[Video] No Tradition? Fine. NO CHRISTIANITY! [13 Verses to Highlight]

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I’ve had this conversation more times than I can count.

Someone tells me they just go by the Bible — Tradition? That’s man-made. Catholic add-ons. The early Church got off track. So if I want to be a real Christian, I need to ditch the Tradition and stick with Scripture alone.

Fine. Let’s try that for a minute and see what happens.

If you reject Tradition, you do not get to keep Scripture. The Bible itself is one of the things the Apostolic Tradition handed down to the Church. The very table of contents in your Bible — the list of which 27 books belong in your New Testament — was a decision made by Catholic bishops, working out of the very Tradition you are now being told is dangerous. You cannot saw off the branch and stay sitting in the tree.

I recently worked through this in depth in a recent episode of Catholic Bible Highlights (the video is above). But the case from Scripture is worth seeing here in print as well. The Greek word the New Testament uses for “tradition” is paradosis — literally, that which is handed down or handed over. It is the same root we get the English word “tradition” from. But in the New Testament, paradosis is not a dirty word. Paul uses it positively, as something the Church is supposed to receive, hold onto, and pass on intact.

Read 2 Thessalonians 2:15:

“So then, brethren, stand firm and hold fast to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter.”

Notice what Paul does here. He puts the spoken word and the written word on equal footing as authoritative tradition. The Apostolic teaching reaches the Thessalonian church two ways — through letters they read and through teaching they heard preached — and both are binding.

Now read 1 Corinthians 11:2:

“I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions even as I have delivered them to you.”

Same word. Same posture. Paul is praising the Corinthians for holding the traditions. He is not telling them to test the traditions against a Bible they do not yet possess in canonical form. He is telling them to maintain what was handed to them.

Then 2 Thessalonians 3:6:

“Now we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you keep away from any brother who is living in idleness and not in accord with the tradition that you received from us.”

That is not a soft suggestion. Paul is willing to break fellowship over a brother not living in accord with the Tradition.

Jude 3 — different writer, same conviction:

“I felt the necessity to write appealing to you to contend for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.”

The faith was delivered. Paradosis again. Once for all. To the saints — the whole Church, not to a private reader with a leather-bound study Bible.

And 2 Timothy 2:2:

“What you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.”

Four generations in a single sentence. Paul → Timothy → faithful men → others. That is not the description of a Christianity that dies with the last apostle and waits 1,500 years for someone to find a printing press. That is apostolic succession. The Catholic name for it is Tradition.

John tells us at the close of his Gospel that “there are also many other things which Jesus did” — many things — and “if every one of them were to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (John 21:25). Whatever it is that the Apostles taught about the things Jesus did, only some of it landed inside the New Testament. The rest is what we call the Apostolic Tradition.

Here is what gets me about all of this. The very people who tell me Tradition is dangerous are sitting there with a Bible in their lap that they trust has the right table of contents. Where did that table of contents come from? It came from a council of Catholic bishops, working in the late fourth century, drawing on a Tradition that already knew which books were Apostolic and which were not. Athanasius listed the 27 books of the New Testament in his Easter letter in AD 367. That list was confirmed at the Council of Rome in 382, at Hippo in 393, and at Carthage in 397. The Bible they trust came to them as a gift of the very Tradition they are being told to reject.

So when somebody tells me they just go by the Bible, I want to ask them — gently, because I used to be that somebody — by what authority do you know that those 27 books are the right ones? You know it because the Tradition told you. The Tradition you are now being asked to throw away.

If you reject the Tradition, you do not have the Bible either. You have your interpretation of a book whose contents were determined by the very Church you are walking away from.

Read the verses. Pull out your concordance. Look up paradosis. Sit with what Paul actually says. The Catholic Church is not asking you to prefer Tradition to Scripture. She is telling you what the Apostles told the Church from the beginning — that the apostolic deposit, written and unwritten, is one thing, handed down together, and held together.

Keep reading your Bible. Keep highlighting these verses. Keep asking the hard questions.