God withheld the truth from man by way of a restoration for a reason. First is the fact that three hundred years after the death of Christ they compiled what unispired men thought was suppose to be the word of God.
I'm sorry, but that's not a very good reason. If the canonization of the Bible can be dismissed in this manner, then why is it that the LDS Biblical canon nevertheless matches the standard 27-book NT used by all Christian churches, which was compiled and accepted by those very same men who you call 'uninspired'? Clearly they weren't so far off the mark that your religion wouldn't make use of what they left the Church. The only reason the LDS have a Bible of their own is because of what these 'uninspired' men did. Do you really expect anyone to think that this makes Christianity look worse, and your religion better, when it shows that your religion clearly cannot function without stealing from Christianity? If Christianity is so apostate and corrupt, then what does that make your third-rate, N-th generation copy of it?
Jesus himself never wrote a single word down or had a scribe write anything down.
So what. Did Jesus come to save and redeem all mankind, or to write a book?
You have epistles written by unknown authors who are using oral traditions to write down from their their own memories from stories they were told.
Which, again, are nevertheless in your Bible.
And these stories were not written down until forty years after the fact. Now if you believe that God protected his word just how did he do that since it came from memories.
Because in pre-literate/at best semi-literate societies like the ancient Near East, that's how
everything was preserved. And it's still traditional to at least some degree to do that in the East. My own church's tradition is to have blind cantors, because it is believed that their blindness enhances their hearing and hence makes them better equipped to produce the fine modulations of the long and melismatic Coptic chant. The most famous Coptic cantor of modern times, Mikhail Batanouny (1873-1957), was blind, and trained generations of Coptic cantors in the traditional ways of singing in church. Today one of the most famous Coptic cantors, Gad Lewis, is blind. Here he is chanting one of the Psalms in Coptic, obviously entirely from memory (both tune and words):
As one of the chief cantors of the Coptic Orthodox Church, Gad also has the responsibility of training others, and he often leads choirs during liturgy or the chanting of the Midnight Praises. These are 3-5 hour or even longer services which can vary throughout the year (e.g., liturgies for fasts, praises for particular Coptic months, etc.), again chanted entirely from memory.
In fact, it is considered a mark of distinction to have memorized the Psalms, as that is what the monks do, and all good bishops, priests, and laity as well. When it's part of your daily prayer rule to chant them seven times a day, you'd probably be surprised at how much you can retain in your memory. I see no reason why this would not have been even more the case in ancient times.
Now these are facts. I didn't make them up. Then because all the apostles were killed off and the leadership that was there lacked the capability to receive more guidance and revelations from God they were left to their own devices.
If you were going to start off this bit by saying "I didn't make them up", you shouldn't have immediately followed it with something that you made up. How is it that the disciples of the apostles were unable to receive guidance from God? The apostles, who you apparently consider competent enough to not be included among those who don't have this capability, were nonetheless not able to pass on the teachings to the next generation? That seems to be in essence what you are saying, if you believe that there was apparently such a degradation in teaching such that those like St. Ignatius or St. Polycarp were rendered incapable of leading the Church. These two were disciples of St. John. So apparently John was a trustworthy apostle in every way but
actually passing the faith on, even though those who he taught would assume their ecclesiastical responsibilities well within his lifetime (since he didn't die until c. 100 AD, while St. Ignatius began his service as Bishop of Antioch c. 70 AD).
That makes zero sense. Again, all restorationism is predicated on the blasphemous idea that God doesn't know what He's doing. Now, in order to give your religion a reason to exist, you've merely kicked the can down the road a bit and said that it's the apostles -- the men who God Himself chose -- who were incompetent. What part of "the gates of hell will not prevail against it" do you not understand?
Remember they didn't have the New Testament for three hundred years. And many only had parts of it.
This is an incredibly flawed and ahistorical way of looking at the Bible. What didn't exist was one canon agreed upon by all churches. That wouldn't come along until 367 AD with St. Athanasius the Apostolic's 39th festal letter, which is the earliest list of books that corresponds to our modern NT canon. The books were around; they just weren't canonized. This was not a problem then, and still is not a problem now. Indeed, in the East, the canon was
never officially closed. This is why, for instance, the Ethiopian broader canon is so much larger than the canon of its parent church in Egypt, as certain books were preserved only in Ge'ez (the liturgical language of the Orthodox Tewahedo Church of East Africa). At the time when the Axumites converted to Christianity, in the early 4th century, the Bible was still in its 'pre-canonized' state, and since there were various writings that were popularized and preserved in their Ge'ez versions only (rather than in Greek, Syriac, etc.), these made it into the Ethiopian canon.
If you are interested in the development of the Bible in particular circumstances, I would recommend Griffith's recent popular overview
The Bible in Arabic (Princeton University Press 2013). While it traces only the development of the Arabic-language Bible, the situation it describes tells a lot about what it would've meant in the ancient Near East for a people to 'have the Bible', so it is directly relevant to this conversation.
