Most Catholics would hardly know one end of the Bible from another. They do not read it, although a dusty copy may be on their bookshelves, sometimes used for recording births. When they are confronted with actual scriptures, they have two choices. They can accept what the Bible says and leave the false church, which sends millions to hell every year, or they can ignore what scripture says and just carry on.
Here is my (Alan's)
e-mail back to our Catholic correspondent…Hello Dan, I am afraid you have a gilded and faulty concept of the history of the Catholic Church, which we set out in our books.
The Bible was banned, everywhere the church held sway, for hundreds of years. This is a matter of historical record, not an opinion. Furthermore, it was in Latin only so that the lay people had to be given the interpretation - a false one - via their
"priests."
The very concept of
“priests" is wrong, as we have explained in our books. All believers are "priests" - for in the new dispensation there are no special classes of "holy men." The whole point of the veil in the Temple being torn in two at the end of the Crucifixion was that this signified that believers could go straight to the Father, via the Son, without
any priestly intermediaries.
No more priestly class, and no more sacrifices.
‘It is finished!’ was Jesus’ triumphant cry.
Non-Catholic believers were murdered throughout Europe for hundreds of years in a form of religious ethnic cleaning.
This too is a matter of history.The RC church was always a false church, right from Constantine's plan to use Christianity to help wield power.
You are correct in that some Protestant churches didn't take the Reformation far enough, which led to John Bunyan being imprisoned by the Church of England for 14 years in Bedford Jail for preaching the Gospel. The main reason the Pilgrims and many others who followed went to America from England, Germany and elsewhere was violent persecution by the church - the Church of England in England and the RCs elsewhere.
Ancient church buildings in nations like France still contain the remains of torture chambers in their basements. The RCs, in Europe, South America and wherever they took their blood-soaked false gospel, forced "conversion" with the alternatives of death or torture. Inconvenient facts forgotten by today's "ecumenical" clergy. The RCS are only "ecumenical" where they are not in the majority....
I don't know where you get the
odd story about Luther, but the OT is preserved in thousands of documents including the Dead Sea Scrolls, which we have seen, and is the same today as it always was, and was carefully copied by scribes, who worked painstakingly for centuries to preserve it accurately.
Yes, happily, the Reformers chucked out
the Apocrypha, the 14 books which were never part of the canon of scripture. There are sound versions of the Bible and we use the Authorized Version, The New American Standard and other good texts. How do people know how accurate they are? Well, that is easy. You study. I agree that there
are wacky ones, like The Message, although they don't actually state that
it
is a Bible, as I understand it. I also agree that most modern denominations haven't a clue what Scripture says.
However, the fact is that the Holy Bible is diametrically opposed to many of the teachings and practices of the RC false church. What is there about "call no man
father" (Matthew 23:9) that is hard to understand? Or that the practice of forbidding marriage is a "doctrine of demons " (1 Timothy 4:1-3).
Not difficult, that one. And have they never read that a bishop MUST be the husband of one wife? (1 Timothy 3:2-4).
He MUST have children who are under control.
No RC bishop in the West has a wife, or children, so they should all step down immediately, from the Pope (Bishop of Rome) on down.
But they do not study the Bible and they do not have ears to hear.
We set it out in the articles I sent you, which you would not have had time to study yet. You will find that they are accurate.
It is the Word of God versus the Catholic church.
Whose word will you take?
Do you have ears to hear?
Many do not. We hope that you do.
Best regards, Alan Franklin.
Our books: Goodbye America, Goodbye Britain, and Cults and Isms: True or False? are available from our web shop and shed the light of the Gospel into the dark corners of Catholicism and other false cults and isms. To access many of the articles on our web site which expose Catholicism use our search engine, top right on thefreepressonline.co.uk.
And Pat adds:
Please get an early copy of Halley’s Bible Handbook, which tells the truth about Catholic history – the murderous decrees of various Popes, the massacres of Bible believing Christians, and the banning of the Bible in the common languages.
Later editions may have had those pages removed or edited.
In my copy of Halley, Pg 776, he writes about Innocent III (1198-1216).
That evil Pope, over 1000 years after the Savior died, ordered two crusades, decreed transubstantiation, confirmed ‘confession’, declared papal infallibility, condemned the British Magna Carta (foundation of democracy), forbade reading the Bible in the vernacular (common languages), started the Inquisition, ordered the massacre of the Albigenses (true Christians) and on and on.
Halley comments:
‘More blood was shed under his direction and that of his immediate successors, than in any other period of church history, except in the papacy’s effort to crush the Reformation in the 16th and 17th centuries.’
Then, the next page, Pg 777, Halley comments that ‘in the 30 years between 1540 and 1570 no fewer than 900,000 Protestants were put to death in the Pope’s war for the extermination of the Waldenses (Bible believing Christians).’
