Things are not true just because you say they are, Peter. You cannot show that the Church has been 'taken from the earth' or whatever the exact wording is in your religion's writings, only that you believe it to be so. Nobody should or can deny you that belief, but that is different from
proving it to be so, particularly in the context where the preexisting churches can show living lines of bishops going back to the apostles via whatever line they wish to emphasize (for most Western Christian sects, I would imagine it is somehow argued via their relation to Rome and its traditional founding by St. Peter, while for the Eastern churches it may be through whichever apostle/s came to a particular land: St. Mark for the Egyptians, Sts. Peter and Paul for the Syrians and Greek Antiochians, St. Thomas for the Indians, etc).
And even if you don't take the traditional accounts at face value (which would make sense; why would you, when you are trying to prove the opposite point), there's still the problem that the written record extends so far back into history as to make the tradition more plausible than the alternative theory cooked up 1800 years later with no backing whatsoever outside of the ideological motivation of the clearly self-interested restorationist sects or religions. Like the written tradition concerning the Catechetical School of Alexandria dates back to the mid-2nd century, as do some of the earlier bilingual Coptic-Greek papyrus fragments containing the Gospels in the Bodmer collection (and there are more recent discoveries that push the advent of Christianity in Egypt back even further, though they are new enough to not be uncontroversially accepted, since they're still being studied). These things would be so even if nobody believed in the traditional account of the founding of Christianity in a particular place, so the restorationist is stuck with the following quandry: if there is such a "great apostasy" that is supposedly a real historical event, then why does the
actual historical record not support it at all, but instead support instead the exact opposite position? Why are there the epistles of the apostolic fathers, and their children the early Church fathers? Why is there the Didache, and following it (and clearly modeled on it) the Didascalia Apostolorum? And why are these likewise mentioned by the fathers in such a way as to disprove every late comer who tries to heap doubt upon the historical reality of our faith? Why does St. Justin Martyr in the mid-2nd century argue for the LXX, and why do the Eastern churches still use that as their standard OT to this day? Why do the core of the Anaphoras attributed to St. Basil -- one of the Cappadocian fathers of the fourth century --
actually date back to the fourth century?
In other words, whether or not you or your religion believe that the Christian Church apostasized is immaterial in light of the fact that we have actual history on our side, which you have absolutely no answer for but to maintain in the face of all Christian history (most of which is dealt with by secular historians, I should say, so it's not a matter of whether or not anyone believes in their contents -- only that they are there/they actually exist as we have always said that they do) an opposing opinion based on nothing but your wish that it should be so in order to validate your own religion which has
no history behind it. None whatsoever.
Until you can answer for this vast disparity between your position and the Christian position, your religion's idea of an unproven and unprovable "Great Apostasy" will be nothing more than the wishful thinking of a pompous, delusional, religiously illiterate malcontent, no matter how many have been sadly duped into following him.
