One of the greatest difficulties in debating Catholics is that they simply cannot stick to the Scriptures. There's always some history, whether real or imagined, that they will appeal to in an attempt to prove the validity of their Church. 9 times out of 10, these arguments are fairly easy to respond to. Rather than going to an old Christian source, Christians never need to stray beyond the first Christian source: The Bible. There is no Council, Reformer, Church "Father", not a single human being or organisation that any Christian needs to worry about, because we have the Bible.
But Catholics think they have the solution to that problem: The Catholic Church produced the Bible. According to the narrative, the canon was officially given to the world at the Council of Carthage in 397 A.D. Therefore, according to the Catholic Church, they basically own the Bible, and thus have ultimate authority over it. Thus, even if the Bible explicitly disagrees with them, they have every right to re-interpret it for you, and there's nothing you can do about it. This is an argument I refer to as the "Catholic claim to fame", and in no particular order, this article is a summary of all the major flaws in it.
The Deuterocanon
The canonicity of the Apocrypha has been an ongoing debate for more than 2,000 years. According to the New Catholic Encyclopedia, "St. Jerome distinguished between canonical books and ecclesiastical books. The latter he judged were circulated by the Church as good spiritual reading but were not recognized as authoritative Scripture. The situation remained unclear in the ensuing centuries...For example, John of Damascus, Gregory the Great, Walafrid, Nicolas of Lyra and Tostado continued to doubt the canonicity of the deuterocanonical books. According to Catholic doctrine, the proximate criterion of the biblical canon is the infallible decision of the Church. This decision was not given until rather late in the history of the Church at the Council of Trent. The Council of Trent definitively settled the matter of the Old Testament Canon. That this had not been done previously is apparent from the uncertainty that persisted up to the time of Trent". (Emphasis mine).
The Catholic Church, therefore, has a very weak claim to have produced the canon. First, the argument itself assumes the Catholic Church waited more than 300 years to finally decide which books God inspired, leaving the Church without the word of God. This means the Catholic Church would have been extremely inept, even ignoring the open-ended question of the Deuterocanon. But here we see that even Catholic sources admit that the Catholic Church just left the canonical status of the Deuterocanon open-ended for another 12 centuries. One might say, ironically, the canonisation of the Deuterocanong was done in protest of the Reformation. Now who are the Protestants?
But what's even worse is that when they finally made that decision, they got it wrong. They declared as Scripture what is not Scripture. The Deuterocanon was not inspired by God, nor did the Jews, to whom He committed His oracles (and who were the originators of the Deuterocanon) believe it to be so.
So, what we have here is a church that claims to have produced the canon, yet allegedly waited 300 years to do so, then waited another 1200 years to solve the most persistent dispute regarding the canon (conveniently doing so when people were starting to question their authority as the Bible became more widely available in the language of the laity), and they got it wrong. This is the church that supposedly produced our Bible? I wouldn't trust such an inept organisation to deliver a Christmas card to my next door neighbor, let alone saving my eternal soul!
Banning the Bible
Aside from not knowing exactly which books belong in the Bible, the Catholic Church has a very nasty history of suppressing it. In 1229, the Council of Toulouse banned the laity from even owning a Bible, followed by the Council of Oxford in 1408, which criminalised the translation thereof. Well-educated Christians, familiar with either Latin or the original Bible languages, were cruelly persecuted, even to the death, for daring to rebel against this declaration. Most notably, William Tyndale is famous for having smuggled his Bibles into England via hay bales and other mediums, was strangled before being burned at the stake for this "crime".
The Catholic Church was, as it still is today, so afraid of the Bible that it would do everything in its power to stop people from reading it without their permission. If they produced the Bible, why would they go to such lengths to get rid of it? There are two possibilities: Either the Catholic Church significantly changed since 397, or it never produced the Bible in the first place. Both of these possibilities are at least slightly correct. As we will continue to establish, the Catholic Church has no legitimate claim over the Bible, but on top of that, the Catholic Church has been evolving ever since it crawled out of Hell. The Catholic Church of the modern day is not even the same Church as it was even 200 years ago, much less 1,700 years ago.
