Fr. Chas. M. Carty - Bible Quizzes: Quizzes to a Street Preacher

Bible Quizzes
to a Street Preacher

Fr. Chas. M. Carty
&
Rev. Dr. L. Rumble, M.S.C.

IMPRIMATUR: Joannes Gregorius Murray
Archiepiscopus Sancti Pauli.

Written by

Fr. Chas. M. Carty
&
Rev. Dr. L. Rumble, M.S.C.

Copyright 1976 by TAN Books

Originally published by

Fathers Rumble and Carty
Radio Replies Press, Inc.
St. Paul, Minn., U.S.A.

Complete and Unabridged

TAN Books
Charlotte, North Carolina
www.TANBooks.com

1976

CONTENTS

BIBLE QUIZZES TO A STREET PREACHER

1. In a pamphlet I just read the Catholic Church is charged with destroying the Bible.

Yes. The Church is accused of hating the Bible, destroying the Bible, keeping the Bible from the hands of the people, of burning it wherever and whenever she found it and of sealing it up in the dead language of Latin which the majority of people can neither read nor understand. And all this she does (so they say), because she knows that her doctrines are absolutely opposed to and contradicted by the letter of God's written Word, and that she holds to dogmas and creeds which could not stand one gleam of the searching light of Holy Scripture. But in reality the Bible was always available to the people and many editions appeared before the Reformation.

2. Did not the great revolt against the Roman Church let the people see how they had been befooled and hoodwinked?

Many believe that putting the Bible into the hands of the people brought about the Reformation. The multiplicity of Christian religions was brought about by putting the Bible into the hands of the people without a proper interpreter of what the Scriptures were saying. The Bible was in the hands of the people long before the Reformation as you can observe through statements elsewhere in this phamphlet.

3. Do real honest scholars believe the present-day Protestant statements against the Church for her attitude on the Bible?

Dr. S. R. Maitland, Protestant secretary to the Archbishop of Canterbury, explodes the common opinion of the masses who believe such charges because of tradition handed down to them from their forefathers since the "Reformation," by minister, teacher, and parents; through sermon, catechism, newspaper, radio, fiction, and history. They believe the tradition that monasteries and convents were sinks of iniquity and corruption; or that Catholics pay money to have their sins cancelled, etc. The Protestant account of pre-Reformation Catholicism has been largely a falsification of history and all the good the Church did has been misconstrued, misjudged, misrepresented as Dr. Maitland and other students of history admit after their study of the documentary sources. It would be well for readers of this pamphlet to investigate and if they do they will come to the conclusion of the story, told about Charles the Second, the Merry Monarch of England. Charles the Second propounded to his learned and scientific men the following profound problem: "How is it that a dead fish weighs less than a living one?" The scholars discussed the grave difficulty and wrote long articles to win the favor of their Royal inquisitor, but they came to no satisfactory solution of the problem. Finally, it occurred to one of the scientists to test whether a dead fish does weigh less than a living one; and, of course, he discovered the lie or the joke; for the fish weighed exactly the same, dead or living. People act in the same gullible manner when treating statements concerning the oldest Christian Church in the world. It would be well to investigate and you will soon remove the mountains of abuse, calumny, and false supposition.

4. The books in our public libraries give testimony that your Church is the enemy of the Bible.

By a calm consideration of the facts of history and a mind open to conviction on genuine Catholic and non-Catholic evidence, you will admit by sheer force of honesty that the Catholic Church is not the enemy of the Bible for she has been the parent, the author and maker of the Bible; she has guarded it and defended it all through the ages against those who would destroy the Bible; she has ever held it in esteem and has refused to allow the fallible brain of man to tamper with the Bible; she has grounded her doctrines upon the Bible; she, of all the Christian Churches in the world has the right to call the Bible HER OWN BOOK; she can boast to the world that she alone possesses the true Bible and the whole Bible of not 66 books but 73 books, and that copies of the Scriptures outside the Church are partly incomplete and partly defective and that whatever in them is true, is true because it comes from the Bible which the Church preserved from the days of the Apostles who were the authors of the New Testament.

