The teaching of purgatory - as already linked and shown - did not exist for 1,200 years of Christianity.
I see above where you said based on a cursory AI search – “
The fully developed concept of purgatory, involving post-mortem fire and satisfaction for venial sins, emerged centuries later (formalized at the Second Council of Lyon in 1274 and the Council of Trent in the 16th century).”
That type of reasoning and scholarship is most problematic. It’s the same methodology used by the Jehovah Witnesses when they say that it is a “fact” that the dogma of the Trinity is based on a late 4th century “invention”. Why? Because the word “Trinity” does not appear in any Christian writings until the 3rd century and because the Catholic Church did not formalize the dogma of the Trinity until the 4th century.
No different is your reasoning here. It fails to recognize three key things:
- Just because we do not have a preserved writing that directly speaks to a teaching prior to a certain point in time, that is not evidence that the belief was not in place prior to that.
- Just because specific language is not used it does not mean that a belief was not conceptually reflected earlier than that.
- The Church quite often does not formalize a dogma until there is a heresy that has gained ground and needs to be addressed. The Arian heresy is what required the dogma of the Trinity to be formalized and made more precise and robust in the 4th century.
The other problem is that a cursory AI search is not true scholarship at all. For reference, if you do not have a copy of “An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine” by John Newman, it would be worth your time to acquire one. Regarding the doctrine of Purgatory, he begins with Clement of Alexandria (150-215AD) and talks about sins being purged by discipline (much likes Hebrews 12) and that “the necessity of this purifying discipline is such, that if it does not take place in this life, it must after death, and is then to be effected by fire, not by a destructive, but a discriminating fire, pervading the soul which passes through it.” Hmm, sounds like Purgatory to me.
For reference, the first complete and accurate listing of the books which comprise the New Testament is from Athanasius in 367, 150 years later. So to say that the conceptual understanding of a purifying fire after death is not a part of the belief of the early church is simply not true.
Newman continues with his citations, St. Cyprian (210-258), The Acts of the Martyrs, the Eucharistic prayer of the faithful in the 4th century, and St. Cyril (376-444). While he doesn’t reference St. Augustine (354-430) and St. John Chrysostom (347-407) both speak of our prayers being able to help the dead. To what avail would that be if they were believed to all be in heaven?
So in the interest of honest scholarship, it simply isn’t accurate to profess that the teaching of Purgatory didn’t exist for the first 1200 years of the Church. No more accurate than the Jehovah Witness claim that the teaching of the Trinity didn’t exist for the first 400 years of the Church. Same flawed scholarship leading to flawed conclusions in both examples.
