Catholics were the first Christians. It’s in the Bible!
Imagine the Disciples' surprise.
“Catholics were the first Christians. It’s in the Bible!”
Not in mine.
Jews and Samaritans were the first Christians; Jesus’ disciples and others converted before His death; the woman at the well, along with others in her town, up to and including the thief who died next to Him.
And those disciples at Antioch where the first called Christians. Acts 11:26
Please show where Catholics are even mentioned.
Catholics were the first Christians. It’s in the Bible!
You seem to say this with pride, but nothing of the kind is in the Bible, and "catholics" were not the first Christians.
It was at a particular local assembly, in Antioch of Syria, where the people of The Way were first given the epithet "Christians" for their allegiance to Jesus of Nazareth, claimed to be the Messiah--the Anointed One ("Christos" in the Koine)--The Christ, as though it was their profession.
They were not catholics.. In those days, all the local bodies of Christ-believers were organized into independent autonomous assemblies, no church answering to any other church or association of churches for direction or government. Local government was by a plurality of elders, answering to the Lord and the remainder of the congregation only. There was no catholicity and no people titled "Catholics."
The concept of catholicity--of a "universal church"--came in as Greek-educated intellectuals and philosophers insinuated themselves, brought their Hellenized organizational principles, and implemented their platonic concept of an "oversoul" by marrying it with, altering, and corrupting the doctrine of The Apostles.
Assemblies in which these Greek-trained of the Apostolic Fathers and ante-Nicene Patristics--influence-peddlers all--thought they were rightly dividing the church by wrongly dividing the brethren into two classes: one of clergyman overwhelming and dominating the remainder of the congregation, which is the second class called "lay people." This is called Nicolaitanism (from "nikaoh" = to conquer and "laoi" = the ordinary people"), and God hates it (Rev. 2:6) and its partiality (Eph. 6:9). A permanent split of the believers was caused such that no unity, as voiced by Jesus in His high priestly prayer, John 17, was ever to be possible in that polity of the church, even in a small local assembly.
Furthermore, the platonists extended their power by forming associations eternal to the local churches, of clergymen and their cohorts only--a sort of "holy Mafia"--to make cooperative agreements and quash any form of resistance. This, of course, introduced even more sources of bitter divisions between them and those who reasonably disagreed. Thus the idea of seeking a "universal church" with unity of doctrine could never be achieved.
Finally, they locked in their power over civilization by integrating their rule of the spirit with the government over ones body, accepting the head of civil government as arbitrator of all, thus becoming a sacral society ruled by a statist church, headed up over a very broad area by one political leader, entered into by one means for all inhabitants, and defended by exterminating all dissidents.
In the words of Dr. Thomas Strouse, professor of theology, "Constantine embraced the platonic catholicity of the Patristics to form the Roman Catholic Church (RCC(, with its one head in the bishop of Rome, with its entrance through the baptismal "regeneration" of infants, and with its persecution of all dissidents. This visible catholic ecclesiology, initiated by Ignatius and his ilk, propagated by Irenaeus and Cyprian, and popularized by Augustine, became the orthodox position for Christendom until the Reformation."
Subsequently, hordes of religious freedomseekers left the war-torn Eropean Continent, and set up a community in which citizens were not taxed to support religion, freedom of speech and religion was rampant, and the populace enjoyed no distinction of aristocracy save that natural distribution of excellence of thought and diligence. That mode enjoyed free play until the old religions the first settlers had escaped came across with later immigrants, and started attempting to reassert its grasp upon the government and its administrators. The eclipse of truly non-Catholic Christanity in America is now nearly complete, and we are suffering the results of inolementing the "social gospel."
This is called catholicism, and is a gospel not present in the Bible nor in the policies instituted by the original personal intimate disciples of Jesus, called Apostles, who would never be called Catholics. It is a practice that has brought innumerable differences wherever it has gone, never to be resolved until His Second Coming to establish and rule His Kingdom with fairness and justice on the Earth.
No, the first Christians were not Catholics. Peter was not a Catholic and never preached the catholicism we see today. There were no Catholic churches in the Bible.
“Catholics were the first Christians. It’s in the Bible!”
Might want to reread. Jews were the first Christians.
Book and chapter please.