bible or chose which books belong in scripture literally where's the evidence you know and when dan brown and davinci code says constantine chooses which books are in the new testament we'll let's pull up the canons of the council of nicaea and we'll see if if that's true or not by the way if you hear them in the background there's some kids playing in the street there's not a murder going on i'm really glad that you you made note of that thanks joe yeah i mean i'm assuming here i'm a little afraid to check oh it would be a first for the podcast yeah yeah it really is yeah so time plays i i yeah i totally get that right but for the most part it usually for me at least what was this kind of yeah this kind of clean this out that i wouldn't have i wouldn't have thought once you once you make me say it's this time place well then it becomes a little bit like oh yeah i better look into this like when when was that and when did that happen and and how and i guess the the next step right would be okay well then let's look at the these practices these catholic practices and see how far back they go how how what you know what time what time they suddenly change or or or something like if the claim is that the catholic church came and somehow it corrupted this early ancient faith and we'd be able to find this early ancient faith before before it's corrupted right and if we can find that then we can find the time and place if we if we can't find that what what's the conclusion then yeah i think this is really well said you'll occasionally i want to uh anticipate a response that some protestants have to this which is well the reason we can't find any evidence of these early protestants is because the evil catholic church destroyed all the evidence and to that i would just say i don't think you understand how like writing and antiquity works like we're constantly finding ancient texts that were just preserved in a cave somewhere yeah you also have you know so until the discovery of the dead sea scrolls in the 1940s oh no i'm sorry excuse me the uh the discovery of the nagomani library in egypt uh which was this treasure trove of gnostic texts the best source for gnosticism was actually saint irenaeus of leon's against heresies that in other words catholic opponents of a heresy spend a great deal of time spelling out what it is that their opponents believe so if you know if tomorrow all the protestants got raptured you can still find from books like mine what protestant theology resembled in some way even if we decided let's go burn every protestant book because you know we're this wicked corrupt organization you would still find from the response books people responding to protestant claims and so you'd be able to piece together what protestantism must have taught from that so if there are protestants in the early church it's really remarkable that they never left any writings and that their opponents never left any writings responding to them and that no one seems to have even heard of them they just simply disappeared without a trace that's not a good historical theory to say here's this uh this church that christ calls a city on the hill and a light that can't be hidden under a bushel basket and it's invisible and it leaves no trace and it's the mustard seed that grows into the mustard tree but it actually just dies out instead uh you know those it doesn't fit theologically it doesn't fit historically it makes no sense so i think if if that's the claim you're working with it doesn't work and so then you're left with i think the full brunt of your question which is what do you do if you can't find any evidence of this church that your theology would entail exist but if just think about it in the first century we know we know from acts we know from the writings of saint paul we know from the opening chapters of the book of revelation there are faithful devoted christians up to the end of the first century who by all appearances from the apostles speaking about and to them get the gospel now granted not everybody does but there's huge groups who do who understand the gospel who are willing to die for it who are orthodox in their belief and especially on issues like baptism you know saint paul can speak of one lord one faith on baptism because these are really rudimentary doctrines that everybody gets now the protestant claim and i'm speaking loosely like protestants who who reject these specifically catholic claims about baptism eucharist and like the protestant claim is that this church remarkably quickly didn't get it right at all that everyone went from understanding it to not understanding it and again there's no evidence of this transition like if everybody gets baptism and the baptist teaching on baptism is true you should find a lot of first century texts talking about baptism is just a symbol for that matter you should find some new testament texts that talk about how baptism is just a symbol but you don't instead you get things like references to the washing of regeneration or baptism now saves you in first peter 3 21 or john 3 where jesus says you have to be born again of water in the spirit and then it's followed by the apostles going to go baptize like all of those things point in one direction and not the direction of the protestant case it's not you have to carefully balance the evidence here is that one side literally has no historical evidence from a time and place they should have a wealth of historical evidence and the other side the catholic side actually can point to a pretty good deal of evidence that even many protestant scholars and historians are going to grant that the early church was catholic and i guess the interesting thing for me is you you're into conspiracy theory territory right if you're if you're trying to say well within within very shortly with the church being being born and beginning to spread they believe this but those documents are are gone now we don't have those they were erased there we don't know i mean you can think of all kinds of ways to explain that away but they all end up in some kind of weird conspiracy theory territory where you end up having to you know explain the rules of your faith by by some rather unsavory means i i think right like yeah i think that's that's well put that it it really does boil down to uh if you can't believe the early witnesses to the gospel on what basis are you even christian in other words like if you buy this conspiracy theory that there's a church in 300 or whatever that is so all powerful that it can track down every protestant writing in the homes of everyone or you know whatever like a kind of reach in power that the church even at her height didn't have like the catholic church that couldn't stop the reformation with an actual army back in 300 having just been freshly legalized it was somehow able to to round up every protestant writing and not only that but prevent any knowledge of this crime ever ever existing so no historian knows this happened once you're in that territory you're surely in territory of imagination you might as well say and they killed all the unicorns and burnt their bones like it you're just making up fables you're making a pure fiction uh there's no evidence of it and the reason you find people going to such absurd lights is because they need this to be true for their historical and theological claims to make sense like there's a reason you find otherwise respectable christians indulging in this kind of pardon my bluntness this kind of lunacy uh and so the flip side of that the the second kind of point i'd make on that is if you're gonna go down that road and then we're gonna ask well how do you know the bible wasn't also corrupted by this all-powerful church the kind of mental gymnastics necessary to believe well because the bible says it's going to be preserved oh the bible given to you by the church you just said is all powerful and corrupt and editing documents and you know getting rid of all the evidence he doesn't like it tells you like that it you can see hopefully that doesn't work like the logical conclusion like if you're going to go the conspiracy theory route in spite of all the evidence