Nearly every Catholic-versus-Protestant discussion leads to a dispute over who has the correct interpretation of Scripture. Some believe that Scripture clearly teaches baptismal regeneration in John 3:3-5, whereas others rigorously maintain that these verses clearly teach no such thing! In some instances, Christians in these disputes will appeal to other passages from Scripture to settle the matter. One problem is that the disagreement over the correct interpretation of the other Scripture passages also becomes disputed, not to mention the differences between Catholics and Protestants on how to identify the canon of Scripture.
What are Christians to do? Does this phenomenon mean there is no objective tie-breaker?
This difficulty is not new by any means. In the second century, a group of people known as the Gnostics claimed to have the true canon of Scripture and the true interpretation of Jesus’ words. The Catholic Church had to vigorously combat this group due to the severity of their corrupted teachings. Fr. Robert Eno succinctly relays the situation with the Gnostics as follows:
Following upon this, some of them, Marcion notably, maintained that the Hebrew scriptures, coming from the Creator God, were to be rejected as totally different from, and inferior to, the teachings of Jesus. Mainline Christians, of course, rejected such ideas, claiming that their teaching came from Jesus through the apostles. The difficulty was that the Gnostics also claimed apostolic authority for their teaching. They asserted that their teaching was handed down in a secret tradition through a series of teachings going back to a particular apostle, who, in turn, received it as a secret teaching from Jesus (Teaching Authority in the Early Church, 23).
How did the Catholic Church respond to the Gnostics? Catholics couldn’t merely appeal to exegetical arguments from Scripture, because the Gnostics gutted large sections of the Gospels and rejected entire books of Sacred Scripture.
It is here that the writings of the second-century figure St. Irenaeus of Lyons become so important. In five books against the Gnostics, known as Against Heresies, the saint knew he could not ultimately appeal to Scripture, since the Gnostics would have rejected his canon and his interpretation. So he appealed to something concretely verifiable—namely, apostolic succession! This is the concept that the bishops of the Catholic Church are the authoritative teachers Christ placed over his church, and their ordinations can be traced back to the apostles through the laying on of hands. It was such teachers that Irenaeus appealed to, noting they had not received from the apostles the teachings the Gnostics maintained.
Eno explains it this way:
The Church’s argument as developed principally by Irenaeus and Tertullian maintained that the only logical presumption was that Jesus taught his real doctrine to his disciples and that they in turn taught the same in its totality to their followers, especially those whom they set over the local communities. . . . Hence the importance of the appeal to the local churches founded by apostles. As Tertullian put it, if you wish to find out what the apostles really taught, you do not go to private, i.e., Gnostic teachers, who claim, but cannot offer proof, that their teachings derive from an authentic tradition. Rather you go to those cities and towns where there are Christian communities founded by apostles. Moreover, these congregations can also give proof not only of apostolic foundation but of an historically demonstrable link with the apostolic generation. This, of course, was the list of their community leaders, their bishops.
As confirmed by description above, the Catholic Church was able to break the tie with the Gnostics by appealing to churches established by the apostles, which handed down the teachings of the apostles through a tangible series of ordinations. The Gnostics had no way to respond to such an appeal from the Catholic Church, since they lacked an objectively verifiable connection to the apostles.
Protestants are in the same position as the Gnostics of the second century. Like the Gnostics, they contend with the Catholic Church about the proper canon of Scripture and the proper interpretation of it. They claim to have the uncorrupted message of Jesus, just as the Gnostics made such claims. Yet Protestants lack an objectively verifiable connection to the apostles, since they lack any claim to apostolic succession. In the very same way the Catholic Church appealed to apostolic succession to refute the Gnostics, so too the Catholic Church repeats the same criticism to Protestant Christians.
What is even more ironic is that Protestants attempt to use a New Testament canon against the teachings of the Catholic Church, when this canon was forged by the Catholic Church in the midst of its disputes with the Gnostics. In other words, Protestants enjoy the content of the canon of the New Testament while contradicting the rationale used to arrive at such a canon. After all, it was only a community that had a traceable line back to the apostles that could authoritatively confirm which scriptures were entrusted to it. Any community that lacked such a pedigree had no objective way to claim which scriptures were apostolic in nature.
Because of such similarities with the Gnostics, Protestantism seems to be on the wrong side of history in the debate over the canon of Scripture and its proper interpretation. It is in this sense that they are the Gnostics of our age—a neo-Gnosticism, as it were.