Tuesday is my day to field questions on “Catholic Answers Live.” Some shows bring one or two questions I have not heard before, but most callers pose questions that have been answered multiple times on the air. This is understandable-not everyone listens to every show, and few people can remember what was addressed on the air a week or a month ago. (I surely can’t.) A certain amount of repetition makes sense, but there are limits.
For some weeks running, on each broadcast I was asked the Catholic position on the Evangelical doctrine of the Rapture. The question became so predictable that program host Jerry Usher and I joked off-air about just when during the hour we would receive the “question du jour. ” Was there really so much interest in the Rapture, or had listeners just not been listening? As a courtesy to those who tuned in regularly and who must have become as tired of hearing the same question as I was of answering it, we instructed the program’s call screener to refer Rapture questions directly to our staff apologists. We temporarily embargoed such inquiries from the air. Then, mercifully, questions about the Rapture became infrequent. Perhaps the answers finally “took.”
I wish I could say the same thing about anti-Catholic controversialists. So many of them never seem to get the point. They style themselves professional in their understanding of “Romanism,” but they keep making the same misstatements and mistakes, even after being corrected repeatedly. It is as though they never had heard the Catholic side or, if they had, that the Catholic argument had made not the least impression on them. I have come to the conclusion that, for some such people, answers from Catholics never will “take.”
As one example among many, let me mention Ron Rhodes. He heads Reasoning from the Scriptures Ministry, which is based in Rancho Santa Margarita, about an hour’s drive south of Los Angeles, California. He holds degrees from Dallas Theological Seminary, the stronghold of Dispensationalist theology, and he teaches on an adjunct basis at Biola University, Golden Gate Seminary, and Southern Evangelical Seminary.
Rhodes formerly served as the associate editor of the Christian Research Journal, the main publication of the Christian Research Institute (CRI). CRI is best known for the “Bible Answer Man” radio program, on which Rhodes has appeared hundreds of times. He is the author of nearly two dozen books, with topics ranging from alien abductions and the New Age movement to Mormonism and the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
His chief book about Catholicism is Reasoning from the Scriptures with Catholics, published in 2000. As an offshoot of that larger work he produced this year a book called The 10 Most Important Things You Can Say to a Catholic. He says the new book “is short by design” and that “there is much to be said for brevity. However-and I want to emphasize this very strongly-brevity should not be thought of as ‘shallowness’” (his emphasis). Shallowness, though, is precisely what is served up in the new book.
This should come as no surprise to readers of Reasoning from the Scriptures with Catholics. That earlier book, marketed as a fair and well-balanced look at Catholicism, hardly could satisfy anyone, including Protestants, who had an independent knowledge of the Church of Rome. A measure of the book’s deficiencies is found in the first chapter, where Rhodes presents a chart listing “many of the distinctive Roman Catholic doctrines [that] emerged far after the first century.” Among other things, he claims that priestly celibacy came into practice only as late as 1079 and that confessing sins to a priest began to be taught in 1215.
The first “fact” would be news to Christian Cochini, S.J., who, in The Apostolic Origins of Priestly Celibacy, demonstrated from a thorough examination of ancient literature that celibacy was the norm for priests in the earliest centuries, even from the apostolic era. As for confession, the practice is mentioned indirectly in the Didache (the first liturgical directive, written around A.D. 70) and explicitly by such writers as Tertullian (203), Origen (248), and Cyprian (253), who wrote as though confession to priests already was a long-standing practice by their time. Asserting that priestly celibacy was not “invented” until 1079 or that “auricular confession” was not taught until 1215 shows either a reckless disregard of Christian history or a biased approach to a religion other than one’s own-or both.
The “inventions” listed in Rhodes’ chart are illustrative of the errors found throughout his more serious work. It should not surprise anyone that his simplified critique, The 10 Most Important Things You Can Say to a Catholic, is no more accurate or fair. The shorter book is one of a series, other titles discussing the “10 most important things” about the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and Masons. For none of those groups do I have much regard theologically, but, judging by Rhodes’ treatment of Catholicism, I would be remiss in not anticipatorily empathizing with what the others must perceive as his mangling of their beliefs and history.
My Catholicism and Fundamentalism appeared in 1988 and was the first book in years to take a detailed look at the anti-Catholicism found within certain strains of “Bible Christianity.” There followed many books of Catholic apologetics-several by me, most by other writers-that covered similar or complementary ground. By the time Rhodes turned to the writing of The 10 Most Important Things You Can Say to a Catholic, there was plenty for Protestant controversialists to review before going on the attack.