the logical place to end up is a rejection of christianity not an endorsement of like a watered down christianity it leaves you with nothing because on what basis do you trust that the christians of the second century and on faithfully preserved the biblical text yeah absolutely and just one side point there unicorns aren't real actually there's a fascinating side point with us marco polo in his writings uh recounts his surprise of discovering unicorns and them not being like he had read about in the fairy tales and it what he almost certainly discovered was the rhinoceros not quite as majestic as the unicorn no he mentions you're much uglier than he expected he tries to ride one and fly and you just stand there that's fantastic so the the way to figure out if this if the church was was corrupted from the early church to the catholic church it's of course a look at those early writings and so many yeah so many uh you know i had marcus girdai on the show uh a couple of years ago and i asked him who hosted the journey home who's heard hundreds if not thousands of conversion stories from from people like like myself who found the catholic church and i asked him i said is there a pattern to those who convert are there things that most converts encounter that pushes their conversion to becoming catholic and he said yes he says authority and the early church now joe you've written books on both of these things you're tapped into the zeitgeist of the conference quite quite clearly i talked to a lot of protestant conferences and then i asked people about their stories and these things come up constantly i think brody's absolutely right and of course he's talked to way more people about their conversion stories than i have yeah some of my favorite stories have been watching his show so i mean he's an expert on it yeah but yeah it really is quite remarkable a friend of mine just one day got curious and started asking where does the bible come from this is before even newer and just started researching the question and became a catholic like those kind of questions or the ones that i hope protestants and maybe protestant listen protestants listening to this are asking okay i take scripture very seriously how do i know that the new testament is reliable how do i know the gospels are the right gospels these four and no others and you're going to come to one of two conclusions either you're going to say we can trust these early catholics we can trust the early church we can trust the catholic church in which case you're most of the way home or you're going to say something like well we can't and so we just we're hoping this is the right set and then you're left with like a fallible set of infallible books and i think with john mcarthur's saying but you know if that's the case you've undermined the authority of the bible more than uh liberal theologians could ever hope to because what you've just said is the bible is right and infallibly right in those places when it's infallibly right and that's that's a nothing claim like yeah my test answers are infallibly true it's just i have a fallible set of them i don't know which of them are the right infallibly true ones like that that's meaningless you might as well just say i don't think the bible's infallible because that's where you end up or i hope these books are infallible because i don't know and you know either way you end up in this place that that does you know look the reformers i give them credit for trying to uh preserve the integrity of the bible from what they saw as ecclesial threats i i think that they are largely motivated by good motives uh i think human pride and all that stuff mixes in i think errors in judgment makes in but the result of their work isn't that the bible is held in a stronger position you get you know within luther's own lifetime him saying maybe these books don't belong in the bible you get calvin saying a different set of books don't belong in the bible that's a problem that you don't end up with a stronger canon of scripture you don't end up with a stronger bible and i say the same thing to any protestant who rejects the evidence for where the bible actually comes from that you're not going to end up with a stronger bible you either end up halfway into the catholic church maybe more than that or you end up in a situation where you have got much more of a kind of a modern skeptical view of scripture yeah i think that's fantastic that's well said right and i think the interesting thing is that more and more when you begin looking into to modern biblical scholarship i mean the the premise that i was that i kind of grew up on as evangelical was that we had the more accurate bible as catholic as as non-catholics right catholic added to the books of the bible right but once you begin to actually uh dig into biblical studies and how the bible's put together and and even more recent discoveries about about you know different books found in different places like the dead sea scrolls and these kinds of things i think i think modern bible studies would would argue that no actually the the catholic canon is closer to the canon that that the the early church would have used i mean just based on history i think yeah if you understand that correctly yeah so you have the actual endorsement of the catholic canon in toto and some of the fourth century councils like the third council of carthage pretty famously before that there you will find discrepancies in which books belong in the bible but every book in the the so-called deuterocan the seven books that catholics accept as scripture and protestants reject his apocrypha every one of those seven books is quoted by the early christians and quoted as scripture so these are not books that were added in the medieval period that by the time you have a set new testament you have a bible new and old testament that includes these books that before that you have people saying well maybe it should be this maybe it should be that canon and you don't have agreement by the time agreement comes it's agreement in the catholic direction yeah i think that that's that's well said that's well said great great points joe of course so if we're looking again at other other ways we can see that the church you know wasn't this one thing encrypted by the catholics into something else we can look at areas uh you outline a bunch of different areas we can we can look at in your book and dig into things like like baptism and and the eucharist and and the the hierarchies kind of things i we we could spend all day digging through this but i want to kind of lay out what are a few ways you want to highlight to say look here's where we can show that the early church was catholic it wasn't this and then corrupted to to become this what i guess first of all what what sources do you begin to look at to show that this church because you can dig in sources from say 680 and go oh look this over here looks very catholic and some go oh that's that's way too late obviously they are corrupted you've got some pretty early sources though i i think that you used to to kind of argue uh or to demonstrate some catholic ideas the church had in her infancy right yeah so i'm using a kind of soft deadline of about the year 200. uh and so i'm looking at christians writing in about the year 200 or earlier occasionally i'll pull in someone a little later and i'll kind of flag that when i do it uh if i think they have something helpful for helping us understand or if i think they just say something really beautifully i i'll cheat a little and but i i acknowledge when i'm doing it um but i'm trying to get just the christians of the first 200 years of christianity and really less than the first 200 years like really like 150 to 170 years of christianity basically from like 30 a.d until 190 200. that uh that period is not as long as it may sound and the example i give in the book is that the apostle john who seems to have been very young when the crucifixion happens is said by early christians who have died in about the year 100 we know like the reign of the emperor under under whom he died and he leaves behind two students ignatius of antioch and polycarp