So don't tell me that there wasn't an apostacy. The church was taken from the earth. Some men wanted to do what was right or what they felt was right. They fought over the very character of God and finally was decided by a pagan worshipper.
There wasn't an apostasy at all. That's the LDS and other restorationists' fantasy, but their sects cannot function without relying on so much of what the Church they call 'corrupt' or 'apostate' left, that their claims are transparently hollow and self-serving. And again, God knew what He was doing when He founded the Church -- and He still does.
And if emperors really decided religious doctrine as you apparently believe they do, then the Henotikon of (Emperor) Zeno would've healed the Chalcedonian schism in 482 (to use but one example). Alas, that's not what happened. Even earlier than that, Julian the Apostate (361-363) attempted to reinstate Hellenistic paganism as the state religion, and that didn't take, either. Your idea that the Church was merely the malleable plaything of the Emperor is dead wrong.
And the creeds is what they came up with. If God wanted to preserve his words why didn't he just call a prophet?
There were those who attempted to set themselves up as modern prophets in the wake of the apostles, such as the
Montanists, and these were never accepted by the Church. There is no need for any 'new' prophecy. What we have is timeless and perfect, as the God who established our faith and indeed the universe is timeless and perfect.
He allowed man grubby little hands all over it and screwed it up pretty good.
Well, there we have it...the restorationist says plainly and without shame "God screwed up". Why am I not surprised? Lord have mercy. This is blasphemy of the highest order. May God forgive you for it.
I know the reason God didn't call prophets because the leaders of the church would have had them killed.
That's funny, because they didn't have Arius, Nestorius, Apollinarius, Sabellius, or any of the other major early heretics killed. Killing people for heresy was a later behavior, uncharacteristic of the early Church, which didn't really have any power to have anyone killed for the first four, almost five centuries of its existence (Christianity was not adopted as the religion of the Empire until 380, under Emperor Theodosius). It was practiced a lot against my own Church by the Chalcedonians in the wake of that council in 451, during which time we were also dispossessed of many of our properties and our hierarchies were gutted or suppressed, so I'm not even trying to make the early Church sound better than it was. It's just that if you're going to look for Christians killing one another for sectarian reasons, you'd do better to look to Europe and Asia Minor after the 11th century (e.g., the Massacre of the Latins in 1182, the Siege of Constantinople in 1204, or the various European wars of religion in the 16-17th centuries) than to the early Church in any place. Also, keep in mind that some of the Byzantine Empire's actions during the early centuries of the faith hurt those outside of it, such as battles with the rival Persians that led to the martyrdom and imprisonment of many within the Church in Persia. And there were also others completely outside of the Byzantine Empire who had their own churches which, due to their isolation from it, would not have been under any Roman emperor's control, such as in Axum or India. You cannot tie all of Christianity to Rome or Byzantium, then or now, and there was time when the bulk of the world's Christians were likely adherents of the See of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, as the East Syrian (later 'Nestorian') church headquartered in Mesopotamia once had the largest geographical spread of any particular Christian church.
Please stop trying to impose your latter-day myopia on the history, growth, and theology of the early Christian Church.
Can you imagine what they would do with Jesus during this time? Especially if he taught them the truth.
What does that mean? "Especially if"? Did Jesus ever do anything else?
You'd have to prove that that's what happened in the first place for it to be the same thing over again. But you can't, because it didn't. Mormon fantasies do not count for historical evidence.
But let's suppose that there was much more to the bible than there is today.
Yes, and let's suppose that doesn't include any LDS writings. In fact, let's do more than suppose that, let's just state that outright: That doesn't include any LDS writings.
We are the only church that teaches many of the things that had been lost.
To say that they have been 'lost' suggests that they were at one point found in and used by particular communities. So please tell us: Which early communities accepted the Book of Mormon, or the Doctrine and Covenants, or the Pearl of Great Price? And I want actual communities, not made-up non-people of whom there is no trace. I already gave one example of a particular Christian Church, the Orthodox Tewahedo of Ethiopia and Eritrea, who have a larger Biblical canon than other churches, and explained how that came to be. The peoples of what are today Ethiopia and Eritrea have been Christians since the days of King Ezana of Axum (c. 320s-360), the first Axumite king to embrace Christianity. Where are the corresponding Mormons of the early 4th century?
It is a striking difference between mainstream Christianity.
I'll give you that. It is striking how utterly wrong and historically baseless it is.
I believe that if there was more truth that made it through time that it would be harder for those who are sincere in finding the truth to find truth.
Huh? "If there was more truth that made it through time it would harder [...] to find the truth"? Don't you mean easier, not harder? How would having more truth make it harder to find the truth? I don't understand what this is supposed to mean.