Prior to the late eighties anti-Catholics had the field more or less to themselves. They could afford to be sloppy. By the turn of the century the initiative was with the other side. Numerous Catholics had debunked traditional anti-Catholic charges (not even in the fever swamps does anyone rely on Maria Monk any more). Opposition to the Church by Fundamentalists should have reached a higher level-the anti-Catholics should have learned from their opponents-but Rhodes writes as though little apologetics has come from Catholics in recent years. (Of the fifty books in his bibliography, Catholicism and Fundamentalism is the only directly apologetical work by a Catholic. Three-quarters of the books listed are by non- or anti-Catholic writers.)
Let me give a few examples of Rhodes’ argumentative deficiencies.
The third chapter of his newer book is titled “Peter Was a Great Apostle, But He Was Not the First Pope.” The disproof of the papacy includes an examination of Matthew 16:18. Rhodes begins with a non sequitur: “Whenever Peter is referred to in Matthew 16, it is in the second person (‘you’), but ‘this rock’ is in the third person (verse 18).” Yes, but so what? When addressed, men are referred to in the second person. When inanimate objects are mentioned, the third person is used. “This rock,” even if referring symbolically to a man, would not be addressed as “you.” Rhodes points to a grammatical truism that demonstrates nothing.
Then he turns to something of more substance. “‘Peter’ (petros) is a masculine singular term and ‘rock’ (petra) is a feminine singular term. Hence, they do not seem to be referring to the same thing. Jesus did not say to Peter, ‘You are Petros, and upon this Petros I will build my church.’ Jesus said, ‘You are Petros (Peter), and upon this petra I will build my church.’ It would seem that, in context, petra refers to Peter’s confession of faith that Jesus is the Christ.”
This argument was weak but useful before the recent resurgence of Catholic apologetics. Today it should be regarded by every Fundamentalist as an embarrassment because it has been answered repeatedly by Catholics. Yes, to the uninitiated “it would seem” that Petros and petra refer to different things because the endings of the words differ. But there is a good reason for that: Petros is masculine and refers to a man (it is Simon’s new name), while petra is feminine and is a well-established word for rock or stone. (The Greek word more commonly used in the New Testament for rock or stone is lithos, a masculine term not used here by Matthew because, unlike petra, it does not preserve the play on words.)
Rhodes apparently realizes that his argument has a weakness, because he notes that “Catholics may respond that Jesus would have spoken these words to Peter in the Aramaic language: ‘You are Kepha, and upon this kepha I will build my church.’ Unlike the Greek, where two different word forms are used-petros and petra-the Aramaic expression would have used one word (kepha), and hence Peter must be the ‘rock’ of which Christ spoke. All of this is mere conjecture. We do not know what Jesus might have said in the Aramaic. What we do have are Greek New Testament manuscripts that use two distinct words-petros and petra. And since Scripture is inspired by the Holy Spirit, the exact words God wanted in Matthew 16:18 were placed into this verse by divine superintendence.”
Matthew’s Gospel was not written in Greek. Both Catholic and Protestant scholars acknowledge that the original was penned in what Papias called “the tongue of the Hebrews.” That language may have been Hebrew itself, which was the hieratic language of the Jews, but more probably it was Aramaic, which was the everyday language of the area. Many first-century Jews no longer could read Hebrew, but they knew Aramaic. Many also knew Greek, which was the commercial language of the Roman Empire, and perhaps even some Latin, the language of the Roman conquerors.
What is indisputable is that our Lord knew and spoke Aramaic-he spoke it, for example, from the cross: “Eli, eli, lamma sabachthani? “-and that Paul in his epistles refer to Simon as “Cephas,” a transliteration through Greek of “Kepha.” Why would Paul refer to Simon as Kepha if our Lord had not used that very word for the head of the apostles?
Besides, it simply is not true that “we do not know what Jesus might have said in Aramaic.” What he said can be reconstructed by those who know Aramaic. One might as well say that, on reading Goethe in English translation, we cannot know what he might have written in German. One can translate backward and can come close to Goethe’s original text. If that can be done with complex literary works, with their broad vocabularies and intricate verbal formulations, it is all the more easily done with the simple language of the Gospels.
