Joseph Smith did not have to study the ancient Christian church, he had Jesus Christ to tell him what he needed to do to restore His church to the earth.
The problem with this kind of assertion is that it assumes that JS was telling the truth and not subject to spiritual delusion, and therefore that his 'visions' (plural) didn't need any kind of verification from an actually-existing church. This is very unlike, for example, St. Paul's encounter with Christ on the road to Emmaus. If you'll recall, he had this encounter and at its conclusion he was told to enter the city where he would be met by one of the believers who would receive him (see Acts 9).
As for the other reformed churches, they did not have the priesthood and no authority or power thereof. Was the authority and power passed down through the ages from Jesus Christ? I believe it was lost through wickedness.
I am aware of your God-mocking belief, but again, the problem is that you are simply stating it as though it is fact because you believe it. And when you or other Mormons are asked where the proof is that this 'priesthood authority' was lost, you post Bible verses that mention the future when people will fall away from the faith, as though it is self-evident that these are referring to the Mormon 'Great Apostasy' idea, and not, I don't know,
the coming of parasitic, pseudo-Christian religions like Mormonism which would draw people away from Christianity. Again,
a propos of nothing. It's just something you already believe, so it's true. Well I'm sorry, that's not going to do it. You're going to have to show
how, when, and where this was the case, and you cannot do that. Or if you can, you and every other Mormon here have not done so yet, despite being asked whenever this topic comes up.
God would not suffer His priesthood to be misused so it was lost.
That makes no sense. He wouldn't suffer it to be misused, so He allowed it or caused it to be lost?
I pointed to the Roman Catholic Church because other churches broke off from it. It seems to me that the Oriental Orthodox Church was once aligned with the Roman Catholic Church.
We were in communion with the
Church of Rome, but it was not the "Roman Catholic Church" at that time, as the characteristics which mark it as unique today (its unique ecclesiology, theology, etc.) were largely absent at the time. For instance, the filioque -- the addition of the phrase "and the Son" in the clause of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed about the procession of the Holy Spirit, which was unique to the Latin churches before the creation of the first Eastern uniates after the Great Schism -- wasn't added until c. 580s. Ask any Roman Catholic: even that name wasn't applied to their Church until the time of the Reformation, by Protestants.
Etymology Online gives the date of 1554 AD, which is over a millennia after Chalcedon and at least a few centuries after the 'Great Schism' between the Eastern and Western Chalcedonians (generally dated to 1054, though some say it wasn't finalized until the sacking of Constantinople in 1204).
No, it is not true, and it is also
not related to the questions I asked about Mormonism.
Is that not where your priesthood lineage comes from?
No. That makes no sense. How would priesthood in the Egyptian Church 'come from' Rome? Rome has never had any kind of ecclesiastical authority over Egypt, or even real presence there. Rome did not even form its own uniate Church in Egypt (the Coptic Catholic Church, an Eastern Rite church of some 187,000 people) until 1824, and even then it was basically titular. In fact, the first vicar of the Coptic Catholics was appointed in 1781 to oversee less than 2,000 people, and very shortly afterwards thought better of his decision and returned to Orthodoxy in repentance.
By 1824, we were already on our
109th Pope, HH St. Peter VII. How could that have been the case if our 'priesthood lineage' came from Rome? In truth, HH St. Peter VII refused the overtures of the Latins and the Russians alike. He famously responded to the Russian tsar's offer of protection by asking him rhetorically if he planned to live forever, and when the answer came that he would die like any man, HH told him he will stay with the Protector of the Church who does not die (Christ). These aren't the words of someone who recognizes Rome or the Chalcedonian churches more generally as being the origin of the Church or its 'priesthood lineage', and he is not unique at all in our history.
Wasn't the Oriental Orthodox Church formed in AD 431?
No more than the Chalcedonian Church could be said to be formed in that year. That's the thing about mutual anathematizations: they're mutual. They establish us as separate from those we anathematize (though to be more technical about it, we did not anathematize the Chalcedonians as people, only the Tome; HH St. Timothy II, the direct successor to our teacher HH St. Dioscorus, mandated that any who wished to return to Orthodoxy from Chalcedonianism be accepted by profession of faith only, after an appropriate period of reflection to make sure that this is what they really want to do). They also establish those who we are separated from as their own unique population. Think about it logically: before 451 AD, no one was Chalcedonian or non-Chalcedonian, as Chalcedon hadn't happened yet. So did Chalcedon create a 'new' church, or two new churches? It depends on who you ask, of course, but just as the Chalcedonians would say that they changed nothing between 450 and 451, we likewise say that we did not change in rejecting Chalcedon, and we have the record to prove it, in the sayings of the likes of St. Shenouda the Archimandrite of the White Monastery (pre-Chalcedonian Coptic saint, b. c.347), the historical record on both sides of the divide with regard to the
Trisagion or
Agios prayer (both Zacharias Rhetor on the OO side and Patriarch Ephrem of Amida on the EO side say that what has been recast as the 'OO understanding' was common to
all the people of Syria since the days of HH St. Eustathios of Antioch, who was patriarch before the founding of Constantinople, which the 'EO understanding' of the hymn is traditionally tied to), etc.
The questions surrounding the schism of the 5th century open a very deep hole, and I think if you're going to attempt to traverse it in order to make some kind of point against my Church in particular, I will warn you that you will not be able to get out of it with such a shallow understanding of the conflict such as you have now. And again, it is unrelated to any of my questions about Mormonism. So you might not want to go there, or at least instead request that a separate thread be made. (I'd absolutely be willing to participate in it, but as you can probably tell from this post, that comes with a lot of background reading to get the necessary information to even make sense of what you're looking at. To this very day, the two 'sides' don't even necessarily agree on the substance of what the schism was actually about. So get ready for a lot of references, and a lot more history than you are probably equipped to deal with, if this is where you want to go...that is to say, if it is not just a cheap ploy to recast my Church as something akin to the Protestant churches or some other western phenomenon that you are more familiar with.)
We believe that the priesthood was no longer on the earth then.
"Then" as in since Chalcedon? So Nicaea, Constantinople, and Ephesus are all preserving the true faith? Well dang, man, in that case I'll see you at liturgy as soon as we're able to have them again!