smyrna and polycarp is born in the year 69 he dies near 155. he mentions his age at his trial when he's martyred so we know exactly he dies at age 86. uh and his martyrdom is attested to within a year that there's an account of his martyrdom written down by people who loved him uh so it's not like one of these later legends or 500 years later there's this story about this guy public no no we have written records within a year that's we're you don't have that for almost anyone in history so it's actually a really remarkable bit of evidence we have for polycarp well polycarp leaves behind a couple of students the most famous of which is saying irenaeus of leon i mentioned before he's riding in 180. so 180 may sound like a really long time after you know calvary but it's 114 years after the death of peter and paul and in the book i i use a now moot example that diedrich von hildebrand was in college 114 years ago and his uh second wife alice von hildebrand is still alive now very shortly after i published my book she she passed away but it's still a real testament to the fact that 114 years sounds like this incredibly long time but in the span of human lifetimes it's much closer like if you wanted to know what happened 114 years ago it wouldn't be that hard to find out from people who were in a position to know not because they'd been there themselves but because they'd grown up with people who'd been there themselves who people who remembered those years well that's still the period of what uh marcus bucknell calls living memory that when irenaeus is writing he knows what christianity is not because he read about it in a book or because he heard about it from you know just some random group of christians he knows because a guy who learned christianity at the feet of an apostle taught it to him that's living memory and really after about 200 that kind of stops so in terms of like the scope of who i'm using i'm looking at that time period in terms of what i'm covering i'm purposely looking at issues on which you have the early christians very much united and on issues of of real importance and in three of the four issues i look at issues on which a number of protestants are on the opposite side of the issue uh i follow of all people a reformed theologian michael krueger who suggests that we ought to look to the second century church to see what they believed about doctrine worship behavior and writings so i look at okay i wonder what do they believe about the doctrine of baptism how does one become a christian what does baptism do all those questions on worship what was their worship like you know this is the spiritual heart of the guys we're talking about was there worship something that a protestant could endorse or did they believe in the real presence and the sacrifice of the mass and these things that the reformers found anethema and then on behavior uh looking specifically at this line do nothing without the bishop like what was the role of the bishop in early christianity is that some later medieval thing is that something that they slowly add on or is that there from the start and then finally on writings how do we know we got the right four gospels so those are kind of the areas i'm looking at those are the reasons i'm looking at partly because of kruger partly because they're they're really united on this this front that is it's a lot easier to kind of present that case and say well eighty percent of them thought x and 20 thought why no no we're going to take the really basic issues and see that protestants don't even agree with him on on the basic issues everyone's in union on yeah that's a fantastic framework right because of yeah of course right if if if we don't agree on on these things i mean that that i'm thinking the timeline again joe and that timeline is is is quite tight right yeah if you're going to argue that these things that look very catholic that i want to unpack in a second a few more you know in a bit more detail if we're going to say that these things were corrupted from what originally they they would have been right so say jesus taught the apostles the apostles you know john john taught polycarp maybe polyglot got it wrong when he passed it on right i mean if if we're that's a really quick turnover for the church falling into into chaos right not being rescued again until the reformation i mean that's is that's not even biblical to think that the church would collapse on itself that quickly i don't think exactly like the the idea that the gates of hell won't overcome the church but it'll have the lifespan of like a carton of milk is a problem or should be a problem like protestants should really grapple with how do i square now it's fine to say the church fathers are not individually infallible it's fine to say you'll find heretics even in the second century church all of those things are not controversial points but you can't use a kind of pope buddies nerfed to explain how like an entire church can go from believing the teachings of jesus to believing catholic teachings that according to your theology are not the teachings of jesus it's not you just can't say well people make mistakes to explain why everyone makes the same mistake in the same way and is convinced this mistake was taught to them by the apostles like that just doesn't cut it it doesn't make sense yeah i think that's very well said joe so on baptism right baptism you mentioned before a little little preview of this but the the church fathers are are pretty unanimous on what baptism is and does right in in the first 200 years of of writing that we have and it's quite different than say i would have been told the early church believed as evangelical i i grew up my faith believing that the baptism was a symbol right we did it when we turned you know we did it when we were ready to really commit to christ so i i think i was in in in high school say 16 or 17 or something i said you know what i want to commit to really following christ i'll be baptized it's a symbol for the community for myself that's all that is that's all it's ever been it's never been or done anything else it's what i believe my very narrow view of christian history we would have said this is what the early church believed if you were to press us but of course you begin to dig into that in the very first that really the pristine church before any corruption could have crept in right what does it look like back then a symbol uh no it doesn't so you complicate the picture slightly you have these largely symbolic baptisms meaning you have jewish ritual baths that that were meant to signify you're turning away from sin called a mikvah and you have john the baptist doing something pretty similar seeming where people turn away from sin and are richly washed but it doesn't bestow you know the holy spirit it doesn't give the imparting of you know these theological virtues it doesn't do any of the things we believe baptism does but then you have the early christians saying from scripture itself that their baptism does something different so let me just give you acts 19 and then we'll look at the futuristic evidence in a second so in acts 19 while paulus is at corinth paul passes through the upper country and comes to ephesus there he finds some disciples and he asks them did you receive the holy spirit when you believed and they say no we've never heard we've never even heard that there is a holy spirit paul then says into what then were you baptized they said into john's baptism and paul said john baptized the baptism of repentance telling the people to believe in the one who is to come after him that is jesus on hearing this they were baptized in the name of the lord jesus and when paul had laid his hands upon them the holy spirit came on them and they spoke with tongues and prophesied now the clear sense of the text is that christian baptism is something more than a baptism of repentance or else paul's description of john's baptism just makes no sense like if what he means is john's baptism does the same thing ours does but we mention the holy spirit explicitly then it's bizarre to distinguish it as his was a baptism of repentance pointing towards