The Bible is the Word of God, and is God Himself

[The Liturgist]

By the way @Roymond are you able to read Patristic and Byzantine Greek of the sort one would find in early liturgical texts easily enough?

 

[The Liturgist]

Thank you. That quotation is from Letter 39. Consider the following quotation of Athanasius from On the Councils of Ariminum and Seleucia. ,

'Thus believes the Catholic Church;' and thereupon they confessed how they believed, in order to show that their own sentiments were not novel, but Apostolical; and what they wrote down was no discovery of theirs, but is the same as was taught by the Apostles.

CHURCH FATHERS: De Synodis (Athanasius)

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Athanasius speaks of the Councils, specifically the Nicene Council in this instance, but the sentiment goes for all Catholics and Catholic beliefs. We believe what has been handed down through the Apostles. We may come to a deeper understanding of what has been handed down.

Athanasius does not specifically say some person handed him the NT list. I understand your interpretation of his words, you are absolutely entitled to your opinion. What we do know for a fact is that the oldest list in existence that is the NT canon formalized by the Catholic Church forever just decades later, was that from Athanasius. But as I have explained to you the Catholic Church process of selecting books of the Bible spanned centuries. The Catholic approach is the same with the OT, Catholics use the Septuagint because that's what the Apostle's taught from. Earlier in that century the lists were getting close to the final canon written down by Athanasius. If you take the text to be saying that some other Catholic handed him the list you are absolutely entitled to your opinion. A Catholic understanding the Catholic approach and teaching might believe his reference did not mean a person handed him the list, that instead he was referring to teachings handed down through the Apostles and their successors.

To be fair though as far as Alexandria is concerned it really was the Orthodox Church, since the Church of Alexandria before the Chalcedonian Schism* was governed in a manner consistent with how the Greek Orthodox Church of Alexandria and the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria have been governed since the schism, and both churches continue to refer to themselves and their respective communions as Catholic (this is also the title Catholicos exists, as it was created before the Nestorian Schism by the Patriarchate of Antioch for use by the successors of St. Thomas who ran the Church of the East, and then starting in the fourth century, by the leaders of the newly formed Armenian and Georgian churches, as all three of these were initially “vice-Patriarchates” which became autocephalous largely due to political reasons, as they existed mostly outside the Asiatic frontier of the Byzantine Empire. Indeed the Syriac Orthodox preserves this vice-Patriarchate in the form of the Maphrian (Maphruno in Syriac) who is responsible for presiding over the ordination of a new Syriac Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch, and vice versa; historically the Maphrians were based in Tikrit and were responsible for the Syriac Orthodox Church in Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq), where a slightly different style of headdress is worn by bishops, a small inverted fez reminscent of the kamilavkas of Orthodox clergy, and the Shash historically worn by the Chaldean Catholic Patriarch, known as the Kossita, instead of the onion-shaped turban whose name escapes me, and there is a slightly different liturgical tradition, but since the Syriac Orthodox Church inadvertantly took over the former Church of the East in India (indeed, in the process of responding to the request of the Mar Thoma Christians for assistance after the Portuguese conquest of most of the Malabar Coast, the initial bishop sent by the Syriac Orthodox Church was Mar Ahatullah, who was unfortunately martyred; fortunately Syriac Orthodox relations with the Roman Catholic church have improved considerably, so at present, the only Eastern churches known to consistently communicate Roman Catholics and to allow their members to receive the Eucharist from Roman Catholic priests as permitted under the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches*** are the Syriac Orthodox Church and the Assyrian Church of the East.****

And the reason why there are now two autocephalous Armenian Catholicoi and two autocephalous Armenian Patriarchates is that the Catholicos of Holy Etchmiadzin and All Armenia was the primate of the Armenian Church in the historic Kingdom of Armenia, the Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia was the primate of the Armenian Church in the second Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, located on the Mediterranean Coast around the area where the borders of modern day Turkey and Syria meet, and then there has for centuries been a Patriarch in Constantinople and in Jerusalem to lead the Armenian community in Turkey and the Holy Land (despite the genocide, Armenians remain the largest Christian minority in Turkey so far as I am aware, as a higher ratio of Syriacs were killed, whereas the population exchange with Greece led to the Pontic Greeks being completely “ethnically cleansed” with only the rarified Phanariot Greek community in Istanbul, to which most senior leaders of the Ecumenical Patriarchate are members, a community of Greeks who speak Turkish and are even forced to serve in the Turkish military, although their situation has become more precarious due to Erdogan’s increasingly hardline Islamist views.

