Something that no Catholic has ever made a response back to me is: The verses that are used by the Catholic church to defend "Oral teachings" are single verses from letters written to single churches. How do you know that when all the letters were gathered together to be the Bible, that everything they taught orally was not written down, so that when they were all put together we had the whole of their oral teaching???
Becky
John 21:25: "And there are also many other things which Jesus did, which if they were written in detail, I suppose that even the world itself would not contain the books that would be written."
Note that this passage of John was written after almost all the NT had been completed.
Excellent point!
Anything that is important that one wants to be remembered verbatim and passed along without alteration is put down in writing.
Ask the magisterium of the RCC about anything regarding its history and they will point to a document, not oral words floating in the atmosphere overhead.
Go into a court of law with an oral testimony defense and you will lose every time to the one with written proof.
To argue that the *entirety* of the oral teachings of the Apostles is contained in the mere 200 pages (if you take out the duplication involved in the four Gospels, barely half of that total is left) or so that the New Testament takes up in modern typesetting is absurd. Why, by the time the NT was compiled definitively in its present form in the late 4th Century, the commentary on it alone had already reached many volumes. The Apostles would have similarly expanded on the often bare-bones nature of the NT text.