this greater thing to come and it's very curious that the coming of the holy spirit is is linked with this event happening that certainly looks like as paul is baptizing them and laying hands upon them something is actually happening that isn't reducible to a symbol now i'm sure you can find protestants who find some way away from the obvious implication of the text but let's just point out the the second half of what you were kind of asking which is the early christians thought the same thing that a plain reading of acts would tell you namely that baptism does something more than a baptism repentance more than a symbol and in the book i quote everett ferguson now he's a protestant scholar who is looking at the first 500 years of baptismal history and theology and liturgy in his book baptism in the early church and what he says and this is a very lengthy book i quote page 854 and i only mentioned that to tell you like he shows his work he he traces here's what everyone believed about baptism i do a little bit of that in the book but i'm focused on the first 200 years and i don't want the book to be a behemoth and so i can give you here's the basic view here are some people saying very catholic thing about baptism if you want the exhaustive you know if you want to spend your summer just reading about baptism in the early church by all means feel free uh and he says that although in developing the doctrine of baptism different authors had their particular favorite descriptions there is a remarkable agreement on the benefits received in baptism and then he also points out that these benefits are already present in the new testament texts two fundamental blessings are often repeated the person baptized received forgiveness of sins and the gift of the holy spirit the two fundamental doctrinal interpretations of baptism are sharing in the death and resurrection of christ with the attendant benefits and responsibilities and regeneration that means rebirth from above with its related ideas so already a fully fledged catholic doctrine of baptism is found from the beginning when when we go back and read what do people believe about baptism it isn't that this idea slowly creeps in he said for 500 years if you look at the first 500 years of christianity everyone gets what baptism does and says very similar things about it which by the way if paul is speaking in ephesians a baptism being a basic doctrine makes sense that we should expect people to have this remarkable unanimity this a widely shared understanding of a basic doctrine like baptism all of that squares neatly with the catholic claim about baptism i don't think you can square that coherently with a baptist vision of how you know how were all of these texts written in such a way that would lead a person to believe regenerative baptism and how did all of these christians believe in regenerative baptism if it wasn't true it seemed like a remarkable failure of the apostles to teach christianity if they couldn't get a basic doctrine expressed in a way that didn't lead 100 of people into heresy yeah and again you're bumping into that problem of okay so what we find in those first centuries the evidence that supports the catholic view no evidence that supports the view that it's merely symbolic and if we're going to say the church was pristine and was a certain way was evangelical and then corrupted and became catholic well the evidence so far baptism points to no it it was catholic from the beginning right the corruption of that actually was stephen jungle teaching that that merely sees this as a symbol right not the other way around i think that's that's you gotta you gotta sit in that tension if you're if you're not a not a catholic or not or not a christian denomination that believes in regenerative baptism which there are of course those denominations but you have to sit as evangelical as i would be in that tension and go okay so what do i do with this information if i can't find this in that pristine early church right yeah i think that's a good question and again i mentioned ignatius earlier i would just mention here that he's one of the earliest to point out that the reason jesus was baptized is to purify the waters of baptism oh yeah uh that he's baptized not because he needs it he doesn't even need to symbolically repent of sins when he's baptized the holy spirit descends upon him and you see this incredible theophany the the father proclaims this is my beloved son in whom i'm well-pleased and from that point on now we have a baptism that does something that jesus transforms what had previously been this symbolic baptism of john now ignatius is saying all that and so again it's like if if he's getting this wrong he's getting an interpretation of the gospel of john wrong and he's studied under john for years so how is it that you random protestant understand the gospel of john better than john's own students understood john and that's just one guy i mean we can multiply that because again it's all over it's everywhere how did no one understand this properly or you know luther towards the end of his life was plagued by the question are you or rather excuse me luther towards the end of his life describes how earlier in his life when he was beginning the reformation he was plagued by the question are you alone wise and he thought it was a demonic temptation i don't think the voice of humility is a demonic temptation i think recognizing that maybe you can learn from someone else is actually prudence and humility speaking and that he mistakenly shuts that voice out and concludes yeah i'm right everybody before me is wrong and again like the question i want to really push into protestants who are listening to this is would you accept someone doing that today i mean would you accept if someone said no one before me from the time of the apostles has ever understood this basic christian doctrine but let me explain it to you or would you say this person is full of themselves and they're not reliable they're they've been led astray by their own arrogance because certainly scripture gives us a clear indication like scripture tells us that we need to convince contend for the faith delivered once for all to the apostles and to watch out for people teaching new doctrines and if someone's coming along and saying here's a teaching that no one's ever gotten right before there's a really clear indication they're a false teacher yeah that gives me flashbacks joe because honestly that was one of those verses that i can picture sitting in church on a sunday morning in my even jungle church hearing that being being talked about multiple times right we were constantly on guard for these false teachers and these new and novel doctrines meanwhile we're sitting here in these new novel doctrines like you know that that lack of self-awareness is pretty remarkable but but really interesting yeah maybe let me just start two bible verses that related to this conversation the first would be second timothy uh chapter four verse three in which saint paul warns that the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching but having itching ears will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own liking and then the other would be second john chapter one verse nine in which he warns that anyone who goes ahead and does not abide in the doctrine of christ does not have god he who abides in the doctrine is both the father and the son so both of those are warning against a kind of theological progressivism that says here's some new teaching uh and it may be convincing sounding right that's the whole point about the itching ears you we shouldn't be so quick to assume that applies to other people and not to us we should have the humility to know like there are going to be teachings that i want to be true that aren't something like eternal security is a great example of like people really want to believe they can know that they can't go to hell and they don't need to sweat it anymore and it's a very comforting false teaching uh you know you don't have to you know strive mightily you don't have to do any of these things that like saint paul talks about about working out your