Category: Early Church

  • Oral Tradition, The Early Church, and Paul Pavao’s Astonishment

    I had written (in this previous post): That’s rather the point about the early church fathers – they did not transmit an oral apostolic tradition to us, rather they were our predecessors in trying to search out the meaning of Scripture. Where they do a good job they are to be commended, and where they…

  • >The Importance of Irenaeus

    >An anonymous reader asked: Why are the witings of St. Irenaeus now so suddenly important[?] I thought that his relics were sacked by the Calvinists becaused he was alleged to be a heretic, ie., he is a proponent of Free Will and that his other writings do not support TULIP. The importance of Irenaeus is…

  • Imaginary Patristic Quotation Regarding Mary?

    Sometimes I like to read what “the other side” has to say about issues like the so-called Immaculate conception. I happened to come across the following argument in a book by Cardinal Lambruschini, who nearly became pope but was beaten out by Pius IX: St. Cyril of Alexandria, who flourished in the fifth century, expresses…

  • Ancient Christians and their Bibles

    A common myth that we hear from time to time from a number of different directions, is that Bibles were in essence Gutenberg’s invention: a testimony to Northern European printing ingenuity, but not an ancient practice. Of course it is true that printed Bibles necessarily followed the development of printing, but Bibles were being made…

  • This is Catholic Internet Apologetics and a Reasonable Response thereto

    GNRHead posted a two-part diatribe broadsiding Dr. White with a significant number of accusations, even taking time to wave his finger at the camera and insist that Dr. White should be ashamed of himself. Dr. White posted the video that I have embedded below that makes short work of the bulk of GNRHead’s argument. There…

  • Gems of Calvinism from the Early Church: Ignatius

    CAVEAT: “Calvinistic” is an anachronism. Calvin wasn’t born yet. The proper chronological way to describe the situation is to say that Calvin was being Ignatian — or (better yet) that both Calvin and Ignatius were being Scriptural. In my reading of the Apostolic Fathers, another gem from the Apostolic Fathers caught my eye, this one…