The Whore of Babylon

[Rhyfelwyr]

The Roman Celtic Church was Nicene etc. and therefore Catholic. Pre-Dark Age Britain probably had four Archbishops. So the whole proto-Protestant thing is just silly rhetoric.

Of course it's silly rhetoric, as I said I was joking, I thought someone, particularly Gaelic Cowboy, might get what I was on about. And while it's absurd to talk about the Celtic Church as Protestant, there was certainly no such thing as the "Roman Celtic Church" (I've never heard such term bofore). All 'Celtic Christianity' is is a collective term for the various forms of Christiainty which existed before Britain came under Papal influence. Furthermore, although it was episcopal, the nature of episcopal authority was very different from the forms it took on the continent. One of the most distinguishing features within Celtic Christianity was the fact that it was heavily monastic based. All the major religious centres in Britain during this term emerged from monasteries, the best known example being Iona.

That's not to say that the myth of the Celtic Church somehow being purer and less corrupt by power politics is true. Iona is well known to have played a big role in the dynastic politics of Dalriada, with its leaders such as Adomnan coming to support the Cenel nGabrain dynasty, and rewriting their name into the history books. This is what gave Scotland the myth of the ancient King Fergus that founded Scotland in the 6th century.

Not so, Episcopacy and Arch-Episcopacy were far more effective in the Roman Empire because of the excellent secular administration.

How efficiently they maintained their episcopal system isn't the matter at hand. My point was that there was no church based in Rome that claimed to be the sole, universal church of all believers. If anything, Constantinople was dominant after the other 3 centres at Antioch/Jerusalem/Alexandria fell to the Mohammedans. And remember that quote I gave in reply to CR earlier from Pope Gregory - if the See of Rome was to claim supremacy, it would be regarded as a a sign of antichrist.

An assertion, not an argument.

I'm in a bit of a rush now but I'll look up the qoutes later, there is plenty of doom and gloom talk on the fate of the church.

Hippo was the Domain of Augustine, the great Catholic Christian. Augustine sepnt his whole life as priest and bishop fighting heresy. To suggest he had no conception of a Catholic Chuch as an institution is patently false; he would also have recognised the Pope as its head. After all, Hippo was not a General Synod and Augustine's conclusions had to be authorised by the Pope in order to take general effect.

So that torpedoes your argument pretty neatly, I think. The Bible is Catholic.

As I said above, there was no such thing as the 'Roman Catholic Church' during Augustine's time. There was a church based in Rome, but no RCC. There was no RCC when the Synod of Hippo took place, and even then that was as I said merely the consolidation of what was widely accepted throughout almost all the Christian world for well over a century before. The RCC of today cannot rightfully claim any monopoly on the establishment of the scripture.

Calvin and Luthor only had acces to the authorised Catholic texts in Greek and Latin. Do you not see the inherrent problem? Their Bibles were also "textually deffective" as we say.

Sorry, got to go now.... will respond to the rest later.

I thought we were talking about the selection of canon, rather than the differences in accuracy between various translations? When discussing what should be canon, the Reformers tended to look at things such as the extent of their use by early Christian writers, how consistent they are with the scripture as a whole (that's why Luther threw out James/Hebrews/Revelations, he thought some points were against the 5 Sola's), and in particular whether or not they were attributes to an apostle, and the evidence to support this was sufficient.