Unlike Catholicism, which can't even prove it existed in the first century, Judaism can prove its own historicity from both Old and New Testaments. The first direct reference to Jews by name is in 2 Kings 25:25, and Romans 3:1-2 even flat out says that to the Jews were committed the oracles (His communications, His intentions, His laws) of God. It was the Jews, not the Catholics, who wrote and recognised the Old Testament Scriptures (as well as the Deuterocanon, which they rejected as Scripture).
Thus, this entire discussion is utterly meaningless. No Catholic worth his salt would accept the argument "the Jews produced the Old Testament, therefore you have to accept their interpretation of it", yet this is the same logic behind the argument that the Catholic Church (allegedly) produced the Bible. It's not that Christians stole the Old Testament from the Jews, but that we recognise what it says, especially in the light of the New Testament, which details the fulfillment of many of its prophecies about the Messiah. Even if Catholics could make the same claim to have produced the New Testament, which of course they can't, the fact remains they are just as abysmal at understanding what's in it as the Jews were when they put Jesus on the cross, if not more so. At least the Jews don't typically deny the power of the written language to convey a specific message, instead insisting "we produced the Old Testament, therefore we tell you what it says", like Catholics do.
In theory, both Catholics and Christians believe the Bible is the inspired word of God. It has been my experience that a large portion of them spit on the Bible, and some even call those who believe it "madmen afflicted by Biblical Religious Obsession", but in order to be consistent, not to mention in order to avoid blasphemy, Catholics must admit that the Bible is divinely inspired.
This causes a huge problem. If the Scriptures are the word of God, this means they were already authoritative from the moment they were written. Even before they were written in the case of the many examples of when God actually spoke aloud. So how can the Catholic Church, or any human organisation, attempt to make any claim to having produced it?
When the Council of Carthage, or indeed anyone, declared/declares which books are canonical, there are two possibilities: They're right or they're wrong. If God inspired the Book of John, for example, anyone who says John is Scripture is correct. The Catholic Church is right to call John Scripture. But they are not right because they are the Catholic Church, they are right because they made a factual statement that literally anyone on earth can make, and anyone who says otherwise is wrong. On the flip side, if God did not inspire a book, such as the Book of Judith, anyone who says Judith is Scripture is wrong. Whether in 397 A.D., 1548 A.D., or even 2023 A.D., Judith can never be Scripture simply because God did not inspire it.
And so you see that even if we are extremely generous to the Catholic, even if we say Catholicism can trace its origins back to the first century, even if we pretend the Catholic Church has held exactly the same views for nearly 2,000 years, even if we say Carthage was a Catholic council and the first organisation to officially and correctly declare the canon, the absolute best the Catholic Church could ever claim is that they were the first to correctly recognise which books were divinely inspired. This does not give them exclusive rights to declare or interpret it. To quote one author named Brian Schwertley, "It is an absurd thing to give finite creatures a supreme authority over the Bible simply for admitting what was already true."
But the Catholic Church weren't the first to recognise Scripture, because as it happens, there is ample evidence, even from within the Bible, that the Scriptures were organically recognised, and in some cases divinely revealed to be Scripture, almost immediately upon having been written. As an example, in 1 Timothy 5:18, Paul says that the Scripture says "...you shall not muzzle an ox while it treads out the grain" and "The laborer is worthy of his wages". The first statement comes from Deuteronomy 25:4. The second statement comes from Luke 10:7. In other words, Paul saw Luke's gospel as being equal in authority to Deuteronomy more than 300 years before Carthage. Peter saw Paul's epistles as Scripture, too, as in 2 Peter 3:14-16, he describes Paul's epistles as being something which are sometimes hard to understand, but are twisted by unstable and untaught men, just as "...the rest of the Scriptures". The very fact that the Scriptures recognise themselves as such flies in the face of the idea that the Catholic Church could have produced the Bible in 397 A.D. Was Peter wrong/lying? Were his words completely meaningless until the oh-so-glorious Catholic Church showed up to give him authority? Or is it not a more logical conclusion that the Church didn't need to wait for a Council to identify Scripture for them?
