I’m not setting myself up as my own Pope. I’m setting myself up as someone who can read the Bible and believe it says what it means and means what it says.
>>But you are picking and choosing which scriptures to tie together, so in effect you are appointing yourself as your own Church, Pope and hierarchy.
But I’ll say you have a rather novel interpretation. Now show me any Church fathers who used your hermeneutic connecting the appointment of Matthias with this verse.
The Catholic/Orthodox interpretation predates the canon of scripture we have today.
I might add there were 70 apostles, not just the 12.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventy_disciples
I imagine that if a person sitting in the pew next to you has a different interpretation they are a heretic, right?
Read Eusbius’s Ecclesiastical History, which takes the Church’s history from the cross to the time of Constantine.
http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/250103.htm
From what I am seeing the only difference from a Baptist and a Mormon is a matter of degrees. Both sects are implicitly Gnostic.
By Gnostic, I mean that Baptists and Mormons seem to think they have some sort of hidden knowledge that eluded all of their predecessors when they read the Bible.