Why do Christian rely on only the words canonized by the Catholic Church and will not read the other gospels?

Hi Catholic Corrector You say that the "Catholic Church" gave the world the Bible, not the "Roman Catholic Church." This distinction is meaningless wordplay. They refer to the same church.

Here's the history: The term "Catholic Church" is first found in writing by Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, from around the year 107 AD. It has been in continual use ever since. The term "Roman Catholic Church" came into widespread use after the Anglican Reformation.

The Anglicans wanted to claim the ideological turf of being the catholic/universal church in England, so they started calling the Catholic Church the "Roman Catholic Church" to make it sound foreign and provincial. The term stuck. So the terms "Roman Catholic Church" and "Catholic Church" are synonymous as far as common use goes.

However, the term "Roman Catholic Church" actually has a technical meaning in Catholicism. It refers to the 97% or so of Catholics who use the Latin rite liturgy, as opposed to Eastern Catholics like the Marionites or Melkites who use a more Orthodox liturgy. That's probably more than you wanted to know.

The other thing I find interesting in your question is your rather non-Protestant position on ecclesiology. You don't try to say, for example, that Baptists and non-denominationals were involved in creating the Biblical canon, or that the Bible somehow canonized itself (which would indeed be ludicrous claims.) You say that the early church which canonized the Bible was led by Catholic bishops, although many came from territories that would be Orthodox after the schism. That is absolutely correct.

You say that one bishop did not rule over all other bishops, but you do admit the existence of some kind of primacy for the bishop of Rome. I think that's a reasonably accurate description of the historical situation as well. Hmmm.

So the early Christian church is led by bishops, with a bit of papal primacy mixed in. Does that describe your church? Quite frankly, you sound Orthodox.

You could even pass for Catholic. Ever thought about joining up? ;-) Cheers!

The Catholic Church. There was no East and West, just ONE Christian Church - The Catholic Church. None the Less.. Orthodox faith is still PART of the Catholic church.

They are "Orthodox Catholic" not merely "orthodox" but Catholic as well. So even IF the distinction existed at that time, which it did not, it would be semantical, since the Orthodox faiths are Catholic just as Latin or Western Rite Catholics (AKA Roman Catholic) are Catholic as well. But regardless, the distinction between East and West was largely political and came several centuries later.

So it didn't exist at that time. There were no Protestant denominations either, unless you consider the Heretic groups the Aryians and the Gnostics as "Protestant" but I don't think the later Protestants would want to be linked to those. One group denied the Trinity, the other denied that Christ was God.

The distinction "ROMAN" Catholic church is a creation of the Protestant Reformation, an insult and slander used by Protestants of the time to attempt and link Catholicism to the Roman Empire. Later on, Catholics decided to embrace that which they could not change and make the "roman" in Roman Catholic mean the Catholic church centered in Rome, verses the Pagan and Emperial undertones the Protestant Reformers were trying to insinuate. During the 3rd and 4th centuries when the Bible was undergoing canonization, there was but 1 Christian church.. and that Church was centered in Rome by the Pope.

It makes little difference that the Bishops decided it verses the Pope...because the Bishops believed that the Pope had a valid link to Peter and that Christ gave Peter authority... so the Bishops you are referring to are Catholic Bishops, not Protestant Bishops. No Protestant church besides the Anglican church even attempts to claim they have a line of valid succession back to the Bishops which decided on the Biblbe. So by no means can the other 30,000 plus denominations of Protestantism in anyway lay any claim the usurps the claim of the Catholic church.

And.... The only reason that the Anglican church even claims this is because they WERE Catholic at one time and therefore had a valid line and according to them, they maintain that. BUT, even the Anglican church doesn't claim to have existed back then and therefore admits that the Catholic church created the bible. There is even a quote from Martin Luther which states that he believed that we owed the existence of the bible to the Catholic church... so even Martin Luther recognized it.

With a little bit of Googling, I'm sure I could dig it up for ya.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.