The Church recognised, and even listed Scripture early on
Aside from the internal evidence that the Church recognised the New Testament Scriptures even as they were being written, there are also several fragments of evidence that the modern canon we have today is what was being used way before 390 A.D. The most famous of these would be the Muratorian Fragment, which is dated to around 180 A.D. Of the 27 New Testament books, the Muratorian Fragment lists 22 of them.
Furthermore, Athanasius, the 20th bishop of Alexandria, wrote an almost perfect list of the canonical works in his 39th festal letter in 367 A.D. In it, he wrote "Continuing, I must without hesitation mention the scriptures of the New Testament; they are the following: the four Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, after them the Acts of the Apostles and the seven so-called catholic epistles of the apostles -- namely, one of James, two of Peter, then three of John and after these one of Jude. In addition there are fourteen epistles of the apostle Paul written in the following order: the first to the Romans, then two to the Corinthians and then after these the one to the Galatians, following it the one to the Ephesians, thereafter the one to the Philippians and the one to the Colossians and two to the Thessalonians and the epistle to the Hebrews and then immediately two to Timothy, one to Titus and lastly the one to Philemon. Yet further the Revelation of John."
But that's only 30 years before Carthage. Aside from the aforementioned Muratorian Fragment, is there anything earlier? As it turns out, yes. Origen, in his work "Homilies on the Book of Joshua", gave an almost full list of the New Testament books as a parable. There is one dispute in that he may or may not have included Revelation in this particular quote, however other works of Origen reveal that he certainly considered it canonical. All of this shows that even as early as 250 A.D., the canon was quite well known within the Church.
We agree on canon because it IS canonical
The real reason Christians and Catholics mostly agree on the canon isn't because Christians accept the authority of the Catholic Church in this one instance, but because we accept the authority of God in all instances. Even if it could be shown that the Catholic Church was the first to list the entire canon (it can't), this would be akin to saying "I was the first to draw a map, therefore other cartographers are borrowing from me." In reality, a map is based on the geography of the land. If one person draws a map, then another person comes along, draws a map, and it's almost identical to the "original", that's not because the second cartographer borrowed from the first, it's because the map is based on reality. Similarly, canonical lists are, or at the very least should be, based on reality. Therefore, if Christians and Catholics have the same canon, it's because the works we agree on are canonical. This is also the reason Christians can deviate from Catholicism's canon with regard to the aforementioned Deuterocanon. They're not "on our map" because they're not "on our land".
Conclusion
Above, we have several reasons the Catholic Church simply cannot be responsible for having produced the Bible. Being as generous as is logically possible, the most the Catholic Church can ever claim to have done is correctly assessed which books God inspired. Ironically, this is something they failed to do in the modern day, as they have officially declared as Scripture a group of erroneous books that even the Jews did not recognise as inspired. The Jews genuinely did have the authority to discount these works, as unlike the Catholic Church, they can both prove their historicity and their authority from the Bible. What the Jews do not have the authority to do is suppress the Scriptures, which the Catholic Church has done in the past, nor does their history with it give them exclusive rights to interpret it, or lend even the slightest credibility to their interpretations, as even the Catholic Church would be forced to admit.
Therein lies the problem. Just as modern Judaism has several errors, so also is Roman Catholicism full of heresy. Heresy which is easily refuted by the Bible. So where do Catholics go from there? They go here, to this, the most ridiculous of all the arguments they could have made. In order to avoid being refuted by the Bible, they resort to the same tactic they have had since the 13th century: Claim exclusive rights to it. It's not that the Bible refutes Catholicism, it's that you don't understand it because you're not part of the Church that produced it! It's a gigantic cop out. A desperate default answer to any unanswerable question. Catholicism cannot survive the scrutiny of the Scriptures, and so their only defence is to ensure they never have to face that scrutiny. Unfortunately for them, the Reformation happened, the Bible is now available in many common languages, and so the public ignorance they enjoy in the modern day is due to Catholic laziness alone. If more Catholics would read their Bibles today, there would be fewer Catholics to read them tomorrow.
And now for some satire!
Behold, a list of some of the Catholic Church's greatest achievements!
(Double click to see full sized images)
