I'm a farmer, but won't lord that over you.
Not actually a specialist in ancient history, then. Well, thanks for responding. Anyway, I wouldn't tell you that no one knows where V-8 juice comes from, so maybe you should hold back on saying that no one knows what happened in the past; there is very little, in fact, that isn't known about our history, right own to very small matters. Certainly how the church developed in the first century is not in that category.
But show me what you know, point me to the documentation.
There are innumerable works available to you in any library and I have recommended a number of them to other posters in the past. But this wasn't about some very specific event; you said that no one knows what the early church did. That suggests a more basic need.
But just to make a point. I would venture that few Protestant denomination members would have a clue what the terms Anaphora or Anamnesis or Epliclesis mean, or, more importantly, why the concepts and meanings are so important within the eastern and western churches. Why, IOW, the Eucharist is the absolute central and most solemn part of the Mass. Or dig deeply into the eastern concept of justification, critical as it is to the Christian faith, and see how well it lines up with the Reformed position.
I would say that it depends on which churches you have in mind, although you are right that those particular terms are not normally used (and, frankly, it doesn't matter much whether they are or are not).
And, as I've said before, I don't even care so much which Church might be the original, only that there must be one, and that it must necessarily be visible and trace its roots back to the very beginnings of the faith.
Lets think about exploring that particular slant on the subject, shall we?
Why, I am wondering, should that matter--as opposed, for example, to the survival of the truth, to the orders of ministry, to the administration of the sacraments, and to the continuing expansion of Christianity to all nations, etc?
Why a
single institution, whether it is right or wrong? We know from the New Testament itself that there were many separate churches in the early days, and the writers of the Epistles criticized the performance of some of them but not that they were operating independently from other churches in other cities.