*Which was in my opinion the result of Pope Dioscorus of Alexandria being in my opinion unfairly deposed because Eutyches had deceived him; perhaps he should have resigned, but the Oriental Orthodox really were victims of the sinister figure of Ibas, who falsely accused them of Monophysitism when in fact they had excommunicated Eutyches and the Monophysites, who formed their own Monophysite church whose theologians included John Philoponus, the 6th century philosopher noteworthy for being active in the movement as it went down the slippery slope from Monophysitism to Tritheism, so in a sense the Mormons, whose interpretation of the Trinity is Tritheistic, are the successors of Eutyches and the actual Monophysites, whereas the Oriental Orthodox Christology is identical to that articulated by Pope St. Cyril the Great of Alexandria, and fully compatible with that articulated by Pontifex Maximus** Leo I of Rome in his Tome.

** As you and @Roymond are doubtless aware but other readers of this thread might not be, the Bishop of Alexandria has been styled Pope since the episcopate of Heraclas in the 3rd century, whereas in Rome the style Pope was formally adopted roughly 200 years later by Pope Siricius, although as early as 302 the use of the word Pope (or to be more precise, Papem, a Greek word meaning Father) to refer informally to the bishop of Rome and to other Western bishops is attested. I prefer to refer to the early bishops only by their official titles due to a combination of unyielding pedantry and a horror of anachronism when speaking of the early Church (Baroque era paintings depicting St. Jerome wearing the elegant scarlet galero and cassock of a Cardinal are beautiful but frustratingly anachronistic, although still less frustrating than the refusal of seemingly every modern day Cardinal except for His Eminence Raymond Cardinal Burke to wear the galero which is the symbol of their office, which threatens the beautiful tradition of suspending the scarlet galero over the tombs of cardinals as a memento mori.

For that matter, I wish more archbishops would wear a green galero, as is their right.

*** I believe the same canon also allows “Eucharistic hospitality” between Roman Catholics and the Polish National Catholic Church, which along with the Norwegian Catholic Church comprise the Union of Scranton; the PNCC was ejected from the Union of Utrecht for refusing to ordain women, and at the time the Union of Utrecht was already engaging in gay marriage, which only the PNCC protested. This situation led to a standoff in which a group of liberal Old Catholics occupied the PNCC church in Toronto for several years, painting a rainbow flag on the roof, claiming that since the PNCC had been ejected from the Union of Utrecht it had forfeitted the rights to its properties, fortunately the Canadian courts ruled against the occupiers and returned the church to the PNCC, in 2007, after the occupation had lasted for seven years. Because of acts like these, and the open contumacy we are now seeing by proponents of homosexuality in the United Methodist Church, I am fearful that the advocates of the Synodal Path in Germany are going to try to force a schism and the German courts might not be as equitably minded as their Canadian counterparts; the fact that Pope Francis has started to become publicly critical of the Synodal Path worries me in that the situation I fear is worse and closer to schism than I had previously been aware.

**** The Assyrians have an semi-open communion policy wherein anyone who believes in the Real Presence can partake, so that would include all Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Old Catholics and Lutherans, as well as most if not all Anglo Catholics and a majority of the larger subset of High Church Anglicans, as well as some Methodists, Moravians and possibly any surviving adherents of Scoto-Catholicism and Mercersburg Theology within the Reformed churches, or if one wanted to be generous and interpret Real Presence more broadly to include those who believe in a spiritual presence in the Eucharist, potentially most Calvinists and most Broad Church and some Low Church Anglicans