Modern Catholics have no idea of the mountain of Christian corpses on which the Vatican sits.
They have no idea of the rivers of Christian blood shed by men in clerical garb claiming to be the ‘vicar of Christ’.
And so on.
The popes also sanctioned the use of torture to get ‘confessions’.
After the poet Dante visited Rome he called theVatican‘a sewer of corruption’ and assigned the popes he knew of to the lowest parts of hell in his literary classic, ‘Dante’s Inferno’.
People, please!
Read the Bible for yourself !
So many men died so that you could read it in English, German, Spanish etc.
The Catholic Church would have kept you ignorant, but now people keep themselves ignorant by refusing to read for themselves!
Dr J Vernon McGee, one of my favorite Bible teachers, said that the worst sin of Christians today is that they cannot be bothered to read and study the Bible.
There are many good teachers now, and they are available free on the web – men like Dr McGee and Chuck Smith,
both of whom have free Through the Bible teachings which you can download.
When the Lollard preachers were burned, their persecutors tied their English translation Bibles around their necks to perish with them in the flames.
And so we have our English Bible now.
But can we be bothered to open its covers at all?
We certainly never bothered when I was in the Catholic Church.
We didn’t even have Bibles.
And we were far
too busy honoring the pope, praying to Mary, going to confession to priests who should themselves have known better, attending the ‘sacrifice of the mass’ when the Bible says there is no more sacrifice after Calvary….and on and on.
As for me, I am an SSG.
Those are my credentials – Sinner Saved by Grace.
I feel others should be writing the things I write, as I am no scholar and am in no way worthy to do anything in Jesus’ name.
But I could not be silent after all the Lord Jesus has allowed me to know.
If anything I have written here will help you to open the eyes of a Catholic or anyone else, please feel free to copy it, send it out, etc, so long as you do not change it or charge any money for it.
And back to Alan:
Dan’s challenges to our articles are set out below. Readers who know scripture will be able to get an interesting insight into the odd ideas that Catholics have plucked out of thin air - certainly not from scripture or historical records. At least Dan is polite and states his case, so he got a considered reply.
Hi Alan & thank you very much for your reply. Yes there were places and times where the Church put the Holy Bible on the list of forbidden books. The bans were always localized to specific places and always temporary.
There was one place, I believe it was somewhere in France (working from memory here), where heretics were teaching that physical creation was evil and the spirit was good. These heretics were using the Bible to teach this heresy and were using Sacred Scripture to encourage people to commit suicide. The church rightly clamped down and the ban was lifted when the controversy subsided.
A little known fact is that Protestant Churches have burned Bibles. There was a Bible published in 1795 which today is known as the "Child killer" Bible. But Jesus said unto her, Let the children first be filled: for it is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it unto the dogs. (Mark 7:27)
The Child Killer bible has a typo, so that it read, "Let the children first be killed" instead of "first be filled." Some person who read it went out and killed his children.
These Bibles were rounded up and destroyed. (AF comments: This argument is like comparing a glass of water to the Atlantic Ocean!)
Catholic bookstores sell the ENTIRE Bible. Not an adulterated version of the Biblical Canon that Martin Luther invented in the 16th Century.
Luther threw out many OT and some NT books. Modern Protestant canons have restored the NT books that Luther threw out, but typically lack
the OT books. ( Our books show how the RCs "adjusted" the Ten Commandments!-AF)
These are sometimes included in Protestant Bibles as the "apocrypha" which means "hidden," but is a silly term because they have never been hidden, and were part of all Christian Old Testaments until Luther came around, and have been continuously preserved in all Catholic Bibles. (The Bibles that may be there, like The Jerusalem Bible which we have read, have enough truth in them to convert Catholics to Christ – if they read them-AF)
As you can see, as of today we have around 330000 Christian groups all teaching their own version of the bible & all disagreeing on theology. (AF comments: Not true. Most churches that are recognizably Bible-based would agree at least on the basic fundamentals of Scripture. I didn’t know there were 330,000 different Bible versions….(!)
Its a case of, Some guy with a Bible takes a six month course in Christian Ministry from an online university, takes out a second mortgage on his home, buys a trailer and some lights and sound equipment, hires a band, and starts his own Church in the high school auditorium. (You know of such a church and have attended it, perhaps? AF)
Then he starts spewing all kinds of errors like Baptism doesn't do anything, the Pope is just an old man from Argentina and Jesus was only speaking symbolically when he said his flesh was food. (Sounds like it might be a good church to us, although adult baptism is indeed required of true believers. AF)
This leads to the big question of scriptural interpretation. How do you know that your scriptural interpretation is correct & others are in error? (Answer: Because by study of the Bible you learn to recognize the voice of God.)
Regards, Dan …….