...History.
2. You seem to be interpreting "prayer" to exclusively mean "worship", which is a common source of misunderstanding between Catholics and Protestants.
...No. I understand the difference. I didn't say anything about worship. Though that happens too.
3. See Revelation 5:8 and 8:3.
...Nothing there says anyone prayed to a saint.
And why are you arbitrarily choosing a 100 AD cutoff date
...Apostles were alive then. If it was Apostle's teaching, they would have taught it. Mind the gaps.
How do you explain the fact that Catholic Marian doctrine is already prevalent in 2nd-century Church Fathers with direct lineage from the Apostles such as Justin Martyr d Irenaeus?
...There is nothing about lineage that equates to truth. As said in my OP, by 200, (and in fact earlier, according to Scripture), heresy was infiltrating the Church. Syncretic Paganism accelerated under Rome.
4. No command, but again, there are requests and commands to pray for each other,
...Never in regards to departed saints or demigods.
and the practice of specifically praying to departed saints is referred to in Revelation
...This passage never says anyone ever prayed to a departed saint. Simply quote it and you will see.
and is universal throughout the early Church.
...It is not, unless you redefine what "early church" means.
Moreover, no prohibition to pray to a departed saint exists before the 16th century.
...This is (seemingly) the last bastion of those who flee truth. It is usually offered because the person has cherished idols they wish to preserve.
5. In addition to Revelation: "He is not the God the dead, but the living."
...Living in another existence does not equal being able to hear or communicate with you.
"Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses. . ."
...A reference to the whole chapter that tells the story of faith.
And there is no teaching in Scripture that saints can't hear a prayer from earth.
...The last bastion of those who flee truth is to make it up out of whole cloth or no cloth.
6. See above, for starters.
...Ended quickly, since you did not refute the observations in my OP. I do appreciate that you posted a discussion.
This is a serious question. Why do we get overrun with protestants in an obviously Catholic thread? I have yet to even look at a protestant/evangelical thread.
It gets old.
So, back to the question, why is something 200AD too late to matter when protestantism started 12-1300 years later?
2. If you understand the difference between prayer as worship and prayer as request in the general sense, where are you getting your prohibition against praying to saints in the non-worship sense from, since there are no Scriptures that prohibit this, and there are Scriptural examples of requesting prayers from other believers such as the ones I cited in the other part of my response to this item? Quote me a verse that prohibits requesting prayers from deceased saints.
3. What do you think the phrase "prayers of the saints" means in the verses from Revelation I cited? Who are the martyred saints mentioned there praying for?
Why are you assuming the Apostles didn't teach what their leading proteges practiced? And who do you think preserved the teaching of the Apostles, if you want to throw out the same 2nd-century sources we rely upon for our knowledge of what NT books the church accepted as Apostolic?
As for "Syncretic Paganism accelerated under Rome," again, if you don't cite any specifics, it's difficult to have a productive discussion. But if you're against paganism, you might want to consider that the Reformation's approach to exegesis was influenced by the Renaissance revival of paganism and by the late medieval adoption of Islamic fundamentalism's Scriptural interpretation methods.
4. I already quoted the requested passages in #3, which uses the phrase "prayers of the saints". If you will read these passages in context rather than ahistorically, you will see there are allusions to the Jewish temple and to early Christian worship, such as references to incense and (if you continue down to 6:9) altars. This reflects the role of the departed saints in late Judaism and early Christianity, and is consistent with practices that have been preserved in both Roman Catholic worship as well as Eastern churches that far predate the Reformation.
I don't need to redefine what "early church" means to make my point. I mean Matthew, Luke, John, Paul, Ignatius of Antioch, and Irenaeus from the first two centuries, as well as writers from the succeeding centuries such as Alexander of Alexandria, Cyril of Jerusalem, Athanasis of Alexandria, Epiphanius, Gregory Nazarien, all of whom are considered as part of the Apostolic and Patristic Ages by Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant scholars alike, and all of whom attest to early Marian doctrine. But you seem to be redefining "early church" as "Gnostic" (if I am understanding your response to #3 correctly), which is certainly not how I define the early church and not who I am talking about.
Your comment about fleeing the truth and idols sounds like you might be the one fleeing the truth, since you don't address my point. You're claiming to follow Scripture but you're following an approach to exegesis that post-dates the NT by many centuries; and you're also using your own authority to prohibit practices that are not prohibited by Scripture.
5. If deceased saints aren't able to hear or communicate with us, what do you think Jesus was doing with Moses and Elijah at the Transfiguration? There is nothing in Scripture that teaches the deceased saints aren't able to hear or communicate with us--that is your own assumption, not something from Scripture. In addition to the passages I have cited from Hebrews and Revelation that allude to the deceased being present in Christian worship, Jewish practice of the time also assigned great importance to deceased saints, which is another source of data relevant to this discussion. I don't have a good source on this in English handy, but there's a German scholar named Arnold Goldberg who cites a lot of ancient evidence on this--for some bibliogaphic info, see Ra'anan S Boustan, "From Martyr to Mystic: Rabbinic Martyrology and the Making of Merkavah Mysticism", page 156.
Yes, the prior chapter in Hebrews describes the story of faith, and it describes those who are deceased as a "cloud of witnesses", and again in a context that is heavy with references to Jewish and Christian worship, attesting to the belief already present in 1st-century Jewish Christianity that the faithfully departed were present with the living during worship.
6. I appreciate the discussion as well, and will keep you in my prayers.