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Writer's pictureBible Brian

Paul disagrees with the Catholic claim to have produced the Bible


It is frustratingly common for Catholics to claim that the Catholic Church must have authority because it is the Church that produced the scriptures. According to their argument, no Catholic Church = no New Testament, as the Catholic in the screenshot claims.

There are a number of problems with this claim, but the most obvious, and the most worrying, is that it goes against one of the few things Catholicism and Christianity have in common. That is, we both believe that the scriptures are inspired by none other than God Himself.

First, let us consider that the Old Testament was actually compiled by the Jews, with whom Catholics disagree on a number of issues, some justified (e.g. Jews do not believe Jesus is the Messiah, Catholics do), others not justified (e.g. Jews believe it is an abomination to communicate with the dead, whereas Catholics attempt to communicate with dead saints). Thus, Catholics implicitly admit that the mere act of compiling scripture does not give an organisation authority over it. Why is this? Because of divine inspiration, of course!


Mankind has never had the option to obey or disobey God. If an organisation recognises as scripture that which is not scripture (like Catholics do with the Deuterocanon), that is still not scripture because it was not divinely inspired. On the flip side, if someone does not recognise scripture as scripture, it remains scripture because it is divinely inspired. Thus, even if there is a single denomination with a legitimate historical claim to have compiled the New Testament scriptures, all they could claim to have done is correctly recognise the scriptures that existed. It is undeniably helpful to have all 66 books compiled into one easy volume, but it is not essential for their canonicity or their authority, nor does doing so grant a Church supreme authority over them. Claiming that there is no New Testament without the Catholic Church places the Catholic Church in authority over God, an act commonly referred to as "blasphemy".


The fact that the scriptures are inspired by God removes every claim the Catholic Church could ever have held to have produced it. Not only is it false in that the canon both existed and was recognised before the Catholic Church, and inconsistent in that the same argument would lead us to grant the Jews the same authority as Catholicism, but it is outright blasphemous because it takes the authority that only God possesses and places it in the hands of a religion so antithetical to the very scriptures that it actually banned them. Such a Church has no claim to the name "Christian", much less the one true Church of Christ.

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