faith with your salvation with fear and trembling like though you don't have to do any of that because you can just sit back and trust that from all eternity you were guaranteed a spot in heaven and it's over and done with your your ears twitch you want teachers who say that because it's very likable that's understandable but like we've got the scriptural evidence that says watch out for that like that should be a big red flag and then when you read the early christians and they didn't believe that kind of stuff it's like okay someone along the way introduced a more comfortable version of christianity we can actually say who we can actually trace the the first teachers of this doctrine that's a big red flag that this is not of god that if you can trace an idea to its origin and that origin isn't jesus christ and the apostles we've just disproven it in terms of like christian doctrine yeah yeah well said joe let's talk uh for a second i really want to get the bishops really badly but i don't want to miss the mask because it's so important too obviously let's touch on the mask for a minute because again of course the idea of communion as a merely a symbol is what i would have have doubled down on as evangelical right of course just a symbol right we even and i get i get nuts these days still when i read different different accounts of the last upper in different versions of of uh you know kids bibles or a kid's bible story and because it makes me bonkers when they literally the authors literally changed the words of jesus to make him say this is like my body because gosh golly joe he does not say that right in the text which drives me crazy when we're we're changing this for children right that makes me more you know that's a that's a doctrinal change that's a change that that is prompted by a certain view of what what christ said but anyway it should be a red flag if you're changing the words of jesus to make him sound protestant he must not sound protestant without alteration yeah i could get worked up over that for a while but that's what i would have believed right is that communion that christ was saying this is like my body that is not i discovered and you let us know too what what the earliest christians believed right what yeah so we have very clear witnesses to the fact that they believe the eucharist is jesus that it is jesus in his body and blood and we get this in a lot of places one place we get this is in st justin martyr's description of the mass in which he he lays out what happens in the liturgy and it's remarkably like what you would get if you walked into a catholic church today there's a couple very small differences in terms of the order of things but the ingredients are the same like one difference is we we have a clear old testament epistle and gospel reading now where he describes him reading the memos of the apostles which sounds like they're reading the gospel we don't know if they read the old testament we don't know what role the writings of saint paul had they clearly were focusing on the gospels as we do today you know the life and ministry of jesus christ is the center point of the liturgy in terms of liturgy of the word but anyway when justin gets to the eucharist uh he has a lengthy beautiful description of the thanksgiving which again is from this greek word for eucharist uh and then he studies for not as common bread and come and drink do we receive these but in like manners jesus christ our savior having been made flesh by the word of god had both flesh and blood for our salvation so likewise we have been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of his word and from which our body and flesh by transmutation are nourished is the flesh and blood of that jesus who was made flesh and then he goes on from that and then points out the this is my body this is my blood kind of language and he doesn't have to change the wording because he believes this is his body and this is his blood but notice that principle of identity that is that the eucharist is jesus in his body and blood that's the early christian teaching but what's more it we can see this teaching come up in a really interesting way in the the fight against gnosticism in a couple of places including in justin's writing uh i want to stress here there's another important detail that i haven't really highlighted but it's worth saying that we have been taught when justin says that he's making it clear he's he's not saying as a theologian my best take of what jesus meant when he said this is this it's no no this is what we believe as christians because this is what was handed down to us by the apostles and he's saying this in 160 when he can say that he is about as far from the death of john as we are from like the beatles appearance on the ed mcmahon show like it's not that ancient of history there's plenty of people who would still remember it like it's just not that long ago uh and so when he's saying this is what we've been taught that that's a really good indication he's speaking for the whole christian community and he's writing to the romans to explain christianity to defend christianity hence the name first apology it's a defense of christianity and so he's writing not just about his own idiosyncratic views but second he's making it clear these are views that the the christians have received from the apostles that's what they've been taught so with that said how does this function in the fight against narcissism in a couple of places uh number one uh when saint ignatius of antioch again back in like 107 is writing against probably the gnostics are definitely what are called dosatis they're people who believe that the incarnation wasn't real that jesus only spiritually appeared to be bodily but he was basically just like a ghost so he's writing to the the church in smyrna and he's warning them not to have anything to do with those people and uh he very clearly says to abstain from them because they don't confess the eucharist to be the body and blood of jesus christ and he warns that they incur damnation when they do that this is a pretty big tell like already he's not arguing hey the church and spirit you should really start believing the eucharist is jesus he's saying because the docitists these gnostics or whatever they were don't believe that jesus really has a body then they can't believe that the eucharist is really his body because i don't think he happened you know they he had no body on the cross he has no body in the eucharist etc uh a protestant encountering this i think it's fair to say would say hey these guys are heretics because they deny the incarnation these guys are heretics because they deny the cross and he says all that and and all that's true but his focal point in the letter is in chapter seven when he talks about how they deny the eucharist and therefore we can't be in communion with them because they don't believe in communion like they they don't believe in eucharistic community we can't be in the pleaseful communion and that in so doing they incur damnation now he's already using belief in the real presence as a litmus test and treating it as a sin mortally to deny that's really big that's again 107. then flash forward to justin who i already mentioned uh he's talking about gnostics and he says then again how can they that the flesh which is nourished with the blood of the lord and with his excuse with the body of the lord and with his blood goes to corruption and does not partake of life let them therefore either alter their opinion or cease from offering the things just mentioned but our opinion is in accordance with the eucharist and the eucharist in turn establishes our opinion so a couple things there first he's clearly arguing for bodily resurrection based on a eucharistic theology he's using the eucharist to prove this disputed point of bodily resurrection which ironically we're in a situation now where protestants believe in bodily resurrection deny the eucharist like this argument couldn't work from a protestant it would be incoherent for a protestant to offer something like this against the gnostics and so it points to what a radically different world justin lives