Paul reshaping the church

[Aractus]

And while I'm here athrock, why don't you explain this to me:

"We prohibit also that the laity should be permitted to have the books of the Old and the New Testament; unless anyone from the motives of devotion should wish to have the Psalter or the Breviary for divine offices or the hours of the blessed Virgin; but we most strictly forbid their having any translation of these books." (Council of Toulouse 1229 Canon 14. Translation: Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe 1980 Peters E (ed.))

This was reaffirmed by the Council of Tarragona (1234), the Anti-Wycliffite Statute of 1401, the Council of Constance (1414-1418) during which they declared Wycliffe a heretic (4 May 1415), and in 1428 (about 43 years after his death) Church officials exhumed his rotting corpse and publicly burned it by request of Pope Martin V. In the years leading up to Wycliffite's death, the Catholic Church had two rivalling Popes. Do you really expect me to believe in direct apostolic succession in the first century when it's clearly unproven, and we have other examples such as this one where succession was contested! That's how the Catholic church split from the Orthodox church to begin with (each branch denounced the other). But we're getting a little sidetracked here.

The next major thing happens in the Council of Trent's Rules on Prohibited Books:

"Since it is clear from experience that if the Sacred Books are permitted everywhere and without discrimination in the vernacular, there will by reason of the boldness of men arise therefrom more harm than good, the matter is in this respect left to the judgment of the bishop or inquisitor, who may with the advice of the pastor or confessor permit the reading of the Sacred Books translated into the vernacular by Catholic authors to those who they know will derive from such reading no harm but rather an increase of faith and piety, which permission they must have in writing. Those, however, who presume to read or possess them without such permission may not receive absolution from their sins till they have handed them over to the ordinary. Bookdealers who sell or in any other way supply Bibles written in the vernacular to anyone who has not this permission, shall lose the price of the books, which is to be applied by the bishop to pious purposes, and in keeping with the nature of the crime they shall be subject to other penalties which are left to the judgment of the same bishop. Regulars who have not the permission of their superiors may not read or purchase them." (Source).

Now I'll grant you that this is much further down the line, but what you're failing to accept that in the second century there was no so-called "direct apostolic succession", and in fact the church was a decentralised body. It had to be because their central authority was in all likelihood destroyed along with the rest of Jerusalem in 64-70 AD. Not to mention Nero's direct persecution of Christians in Jerusalem - one of the relatively few examples where they Christians in early centuries were directly persecuted. The second century church was a network of people that met in secret in their homes - they read from the gospels, the letters of Paul and such, and practised some form of communion. All behind closed doors. You can bet your ass no one stopped any Christian from accessing the texts or copying them.

In fact modern textual scholars can point you to many examples of ancient copies and/or translations of the texts that were "done in haste" or "probably a personal copy" etc. Not only that, but today there's only 5800 ancient copies in Greek, where as there's 10,000+ in Latin and at least another 10,000 (and many scholars say double that) in Syriac, Slavic, Gothic, Ethiopic, Coptic and Armenian. So actually the use of personal copies, and of translations throughout the years of the Christian church was common. Very common. So why did the RCC try to stop it in the middle ages?

The decentralised church later transformed (by the fourth century) into one with a clear hierarchy. But with that said I'll grant you that by the early second century there was some kind of primitive hierarchy in the church. But it was just as disputed as the mid-first century hierarchy - and probably more so since they no longer had Paul, Peter, James, etc to go to. You have to remember that Acts 15 says the central authority of the church is in Jerusalem - and it gets destroyed. That decentralised authority and left Christians split into several factions.


And we now know it wasn't just two factions "Orthodox" and "Gnostic", but rather many more than that. And if we are to believe the number of Gnostic texts that didn't survive much past the fifth century, versus the smaller number of Orthodox texts that are lost, it leaves us to conclude that the Gnostics may have been the more mainstream version of early Christianity. You have to realise that Gnosticism was a valid form of Christianity. I see in another thread you denounced anything that is Unitarians as being "not Christian" and that's not so. We don't even have evidence that the Trinity was an established doctrine in the first, second, or third centuries. Coming to agreement of the Trinity within the Orthodox church took centuries, even if the idea had existed early on. Gnosticism survived until the fifth century or so. A lot can happen over 400 years. We just have to look at how Judaism grew, and then split into factions as well before that.