I am not Protestant. I am a non-denominational Sola Scriptura Trinitarian Christian. I am not Protestant because they believe in Sola Fide (Faith Alone, i.e. Belief Alone - in regards to salvation), when the Bible teaches that faith is actually more than a belief alone, but faith is shown to be true or genuine by "works of faith" (James 2:18). James says we are justified by works (James 2:24); And Jesus agreed with the lawyer on the truth that we need to love God and love our neighbor as a part of inheriting eternal life (See Luke 10:25-28). So while we are saved initially and ultimately by God's grace (Ephesians 2:8-9) (Titus 3:5), His grace teaches us to deny ungodliness and that we should live righteously and godly in this present world (Titus 2:11-12). It's not popular, but then again truth is never popular. While some Protestants attempt to agree that faith needs to have works, they don't believe certain grievous sins can separate a believer from God (if the believer generally lives a holy life). For they believe one is saved by having a belief alone on Jesus, and that works do not play a part in the salvation process, but they oddly believe they will have works if their faith is genuine. In other words, Protestantism sounds contradictory to me.
However, I am far from Catholic or Orthodox: I do not believe in following anything that is not in the Bible or anything that appears to conflict with the Bible.
Anyways, as for the word "traditions": Well, we can make all kinds of assumptions on what that word means until the cows come home, but the real way to determine what the word means is by looking at the context. The context or the surrounding verses or chapters do not in any ways suggest what you are saying here. In fact, nowhere in the New Testament does it teach that there was some additional passed down traditions that was to be kept separate from Scripture. It merely just happened that they taught by word of mouth as pastors do today, and they also written things down so as to preserve the teachings that the Lord gave to them. You cannot pass down information via by oral means. That never works. Even the Catholic church does not do that currently. They have a book that is their traditions. But again, there was no reference to some booked or scroll that was labeled as "traditions" that was something additional to Scripture. It would not even make sense to do that. Any teaching in written form in the NT simply would have been Scripture. Peter even referred to Paul's writings as Scripture. So anything written that came from the apostles would be Scripture. There is no such thing as a passed down oral tradition or some book called "traditions."
Jesus never quoted oral traditions, but He always quoted Scripture as His authority.
We have to also understand that they did not have Ipads, or paper notepads or an easy means to always write down things so easily. So they were forced to in some cases have the people refer to what they taught orally until they were able to write it down later (so that the information on their teaching would not be lost or corrupted).
For what would be the motivation to keeping an oral tradition that could be corrupted? It makes no sense. Have you ever heard of the game called "Telephone"? I played it once in elementary school when I was a kid back in the 80's.
Chinese whispers (
Commonwealth English) or
telephone (
American English)
[1] is an internationally popular
children's game [2] in which players form a line, and the first player comes up with a message and whispers it to the ear of the second person in the line. The second player repeats the message to the third player, and so on. When the last player is reached, they announce the message they heard to the entire group. The first person then compares the original message with the final version. Although the objective is to pass around the message without it becoming garbled along the way, part of the enjoyment is that, regardless, this usually ends up happening. Errors typically accumulate in the retellings, so the statement announced by the last player differs significantly from that of the first player, usually with amusing or humorous effect. Reasons for changes include anxiousness or impatience, erroneous corrections, the difficult-to-understand mechanism of whispering, and that some players may deliberately alter what is being said to guarantee a changed message by the end of the line.
Source:
Chinese whispers - Wikipedia
The challenge of the game was to keep to the original message, but it turned out that the message changed and had errors in it when it had passed down from one person to the next by oral means. In other words, the idea that there would be a faithful means of passing down something orally is not reliable. It just wouldn't work. For there are already problems with people misinterpreting what God's Word says in written form. It would be even worse if one tries to do that by oral means.