in that he takes it for granted uh that okay we all believe in the real presence we all believe that the eucharistic offering is truly the sacrifice of christ therefore anyone who believes something that's incompatible with that must be wrong so i think all of that is just enormous now if i may i know it's kind of a long answer but i want to maybe add one thing that the offering part is really important because it's sacrificial language that the mass isn't just jesus is bodily present but the mass is actually the sacrifice of jesus that we are consuming the food sacrifice offered to god on california and the food sacrifice is his flesh given for the life of the world that all of that would make total sense to someone coming from a jewish or a pagan background because jews and pagans alike had food offerings you know you slay the passover lamb and then you eat it jesus is a new passover lamb so it makes sense that we eat his flesh uh from a medieval perspective or a perspective like the reformers this looks like re-sacrificing christ because the idea of like the meal completing the sacrifice rather than re-sacrificing has now been kind of distorted in the minds of a lot of people so even a lot of people today are like well isn't the sacrifice of the mass re-sacrificing christ the answer is no it's completing the sacrifice but the the point here is that this notion of the sacrifice of the mass really is universal and it's not just me who says that and it's not just like a handful of scholars like martin luther argued that there is no belief in the church more generally received or more firmly held than that the mass is a good work and a sacrifice and calvin said that satan had somehow not only obscured and perverted but altogether obliterated and abolished the lord's supper by blinding almost the whole world into the belief that the mass is a sacrifice and oblation for obtaining the remission of sins that you don't find a more foundational more universally agreed upon belief than this and the reformers knew that while rejecting it that's how radical the reformation is like this is not oh you read it this way read it that way but like people have always disagreed no no it's like everyone always knew it meant this and i think it means that and then luther actually said it's universally believed and not only says it gives reasons why it's universally believed he says the canon of the mass itself regularly uses his sacrificial language it says these gifts these offerings these holy sacrifices this oblation there's a distinct prayer in which it asks that the sacrifice be accepted like sacrifice of abel christ is called the victim of the father it's even the victim of the altar the church fathers agree on this a great number of authorities agree on this in the usage that has been constantly observed throughout the world that's what he said it's not just like the western church believes it's the west and the east the oriental church all everyone agrees on this everyone's always believed this and luther's like i don't know i don't i don't believe it that's really the stakes that we're looking at here this is again not an issue in which there's like a 60 40 split within christianity this was universally what christianity taught until someone just came along and said maybe not yeah that's remarkable and you can find of course you can find writings where people may sound like they are disagreeing with the idea of sacrifice of the mass or the real presence but what we find if we're if we're working with a thesis that the early church was somehow corrupted i don't think you can find those for quite a while but everybody else everybody seems to be speaking you know just justin and aaron are speaking quite literally in those earliest writings so if we're saying that no no no it was default one way and it changed well first of all luther and calvin aren't saying that right where they were where they could but say if if joe even joke on the street is saying that we just don't have the evidence in the earliest church that that was that was being being debated or believed or or discussed right yeah i mean this is the the kind of thing there's sometimes this attempt to um make luther more in continuity with history than luther thought he was or to make protestants more continuous with the catholicity of the church than they believed they were they knew they were rejecting this they knew no one before us thought these things but we think they're right because we're these very enlightened 16th century thinkers and it's just a dangerous road to go down and the same way that if someone did the same thing now as an enlightened 21st century thinker we'd quickly spot the kind of hubris and the arrogance of this i mean this is not long before you get a group of people calling themselves the enlightenment and declaring everyone before them as having lived in the dark ages there's a little bit of a narcissism going on it's in the air it's in the water because you have the the amazing explosion of the renaissance not long before this they you you do have this incredible explosion of knowledge and some people get a little puffed up on their own uh wisdom and brilliance and knowledge and think they know more about history than they do and think they know more about theology than they do like it's important that the closer someone is to the time when animal sacrifice was widespread in paganism and in judaism the more they seem to get what's going on in the sacrifice of the mass because they have a framework to understand it and so even a catholic today has to kind of work through what we mean by the bloody and the unbloody dimensions of the sacrifice because it's just totally foreign you don't see people sacrificing animals regularly unless you live like really close to like some santeria cult you don't regularly engage with like animal sacrificers and and so it's just an important thing like i honestly understand why the reformers are confused and scandalized by this sacrificial theology because they don't have a framework to understand it the earliest christians did and they have a much better theology of sacrifice yeah very well said i don't know a lot of animal sacrifices either around here in canada so so it's it's hard the context yeah it's challenging i do want to touch a minute on the bishop because this for me was i mean this is the thing out of all the things that i encountered when i began reading the early church fathers i think that i got an e-book of the anthony fathers for like three dollars off of amazon and i was blown away by like the the 1800 pages or so of of like these you know i totally scandalized by how much writing there was from the early church and i began to read and i encountered this idea and actually the funny thing is i had dr john bergsma on this show a number of times now but wants to tell his conversion story and he mentions the same line that he read that for him just stopped him in his track because it was the same the same line for me that then you echo back to us in this book the idea that of doing nothing without the bishop and of course my idea of the early church before it became corrupted and politicized and before bishops were installed and cardinals and all this structure and hierarchy was this kind of shirt this this disparate church spread out across across the middle east you know little little home church kind of cells of christians with no structure and no organization whatsoever that the apostles just kind of started and left to flower and then i encountered this in the earliest church christian writings this idea of the bishop and i went what what is a bishop what that sounds really catholic yeah yeah i think it's uh i often very eye-opening because you'll find a lot i mean you'll even find scholars both protestant scholars but catholic scholars and and secular scholars who claim some variation oh originally it was very disorganized and then the structure came later and they're taking essentially an evolutionary view that it evolved from a simpler thing into a more complex thing but they're really imposing that on the evidence the evidence doesn't say that really so any kind of