Category: Catholicism

Mormons, Muslims, and most Protestant groups all have the same fundamental contention. While the details change depending upon the group, they all believe that the Early Church got things wrong, and pretty dramatically wrong at that…

I would suggest that’s a very problematic position to hold. One has to contend that the Apostles were terrible teachers and failed in their mission. Jesus effectively abandoned His Church until either Muhammad, Luther, Calvin, Joseph Smith, or some other figure came along to set things right centuries later.

As an aside, Atheism is a bold position for someone to hold as it necessarily asserts that everyone throughout history who claimed any kind of religious experience was fundamentally mistaken. I would suggest that many groups make a similarly bold claim, that most Christians throughout history have been fundamentally mistaken on core doctrines.

If one claims the Early Church was in deep error, cherry-picking inevitably results. For example, Baptismal Regeneration is universally believed in the Early Church. Yet, many Protestants reject this entirely, but basing this on the New Testament canon discerned by those who held to Baptismal Regeneration! They reject Apostolic Succession, but accept the Trinitarian doctrine which was developed by those who led the Church through Apostolic succession! Many other examples could be given.

Responses

I said this in a recent discussion online and my friend said:

“Yeah, it seems to me that heresies developed fairly quickly…”

Unfortunately, this is just another way to say that Jesus and the Apostles failed, that the long-awaited Messiah’s message was radically corrupted even within the lifetime of the Apostles, and long before the canon of the Bible was settled. Contrary to Biblical prophecy and the words of Jesus, the Kingdom doesn’t even get out of the gate. My friend went on to say:

“That’s an argument from silence, at best.” 

Actually,  *his* position is the argument from silence, positing that the Church was completely usurped without any “true believer” offering the slightest resistance. 

Mormons claim the Early Church were Mormon, yet we find no proto-Mormons in the Early Church and nobody in the “official” Church wrote against a heresy which looked anything like Mormonism. The same is true for Islam. In contrast, we know about Docetism, Gnosticism, Modalism etc. because they offered a significant enough challenge to the Church that Her apologists wrote works against them. Do we find anyone in the Early Church writing against how you understand the Faith? If not, why not?

> “But I don’t say they weren’t “real Christians.” They may have simply been “confused real Christians.” After all, they had a lot of theology to sort out. There was a lot of confusion.””

This seems rather like having your cake and eating it. According to you, the earliest Christians seem to have completely misunderstood even the basic mechanics of salvation. So, either these are grave heresies, or not a big deal. Which is it?

I think 1 + 1 +1 = 1 is the most common comment you’ll see from Muslims on Christian videos about the Trinity. David Wood responds…

Funnily enough, I recently gave a similar example in a YouTube comment:

1 Allah + 1 Jibril + 1 Muhammad + 1 Scribe = 1 Qur’an.

During the formation of the Qur’an, the following men had Qur’ans which had a different number of chapters than found in today’s 114 chapter Qur’an:

• Ubayy ibn Ka’b (116 chapters)
• Abdullah ibn Masud (111 chapters)

Uthman’s bonfire can be found in Sahih al-Bukhari 4987:

Hudhaifa bin Al-Yaman came to `Uthman at the time when the people of Sham and the people of Iraq were Waging war to conquer Arminya and Adharbijan. Hudhaifa was afraid of their (the people of Sham and Iraq) differences in the recitation of the Qur’an, so he said to `Uthman, “O chief of the Believers! Save this nation before they differ about the Book (Qur’an) as Jews and the Christians did before.” So `Uthman sent a message to Hafsa saying, “Send us the manuscripts of the Qur’an so that we may compile the Qur’anic materials in perfect copies and return the manuscripts to you.” Hafsa sent it to `Uthman. `Uthman then ordered Zaid bin Thabit, `Abdullah bin AzZubair, Sa`id bin Al-As and `AbdurRahman bin Harith bin Hisham to rewrite the manuscripts in perfect copies. `Uthman said to the three Quraishi men, “In case you disagree with Zaid bin Thabit on any point in the Qur’an, then write it in the dialect of Quraish, the Qur’an was revealed in their tongue.” They did so, and when they had written many copies, `Uthman returned the original manuscripts to Hafsa. `Uthman sent to every Muslim province one copy of what they had copied, and ordered that all the other Qur’anic materials, whether written in fragmentary manuscripts or whole copies, be burnt.

That Hadith are unreliable—that any given matn cannot be taken at face value as an accurate datum from the 1st Islamic Century, and that any given ʾisnād cannot be taken at face value as an accurate record of a matn’s provenance—cannot be seriously contested, for multiple reasons.

Firstly, there is an overwhelming prior probability based upon the ubiquity of fabrication and pseudepigraphy in Late Antique and Mediaeval religio-historical (pagan, Jewish, and Christian) ascriptions.

Secondly, there is the high frequency of contradictions within the Hadith corpus, which necessitates the occurrence of a huge amount of fabrication, interpolation, and/or mutation and, therefore, skepticism towards any given hadith.

Thirdly, there is the ubiquity of fabrication and interpolation—both reported and demonstrable — in the Hadith corpus, which again casts doubt upon the rest of the corpus.

Fourthly, there is the rapid, extreme mutation and growth of reports that evidently took place over the course of a century or more of oral transmission, which means that any given matn—regardless of the ʾisnād—is likely at best heavily distorted and at worst obliterated beyond its original form.

Fifthly, there is the belated emergence of Hadith as a genre and corpus, largely during the 8th and 9th Centuries CE, which straightforwardly precludes the authenticity of most ascriptions to the 7th Century CE.

Dr. Joshua Little, PhD Thesis

It is available from his own site, or from here: