Some Thoughts on the Youtube "Bible-Only" Debate

There is a great debate on Sola Scriptura at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpqK32AkANQ between Catholics (Patrick Madrid & Karl Keating) and Protestants (Bill Jackson & Ron Nemec). This took place 25 years ago at a Fundamentalist Baptist church in Denver, Colorado. I believe the Catholics won this debate mightily, or someone commented, "The Protestants where utterly destroyed in this debate."

I did notice a few interesting things.

At the 27 minute mark, Karl Keating states that if your Bible reads "Search the Scriptures" at John 5:39 it is a mistranslation. The proper translation is "you are searching the Scriptures." I believe he is correct, but I could only find three Bibles that have the exact wording of "you are searching the Scriptures" and those are the Montgomery New Testament, the 2001 Translation, and the New World Translation.

Interestingly, besides the King James Bible (and a few others), the Catholic Douay Bible also has the mistranslation of "Search the scriptures." But then, the Douay is a translation from the Latin, not the Greek and this may have played a factor in that translation.

Keating further adds that "the divinity of the Holy Spirit" is "not evident on the surface of Scripture." Also correct. This mirrors statements made by other Catholic scholars. Catholics don't derive their beliefs from the Bible, but rather from the majisterium. As such, Catholic scholars are freer to be more frank on many topics*, and it is why their Bible versions tend to be much better.

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Just a few interesting thoughts by Catholic scholars:

"In no N.T. text is theos [God] used in such a manner as to identify Jesus with Him who elsewhere in the N.T. figures as ho theos, that is the Supreme God"..."Nowhere in the N.T. is there to be found a text with ho theos [God] which has unquestionably to be referred to the Trinitarian God as a whole existing in three Persons" Theological Investigations, Karl Rahner 1:155, 1:143.

"Despite their orthodox confession of the Trinity, Christians are, in their practical life, almost mere monotheists. We must be willing to admit that, should the doctrine of the Trinity have to be dropped as false, the major part of religious literature could well remain virtually unchanged." Karl Rahner, The Trinity, J. Donceel, trans, p.10

"The belief as so defined was reached only in the 4th and 5th centuries AD and hence is not explicitly and formally a biblical belief. The trinity of persons within the unity of nature is defined
in terms of "person" and "nature: which are Gk philosophical terms; actually the terms do not appear in the Bible. The trinitarian definitions arose as the result of long controversies in which these terms and others such as "essense" and "substance" were erroneously applied to God by some theologians." Dictionary of the Bible by John L. McKenzie, S.J. p. 899

Also from McKenzie: "Jn 1:1 should rigorously be translated 'the word was a divine being.'"

"The New Testament writers could not have said that Jesus Christ is God: God meant the Father. They could and did say that Jesus is God's Son" (Light On The Gospels; Chicago, ILL: Thomas More, 1976. Mckenzie p.188).

"In the New Testament, however, the term 'God' (ho theos) in practice always means the Father." Does God Exist? Hans Kung, p. 685

Raymond Brown, the renowned Catholic scholar, said of the "Mighty God" of Isaiah 9:6, "'God' may have been looked on simply as a royal title and hence applicable to Jesus as the Davidic Messiah"–(Jesus, God and Man, New York: Macmillan, 1967, p. 24,25).