emergent view this idea that it was originally disorganized the organization came later requires believing three things number one that the early christians felt free to change the structure of the churches bequeathed to them by the apostles but whatever the apostles gave to them they felt okay changing that number two that therefore there were various types of church governance in the early church some would have changed it this way some would have changed it that way and number three that for pragmatic reasons or some reason every local church eventually decided on this three-tiered system of government the bishop priests or presbyters deacons and this is in technical terms called the mono-episcopal there's one bishop per church none of those three things are true not like in fact the evidence argues against them so first the idea that the early christians felt free to change the structure they clearly didn't first clement in 96 talks about how like this is something that we've received and are meant to carry on second the idea that there's various types of church governance is just not true the only evidence we ever see of any clear structure is of the three-tiered structure we don't see anything of like a clearly disorganized church you know we can give you the names of who the bishops were in many of these early cities and we're not from like local legend we mean like from ignatius writing to polycarp or mentioning the bishop by name and mentioning who the presbyters are mentioning who the deacons are like we can tell you exactly who was in the church and who was in these positions of authority the people claiming originally was presbyteral or congregational and then it like evolved it's a fantasy you can just say okay great who were those co-ruling leaders what were their names tell me about them when did they rule like how did that get started because every church founded by the apostles kept written written records uh churchillian mentions this in 200 irenaeus loosed it in 180 that all of the churches founded by the apostles kept records of who all their bishops were from the time of the apostles onwards so unless everyone throughout the church is just lying and inventing evidence that there's just no evidence of this and in fact a great deal of evidence against there's documentary evidence that there are bishops from the start now leon morris in the evangelical dictionary of theology puts it this way he says nowhere is there evidence of a violent struggle as would be natural if a divinely ordained congregationalism or presbyterianism were overthrown the same threefold ministry is seen as universal throughout the early church as soon as there is sufficient evidence to show us the nature of the ministry and it's clear even from the writings of clement that this is not for pragmatic reasons this is because they view it as an inheritance from judaism bequeathed to them by jesus and the apostles in judaism you have the high priest the priests and the levites in the new testament you have the bishop the presbyters later called priests and the deacons and the just as israel wasn't free to just dispense with the high priest if they wanted to or dispense with the levites if they got inconvenient so two christians weren't free to just throw off this kind of leadership structure and when the christians in particular areas did rebel you've got people like clement writing to them telling them to obey their leaders you've got people like the writer of the epistle to the hebrews telling them to obey their leaders you know so it's very clear you've got people like ignatius of antioch repeatedly saying to by your leaders and saying very significantly that without that three-tiered structure of bishop priest deacon you have no church that the early christian understanding was not church means wherever like two or three are gathered or just anyone who believes in their heart jesus is lord no no church has a concrete meaning and it's structural so when people say oh it doesn't you know the example you gave earlier if your former pastor it doesn't mean catholic church in that sense ignatius would say yes it does you know like very clearly here's what it means so there's a lot more that could be said about that but in terms of his teeing up the general issue i'd say it's right there and it's right there from remarkably early on whereas it's just an utter absence of evidence in the other direction yeah and of course the big question for that right is okay so if this is the uncorrupted earliest church in its infancy that then became corrupted at some point when when but they had bishops back here and it's quite clear and i don't have a bishop now in my evangelical church we don't even have any kind of we don't have what what do i do with this and for me that was a huge shocker because i thought we don't even have in our language idea of a bishop we we have maybe some elders in our church that we that we elect democratically and they're accountable to a senior pastor who is appointed by the elders or you know the denomination oversees this or some kind of structure and they they vary from denomination to domination from church to church and non-ethnical churches have even less of a structure than that because there's no domination they're they're accountable to we had nothing to do with with like a a bishop and i read this and i went well where's my bishop like if the earliest church believed that the church is where the bishop was we shouldn't do anything without the bishop when did that stop being believed right and and i think joe in all of this you begin to see that this well first of all like you the highly book suggests the early church was catholic and that that corrupted church it wasn't it wasn't the catholic church that corrupted some original church that was there before i i would have had to admit that as an evangelical i was in the corrupted church i was in the church that had changed things that from infancy christians believed and and that's a ton of bricks like that's a yeah i really like that way of putting it like if the claim is the problem with catholics is they believed something the early christians didn't and then you say okay cool if you're against that and everybody in the other church believes in bishops and you think bishops are expendable or unnecessary or even false you're literally doing the thing that you've accused catholics of doing you're literally doing the thing that you think invalidates catholicity how would that not invalidate your own position i think that's a i think that's a great question i think the question any well-meaning protestants should ask themselves when they kind of encounter this evidence yeah i i think so okay the last thing i want to ask you is drop this up is is the idea because i think this is the other comment that can maybe uh escape you from asking these questions to begin with and this was put to me by somebody that i was my wife and i either was converting we went to see a family therapist honestly joe to work through the experience of me converting from this faith that we had shared for our whole entire marriage and and it it was uh maybe a poor choice in the therapist because it wasn't necessarily friendly to catholics and and grilled me a little bit more than more than i would have been willing to pay for if i had known in advance we were getting into but one of the things that that that he put to me he said okay so you like this church you've read the church father's like on and on but he said why is older better like why does it matter that that you are trying to get closer to this older version of christianity why is why is that important and i think this is i don't think it's good i don't think it's a very good question now that i thought about it for for almost a decade i don't think it's a very good question to begin with but it is a question that i think somebody could use to escape asking these questions all together i think it is a question you could use i think once you begin to peel back that onion it's not that great but what do you think about that kind of the idea that why is why is older joe why do i why do i even care what the earliest