Are Scripture and Tradition reliable?

Dear Rev. Know-it-all,

I was recently on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and our tour guide, Abdul ibn Turghaid, showed us the stone for lack of which Jesus had no place to lay his head and then he showed us the inn where the parable of the Good Samaritan didn’t happen, but would have had it not been a parable. Then we saw two tombs where Jesus rose from the dead. Abdul insisted that Jesus had risen at both tombs. He explained that apparently there was a matinee performance for those who had missed the early morning resurrection. Eventually we made our way past many check points and frowning bureaucrats to a dingy old church in Bethlehem where we stood in line to go down some steps into what seemed to be a basement that was in fact a cave when you looked behind all the tapestries and wall hangings. Come on, now.  I have been to enough Christmas pageants to know that Jesus was born in a stable, not a cave. Isn’t that what the Bible says? How do they know what was what after two thousand years? Isn’t most of this stuff made up? The Bible stories don’t agree with each other. I heard one theologian say that Jesus was born in Bethlehem and then another one said the whole story was made up. How do we know what happened

Yours,

Paul Grimage

Dear Paul, 

You don’t know if you’re not a Catholic, or at least in an apostolic church. An apostolic church is one that can trace its origins back to the founding of the Church by Christ through the ministry of the Apostles. We have an early Christian writer, a Greek who was the bishop of a Roman city in what is now France. His Name was Irenaeus of Lyon.  He was born around 130 AD. That’s only 100 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection. That’s not a very long time. I know stories that my mother told about her father that go back to 1880. I am an American and we Americans have the memory span of distracted goldfish. If I can remember trivial details that go back 130 years, certainly an ancient Greek or Jewish Christian who was paying attention to the stories for which he eventually would give his life as martyr probably got the story down pretty well from the people who told it. The martyr-bishop Irenaeus was the student of St. Polycarp, born 69AD who was also a martyr. St. Polycarp was a disciple of St John the Apostle. This is what Irenaeus had this to say about apostolic tradition:

....It would be very tedious, in such a volume as this, to reckon up the successions of all the Churches.... [we do this, I say,] by indicating that tradition derived from the apostles, of the very great, the very ancient, and universally known Church founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul... which comes down to our time by means of the successions of the bishops. For it is a matter of necessity that every Church should agree with the Church (of Rome).... inasmuch as the apostolic tradition has been preserved continuously by them... (Adversus, Book III, Chapter 3)

I quote this text not for my usual smug “Hurray for our team!” purpose for which I usually quote sources, but to point out that 100 years after Christ, remembering and passing on these traditions was very important to Christians. This may be hard to believe for us moderns who can barely remember who won Dancing with the Stars last year, but ancient people valued their history and did their best to preserve it, though their sense of history was different than ours.

You have two questions, “Is Scripture reliable and is Tradition reliable?”  The Scriptures, especially the Gospels can be spotty, and even seem to be contradictory at times. The four Gospels leave out details like what color veil did the Blessed Mother wear? (Everyone knows it was blue, because the picture in my grandmother’s bedroom has her wearing a blue robe, the exact color of her blue eyes, framed by her flaxen blond hair.) There are things that just weren’t important to the ancients that we think crucial, like the exact time and date of birth of a poor boy, born in a barn. The great and mighty noted the time and date and place so that they could have their horoscopes prepared. Mary and Joseph apparently weren’t worried about Jesus’ horoscope. They were worried about Herod, who was very interested in the time and place of Jesus birth. I imagine a more important date for the Holy Family was the day they arrived safely in Egypt. The Gospels can be very disappointing if one is looking for gossipy details. Far more disturbing are the apparent contradictions. How many angels were at the resurrection? Did Jesus ascend to heaven from the Mount of Olives or from a hill in Galilee? Was he born in Bethlehem or Nazareth?  Why can’t the Bible seem to get it straight if it’s an inspired text? The answer is simple. The first Christians as we have seen from the text of St. Irenaeus handed down exactly what they received.

There are four Gospels that the early Church most respected, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. John is distinct from the others and seems to have been addressed to a very specific audience. My theory is that it was aimed at those who thought John the Baptist was the Messiah. It is probably the last Gospel to be written. The other three are called the synoptic Gospels. The word synoptic is a Greek word that means “look alike”. The look alike Gospels are pretty similar but, of the three, only the Gospel of Matthew has ever been thought of as eyewitness testimony. Luke and Mark were not among the twelve apostles. The long-standing tradition is that Mark had been an administrative assistant to St. Peter and that Luke had been a friend and assistant to St. Paul. Have you ever seen a car wreck? I hope not. But if you have, you know that two people describing the same wreck describe it differently. One notices the dent in the back of the car, the other the dent in the front, but not always both and so on. So it was with these very different and very human accounts of the events of the life and ministry of Christ. The three Synoptic Gospels weren’t written, at least in my opinion, as evangelistic tools. The Gospel was an oral phenomenon. St Paul says “if someone teaches another Gospel than the one I preached...” (Galatians 1:9)

The Gospel was shared by word of mouth. The texts we have were taken from a common fund of knowledge about the life of Christ. My theory is that Matthew was aimed at Pharisees to point out that Jesus was the fulfillment of prophesy and was the Messiah. Matthew was written to show that Jesus was the Son of God and Luke was written as a sort of “friend of the court brief” to convince the former High Priest, “your Excellency Theophilus”, a son of Annas and High Priest from AD 37 to AD 41.  The theory is that Theophilus was the high priest who delegated Paul’s trip to Damascus to clear up this Christian mess and, to Theophilus’ horror, Paul came back as one of them. Theophilus may have lodged the accusation against Paul with the Roman authorities and Luke, the only non-Hebrew author in the New Testament, wrote Luke/Acts of the Apostles as a two-part defense of Paul requesting that Theophilus withdraw his accusation. Just a theory.

