In Mormonism I was taught that the twelve apostles in the New Testament died, and the authority of God died with them. The continued line of the Catholic Church was way off base because, you know, indulgences.
That’s literally all I knew.
I didn’t know much about church history (except they will say the Protestant Reformation was a critical step toward the Restoration of the Gospel) and I didn’t know a single thing about church fathers. No one even mentioned Augustine or Constantine, and I knew very little about why the council at Nicaea was convened, except for the fact that they added new theology to the Bible and took us off course with their silly Trinity doctrine!
But even before that, what about Bishop Polycarp who was ordained by the Apostle John? Wasn’t that the continuation of the proper “priesthood authority”?
The story is told as if the twelve apostles all died on the same day, before they had a chance to pass along the authority. But that is not true! They were killed one by one, over year course of many, many years.
And we don’t need to look far to see what happened when an apostle died!
It’s right there in the Bible!
Please turn with me to Acts 12 where Herod takes the life of James, the brother of John.
Later in that chapter, you see the apostles replacing him to make sure his line of apostolic authority continues…
….wait, you don’t???
You mean they don’t continue the line of apostolic authority?
Why doesn’t James get replaced?
It’s almost like they did that on purpose….
Like they knew the role of the twelve had been fulfilled and was being fulfilled by their own lives, and there was no need to continue it.
Like Ephesians 2:20 says, the church is build on the foundation of the apostles and prophets. You don’t need to lay a foundation again!
And by the way, that verse refers to the authority of the New Testament (apostles) and the Old Testament (prophets). Notice neither got replaced. The prophets in the Old Testament don’t appear in the New Testament. And the apostles in the New Testament don’t appear in the second-century church.
One by one, the twelve apostles died, and one by one, they left another vacancy that was not replaced.
God did not instruct them to.
There was no apostasy — the church was just following God’s instructions.
There was no turning away from God. They obeyed Him the whole time.
And if God can speak directly to Paul, who was not one of the twelve, and the LDS church canonizes his epistles, then why couldn’t God speak to Polycarp, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Jerome, or even the line of Roman Catholic popes for that matter?!
You think they had absolutely no inspiration in how they led the church?
But the Catholics were corrupt!
Okay let’s talk about that.
According to LDS doctrine, can the line of proper priesthood authority pass through corrupt priesthood holders?
Where did Alma Sr, priest of King Noah, who left and formed a church and had the authority to baptize (remember hum?) — Where did he get his priesthood? Who ordained him?
He was part of a corrupt system under King Noah that had lost the truths of the gospel!
They didn’t know the most basic gospel truths until Abinadi came and taught them.
They had scripture (they quote Isaiah 52:7 and ask Abinadi what that means… and how the Brass Plates in 600 BC contained Deutero Isaiah, written after the exile, we will never know….) but they didn’t understand it.
Doesn’t sound like they were very enlightened.
They definitely weren’t teaching correct things from the scriptures.
(Kind of the Roman Catholics of the Middle Ages)
But they still managed to hold priesthood keys and pass that authority down to Alma, so Alma could start a church
So did the Catholics have authority?
Could that authority have survived during the period of corruption?
(To clarify, I’m just playing a game of logic with the LDS church’s claims. I do not personally hold to an apostolic line of authority. I am Protestant, and I believe in the priesthood of all believers.)
So, I think these two facts are all that’s required to debunk the LDS claim of a great apostasy:
(A) We can see, documented in the book of Acts, that the church intentionally failed to replace apostles.
(B) According to LDS canonized scripture, priesthood keys can be passed through a corrupted church.
If you’d like to hear a rebuttal to some scriptures being taken out of context to claim a Great Apostasty, click here.