5. We can have a Bible without a Church.

You cannot, for common sense would tell you that what comes first is the Church and then her writings. We must not get the cart before the horse. The Jewish Church or Synagogue existed before Moses wrote a single line of the Old Testament and in the like manner the Catholic Church existed before a single line of the New Testament was written. Pentecost Day, the Birthday of Christianity, was not the coming down of the Holy Ghost in the form of a book, for there was no book as Johannes Jorgensen, the famous convert writer of Stockholm, Sweden, declares. The Holy Ghost came down in the form of tongues of fire symbolizing that Christianity was to be spread not through the written but the spoken word. It is reasonable that Divine Providence had the Jewish Synagogue to protect the Old Testament from mutilation and it is logical and reasonable that the Church that gave the Bible to the world should be set up by God to preserve and perpetuate the inspired writings of the New Testament.

6. Was the Bible given to the world by God?

The Bible was not served to the world all complete upon a golden platter as the Book of Mormons is supposed to have been served to the fifteen-year-old boy, Joseph Smith. It did not suddenly appear upon the earth through the instrumentality of angel or seraph, but it was written by men like ourselves who used a pen or reed and wrote on parchment in the original languages of the Orient. They were divinely inspired, but they were human beings chosen by God for the work.

7. Was the Bible written all at once by one man?

NO. About 1500 years elapsed between the writing of Genesis (the first book of the Old Testament) and the Apocalypse or Revelation of St. John (the last Book of the New Testament). The word Bible comes from the Greek plural word "biblia" which means "books." The Bible is not a single book but a number of books written at different times by different men. If you lived at the time Moses died all that could be given to you of the Bible was the first five books of the Old Testament, written by Moses himself. His writings formed the first record of the inspired Word.

8. In what language was the Bible written?

It will not be out of place to say here that the Bible wasn't written originally in English as so many seem to believe, judging from their arguments. Some believe that the Scriptures were written first in English and then set forth in the barbarous languages of Latin, Greek or Hebrew for the sake of inquisitive scholars and critics. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew and the New Testament was written in Greek. The Hebrew text of the Old Testament was translated into Greek, before the time of Christ by 70 translators.

9. When was the Old Testament compiled?

The fact that the Old Testament was already translated into Greek more than 100 years before Christ, indicates that the original Hebrew text existed long before that time.

10. What do you mean by the Septuagint Bible?

Because of the "Dispersion" of the Jews and their growing familiarity with Greek which was then the universal language, it was necessary to furnish the Jews with a translation of the Hebrew Old Testament in the Greek language. The first Greek translation was done by 70 translators, who worked at Alexandria. Septuagint means 70 in Latin hence the name of that first Greek version. Our Lord and the Apostles used this version whenever they referred to the Scriptures. It contained the Catholic number of Old Testament books, namely 46 and not merely 39, as found today in the Protestant Bibles. The Septuagint version used by Christ and the Apostles was begun about 280 years before Christ and finished in the next century. It was the acknowledged Bible of all the "Jews of the Dispersion" in Asia, as well as in Egypt, and it was used not only by Christ, His Apostles and Evangelists but by Jews and Gentiles and Christians in the early days of Christianity. It is from this list of 46 books that Christ and the New Testament writers and speakers quote when referring to the Old Testament. Of the 350 quotations of the Old Testament found in the New Testament, 300 are taken directly from the Greek Septuagint Bible. Pope, the Biblical scholar in his "Aids to the Bible," i., 54, mentions 18 passages, citing Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus and Judith books rejected by the reformers. The early Christians of Rome were acquainted with the 7 books rejected by Protestants, for the frescoes of the Catacombs picture Susanna and the elders as well as Moses and Jonas. The writers of the first three centuries often quote or allude to the books eliminated from the Protestant Version.

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