Rhodes’ fifth chapter is titled “Mary Was the Mother of Jesus, Nothing More.” But, for Rhodes, she was the mother of more than only Jesus. She was the mother of those men and women known as the “brothers” and “sisters” of the Lord. As part of his proof, Rhodes says, “In Matthew 1:25 we read that Joseph ‘kept [Mary] a virgin until she gave birth to a Son; and he called His name Jesus’ [emphasis added]. The word ‘until’ implies that normal sexual relations between Joseph and Mary took place following the birth of Jesus.”
Not so. There was no such implication in ancient usage. The word until indicated that an act did not occur up to a certain point; it did not imply, as it does today, that the act later took place. In Genesis 8:7 Noah lets out a raven, which is said not to return to the ark “until” the waters had dried up from the face of the earth. In fact, the raven never returned at all, even after the waters had dried up. In 1 Timothy 4:13, Paul instructs Timothy to attend to reading, exhortation, and teaching “until I arrive,” but has any Christian understood Paul to mean that Timothy should cease those activities after Paul’s visit? In 2 Samuel 6:23 we are told that Michal, the daughter of Saul, “had no children until the day of her death.” Surely this does not imply that she gave birth to children after she died.
The argument Rhodes advances about the meaning of until has been answered repeatedly by Catholic apologists, but either he is ignorant of that fact or ignores it. So it is when he discusses John 6, the chapter most relied upon by Catholics when establishing the doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
“Catholics often respond that some of Jesus’ listeners understood him to be speaking literally when he announced that people were to eat of his flesh (John 6:52),” says Rhodes. “However, the fact that some of Jesus’ Jewish listeners understood him this way does not prove that the Catholic position is correct, for indeed, the Jews often misunderstood what Jesus taught. [Rhodes then gives several examples of such misunderstandings.] Just because some Jews may have understood Jesus to be referring to literal flesh in John 6 does not mean this interpretation is correct. The context indicates that Jesus was speaking figuratively of believing in him for salvation (see verse 40).”
Throughout his argument Rhodes looks at John 6:51-55. He does not look further in that chapter. In the next few verses Jesus repeats himself, even after the Jews have misunderstood him. Then come verses that undercut Rhodes’ argument. “Many of his disciples, when they heard it, said, ‘This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?'” (6:60). Jesus, referring to them, says, “There are some of you that do not believe” (6:64). He is referring to followers-proto-Christians-who had accepted all of his teachings up to this point.
Then comes the first “schism” of the nascent Church. “After this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him. Jesus said to the twelve, ‘Will you also go away?'” (6:66-67). This is the only place in the New Testament in which any of his followers abandoned Jesus for a doctrinal reason. Like the Jews mentioned by Rhodes, these listeners took Jesus literally and refused to accept his teaching-and he let them go. He did not call them back nor assure them that he had been speaking only metaphorically. “Will you also go away?” he asked the apostles. In his words there was a reaffirmation of the literalness of his teaching.
The reader of The 10 Most Important Things You Can Say to a Catholic is not told this. Rhodes ceases his discussion of John 6 at verse 55. He thinks it sufficient to argue that the Jews, who misconstrued Jesus’ words in the past, would misconstrue them again. Perhaps he realizes that his argument would lose all force if he had to admit that some of our Lord’s followers, who had accepted all of his prior teachings, now left his company because they would not accept his new teaching. Looking at the whole of John 6-taking in the entire context-would have been fatal to Rhodes’ argument, so he resuscitates as much of the traditional anti-Catholic spin as he can by ignoring the verses that most clearly undercut his ideas.
Throughout The 10 Most Important Things You Can Say to a Catholic Rhodes presents arguments that have been refuted repeatedly by multiple Catholic apologists, but these few examples will have to suffice. I do not have the patience to lay out dozens of similar inadequacies. What a nuisance to deal with what has been dealt with so often before! Has Rhodes learned nothing from Catholics in a decade and a half? Is he so lacking in intellectual generosity that he is unwilling to grapple with the other side’s rejoinders?
In 1988 I addressed nearly every point that he presents in 2002. In the intervening years other Catholic writers have gone over the same ground. It is impossible to attribute to Rhodes the sense of fair play one wishes to attribute to an opponent. Is it too much to hope that prominent Fundamentalists will insist that he and other anti-Catholic writers finally shape up?