christians believe why is that a better version of christianity so there were a lot of things i could say in response to this but one of them just to keep it simple i would say these are people who are in a position to know what the apostles taught and so we we basically have a trilemma either they're lying to us or they were themselves deceived somehow you know the polycarp was lying about what john told them and so he tricks irenaeus or they're telling us the truth and this like what they believe in the second century really is apostolic christianity now again like we can account for like people making little mistakes in the same way that you can believe an eyewitness and still think an eyewitness is getting some details wrong eyewitnesses do that regularly but if you think everyone is wrong about the major issues that's a really different thing than like this this eyewitness although reliable still gets a few details wrong uh that's what we're left with and if you think that's basically if you go with that they're liars or that they're deceived you're not left with christianity because how do i know matthew mark luke and john or the books that belong in the bible is ultimately because these people tell me well those are the ones written by the apostles and the other ones are fake i don't have some external means of verifying that i have to trust that they're reliable and if i don't trust that i'm not left again i'm not left with anything so that would be kind of the argument i would make that if you're going to reject the christians of the second century you're not left with protestantism you're just left with nothing uh you're just not left with christianity at all if you're going to believe the christians of the second century you're not looking for the promise from them either you're left with catholicism and and so just to maybe put some meat on the bones there when we were just talking about bishops and one of the churches saint ignatius of antioch writes to is the church of ephesus now of course there's a church of ephesus in scripture this is the same church it's a community of believers who had been founded by paul cultivated by paul who taught them a lot about the doctrine of the church if you read the letter to the ephesians it has a lot to say about the church and the structure of the church and then like the nature of the church and its relationship to christ he even says that the total christ is jesus the head and the church's body like it's a really radical endorsement of like a high ecclesiology in a way that i i think a lot of protestants are frankly a little uncomfortable with when ignatius is writing them not that long later around 107 he greets their bishop by name and their bishop is onesimus now if that name sounds familiar it's because there's an onisimus in scripture the escaped slave in the letter to philemon now protestant scholars like ff bruce have pointed out this is probably the same guy and the reason is probably the same guy is it explains a mystery which is how we got philemon in the bible you know the other letters saint paul's circulars where he writes to a church and then they pass it around we get why those are there you know he writes to the romans they're going to keep and preserve the letter and copy it the letter to philemon is kind of an embarrassing letter it's a extremely personal and b rebuking a slave owner for mistreating his slave basically and so how did that letter get there well if philemon goes on to become the bishop of ephesus which was an important center in compiling the new testament texts problem solved it makes sense why he would know about that letter why he might find that important he would know it was authentically paul lined you wouldn't know other ones uh and so all of that means now i think granted that's that part's a little speculative someone could reject the last two minutes of what i'm saying and not really hurt the catholic case but if it's true if ff bruce and these others are right well great then we know that one of these soul bishops of an apostolic church was one of the people praised in scripture by name that's a problem if you think that he's a heretic or an error for being the sole bishop of ephesus like it starts you've now called into question this praiseworthy church you've now called into question this praiseworthy saint and in the problems multiply from there you can do the same all over the place the church is praised in revelation we later hear many of them written to by ignatius and they clearly have this same one bishop per city structure you know again it's all over the place so you end up having to throw out a fair number of the cast of characters in the new testament is unreliable in order to support the protestant case on these issues yeah and it gets more and more complicated i think to begin to to do those kinds of things i think uh becomes the case i'd argue uh joe it's been a blast as it always tends to be and time flies by when i'm talking with you um so thank you i think that's a great place to pres press possible to pin this conversation and entice readers to dig into more things you have to say and you have a lot to say because you're you're very busy you're constantly popping up my news feeds with new i don't know where you find time to write all these articles on top of your books and your speaking engagements uh where do you want to point people towards to find out more to follow you and that kind of thing joe yeah i'll i mean i've got my own blog shameless potpourri uh shamelesspoppy.com but a lot of stuff i'm doing right now is overcatholic.com for catholic answers because that's i work and i really enjoy doing all that stuff if you want this book you can get it a lot of places you can get it at your local catholic bookstore or on amazon but i'd really recommend the catholic answer store uh i think you'll get the best rate we're doing a bulk thing now like if you've got a bible study or you know book study or if you want to get it for your parish if you want to get like 20 books i think we're giving them away for like three dollars a book right now and i don't think you're going to get a better deal than that so if you want to save a lot of money i'm cool with it just go get it the lowest price you can find i'm more interested in you reading it than me getting an extra dollar or two off of the sale so you know please by all means i'd say check it out pray about it and see where the lord leads you that's fantastic and i'll put links as well to your past appearances on this show because pope peter also is gosh i think the best book that you can find right now on defending the papacy joe it's just fantastic it's it's dense and packed with everything you can possibly want and imagine to defend the papacy so kudos on on that one as well and i'll put links to those things uh in the show notes joe and i want to say thank you i want to say god bless the work that you are doing uh catholic answers and your blog in in in sharing this stuff with the church and with us helping to equip us to explain and defend the faith and uh and to to make us think i mean i'm thinking about those listeners who are who are hearing our voices and gosh there's a lot to think about if you're if you're trying to be authentically christian as the early christians were okay thank you very much thanks for having me on the show i really appreciate it and you know count on my prayers if you're a person listening to this on that journey thanks joe take care yeah thanks

Channel: The Cordial Catholic

Views: 6,410

Keywords: Early Church, Mike Aquilina, Mary, Mother of God, Jesus, God, Bible, Christianity, Catholicism, Catholic, Christian, history, worship, saints, statutes, Scripture, Reformation, theology, podcasting, podcast, convert, conversion, Evangelical, philosophy, Luther, Martin, Calvin, Anabaptist, Lutheran, Reformed, Sola Scriptura, lecture, author, biblical, Eucharist, Communion, Lord's Supper, Last Supper, biblical theology, covenant, Old Testament, New Testament, transubstantiation, Vatican II, Vatican, Pope

Id: 6tIF-cYr0x8

Length: 79min 46sec (4786 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 23 2022