Catholic fairly tales for overgrown children

BRIAN SAID:

If you could certainly prove that Jude is in error, then certainly everybody is in the same boat.

But if you can merely show that Jude is probably in error, then the protestant is in a predicament that Catholic/Orthodox are not. Catholic/Orthodox can submit the probabilities of the details to the certainty of the Church, (like protestants submit the probability of the details of scripture, to the overall certainty of scripture).

But if Jude is apparently probably in error, protestants are doomed to argue about it for the next 2000 years with no possibility of resolution. That's quite a difference.

All the more so with your admission that the internal evidence is weak, the external evidence is late, and the content is questionable. This leaves you in no happy position. Your fallible list of infallible books is not merely fallible, but highly questionable. It's probably inerrant, but may be just plain wrong.

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2008/11/jude-obscure.html#8880808181582782003

Several problems with your reply:

i) I didn’t say the internal evidence for authorship was weak. I didn’t say Jude was written by an unknown author, but by a lesser-known author, and due to the brevity of this document, we don’t have as much information to reconstruct his audience or his opponents—without which it’s more difficult to ascertain his viewpoint. That’s a hermeneutical question, not a canonical question.

ii) Intertestamental Jews were in no position to “submit the probabilities of the details to the certainty of the Church.” If that’s not a problem for the Chosen People, why should that be a problem for me?

iii) Jude is not probably in error—as I demonstrated. Not even “apparently.”

iv) If you think the external evidence is weak, then that’s a problem for your position since the external evidence would include ecclesiastical tradition.

v) You can’t treat Catholicism and Orthodoxy as interchangeable on this issue.

a) Your criterion of certain is self-refuting. Let’s say you’re speaking from an Orthodoxy standpoint. You would need to establish with certainty (not probability) that the Orthodox church is the one true church.

b) Even if you could establish (a), the Orthodox church doesn’t have an official canon of Scripture.

c) Even if the Orthodox church did have an official canon of Scripture, that’s not the same thing as an infallible canon of Scripture.

d) To achieve certainty, you would need to lay down infallible criteria to identify an infallible council, which issued an infallible canon. And you would need to infallibly apply your infallible criteria.

v) If you speak from a Catholic standpoint, your appeal to certainty is also self-refuting:

a) Catholicism didn’t have an “infallible” canon until the 16C.

b) You don’t have an infallible list of infallible church councils.

c) You would also need to establish with certainty (not probability) that the Catholic church is the one true church.

d) To do that, you would need, among other things, an infallible list of the true popes.

e) You would also need an infallible list of infallible teachings.

f) In addition, you would need a Dial-a-Pope hotline to check your private interpretation of Catholic dogma against the infallible interpretation of the Pope. (And he would have to be speaking ex cathedra.)

g) A Magisterium can’t conjure up certainty out of thin air, in defiance of the evidence.

h) How did Trent actually proceed? Did the Holy Spirit descend on the Tridentine Fathers in tongues of fire, prompting them to issue a list of the canonical books by unanimous acclamation? No. It went like this:

“Considerable debate ensued on whether a distinction should be made between two classes of books (Canonical and Apocrypha) or whether three classes should be identified (Acknowledged Books; the Disputed Books of the New Testament, later generally received; and the Apocrypha of the Old Testament). Finally on 8 April 1546, by a vote of 24 to15, with 16 abstentions, the Council issued a decree (De Canonicis Scripturis) in which, for the first time in the history of the Church, the question of the contents of the Bible was made an absolute article of faith and confirmed by an anathema,” B. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament (Oxford 1987), 246.

How does putting the question up for a vote confer certainty on the outcome? How does a majority vote confer certainty? How does 24 votes for the motion, with 15 against, and 16 abstentions, confer certainty?

Why do you think the Holy Spirit inspired some Tridentine Fathers, but not others? Why does he inspire Cardinal Simplicius on Mondays and Tuesdays, but not on Wednesdays and Thursdays?

i) And the Tridentine decree left many uncertainties in its wake: “Trent insisted on its list of books ‘as sacred and canonical in their entirely, with all their parts, according to the text usually read in the Catholic church and as they are in the ancient Latin Vulgate’ (DS 1504). Among the ‘parts” mentioned in the discussion were Mark 16:9-20; Luke 22:43-44; John 7:53-8:11 (Jedin, History of the Council of Trent 2.81)—pericopes that are absent from many textual witnesses. Although they used the Vg as a yardstick, the council fathers of Trent and the authorities in Rome who approved the decree were aware of that there were errors in the Vg transl. and that not all copies of the Vg were in agreement. Even the official Sixto-Clementine Vg (1592), produced in answer to Trent’s request for a carefully edited Vg, leaves much to be desired by modern standards; and in many places it is not faithful to Jerome’s original Vg…Which Vg is to serve as a guide when we raise the question of whether certain passages or verses are canonical Scripture?” The New Jerome Biblical Commentary (Prentice Hall 1990), 66:91.

“…where the Sixto-Clementine Vg has passages that Jerome’s Vg did not have (John 5:4, the angel stirring the waters; 1 John 5:7-8, the Johannine comma), the problem of acceptance should be settled on the grounds of scholarship rather than by any mechanical application of the principle of Trent, which was not meant to solve all difficulties or to end scholarly discussion…Roman Catholics must solve textual problems as others do, viz., by the laws of criticism—a principle that holds for other questions too (authorship, dating, history),” ibid. 66:91.

j) The certainty I enjoy is the certainty of providence. The certainty that God has a purpose for his people. The certainty that God will preserve whatever evidence we need to do his will. That includes the use of probable evidence. And I prefer my providential probabilities to your fictitious certainties.

Like all ecclesiolaters, all you’ve done is to stipulate an artificial standard of certainty, and then concocted an imaginary narrative to yield your desired result. But that’s an exercise in make-believe. And it stands in defiance of the historical record.