If you think of the Gospels as modern style histories of the life of Jesus, you are going to be disappointed. They are, I believe, documents that were written by their human authors to make certain points about the life of Christ: that He fulfilled the prophetic expectations about the Messiah (Matthew); that He was the Son of God (Mark); that He and His disciple Paul were innocent of the charges (Luke/Acts); and that He, not John the Baptist, was the Messiah, the true Lamb of sacrifice of the true Passover (John). However the Holy Spirit meant, I believe, to show us the aspects of the life of Christ that are necessary for our salvation and redemption. What color Mary’s veil was is not essential to the work of our salvation.

All this doesn’t exactly answer the question, “Are they reliable?” The fact that they seem to be at variance with one another is the proof that they are reliable. That’s the nature of Sacred Tradition. If someone a couple centuries after Christ had tried to polish up the accounts of Christ’s ministry that would be suspicious. They said, “No, this is what we have received, this is what we hand on to you, whole and entire.” The small apparent discrepancies are not very important and are probably quite reconcilable. The four canonical Gospels are unedited because they are eyewitness accounts made by human beings, though inspired and used by the Holy Spirit. Two of them are quite probably eye witness accounts (Matthew and John) and two are probably second hand accounts (Mark and Luke). The Church has, from the very first, been scrupulous to hand down nothing less and nothing more than it received from Christ through the ministry of the apostles, even though that handing down has some questions attached to it. You can trust the Gospels.

As for your question about the places associated with the life of Jesus, that will have to wait until next week!

RKIA's Guide to Reading the Bible -- part 6

“TRADITION! (Cue the sound of klezmer music, as in Fiddler on the Roof ) TRADITION!”

So, the question becomes, “If the Bible is not a self interpreting book, but a library full of poetry and history and a host of other literary forms, how do we know what it’s really saying?” The answer: Tradition!

Tradition is a dirty word among some Christians. They quote texts like “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition..... rather than on Christ.” (Col 2:8), or Mark 7:3 “For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, don't eat unless they wash their hands, holding to the tradition of the elders.” They never seem to quote passages like, 2 Thess. 2:15 “Hold on to the traditions which you have been taught,” and 2Thess 3:6 “Keep away from every brother that behaves in a disorderly way and not after the tradition which he received from us.”

St. Paul seems to differentiate between human tradition and the tradition that he had received in his instruction in the faith. Remember that he had not been an eyewitness to the ministry of Jesus, but was in that sense, a second generation Christian. He received a tradition given him by the first disciples of the Lord.

Perhaps you have read that Paul was taught directly by Christ, as Galatians 1:12 would seem to indicate. “For I neither received it of man neither was I taught it but by the revelation of Jesus Christ.” If you look closely at the passage, St. Paul is saying that he received good news, (the Gospel) and this Gospel is very simple: “We have been reconciled to God by the physical death of Jesus the Messiah!” (Colossians 1:22-23) Paul received amazing mystical revelations it seems, but he also got to know Peter. Cf. Galatians 1:18 “Then after three years I (Paul) went up to Jerusalem to see Peter and stayed with him fifteen days.”

The word “see” in the text is an interesting one. In Greek it is “historesai” from which our word “history” comes. Its primary meaning is “to inquire.” In other words, he went to learn a few things from Peter. He may have received the good news of redemption on the Damascus road, but he was humble enough to want to know what Peter had to say. What he received from the Lord seems to have included the idea of the Eucharist which he handed on to the Corinthians. (1 Cor 11:23) “For I have received from the Lord that which also I handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus the same night on which he was betrayed took bread.....” The very word “hand on” is the verb form of the noun “paradosis” “tradition.”

Since the first days of the Church we have believed that just as God instructed Moses and the elders of Israel with an oral tradition, (which became the Mishnah), so too, Jesus instructed His disciples in the meaning of what He had said and made them the guardians of the correct meaning of His words. The Catholic concept of sacred tradition simply means that the Church, in particular, the pope and bishops, guarantee that there are no novel interpretations of what Jesus said and did. We don’t add to the Scriptures, we just guard the consistent and universal explanation of what these things mean. Here is an example:

The word “epiousion” is almost impossible to translate. It appears in the phrase usually accepted as “daily bread” but we aren’t quite sure what the word actually means. For almost 2,000 years there has been no other known example of the use of the word other than it’s one time use in the Our Father. It appears no where else in all of ancient Greek literature, only in the Our Father. People get very mystical over it, deciding it must have been a very unique and theologically significant word. I suspect that the opposite is true. Copyists preserve fancy stuff like Cicero or Shakespeare. It may be that it appears no where else because it is such a common word, like "ain't it" or "gotcha!"

In the twentieth century, an archaeologist claimed that he had found the word in a 5th century AD shopping list found in ancient Egyptian garbage dump. The word is written next to the names of several grocery items. It had the sense of "enough for today," or “necessary.” The shopping list is now at the Yale Beinecke Library, but it seems that the word epiousion isn’t there, so we are back to the problem of having no other example of the word. (My personal suspicion is that this particular scholar, like many scholars I have known, couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time. He probably put the scrap with epiousion in his right coat pocket instead of his left pocket and it ended up on the floor of some Cairo laundry).

Back to “epiousion.” Epiousion derives from Epi and Ousia which mean “Upon” and “Essence” (sort of? The word doesn’t appear in the form ousion as far as I can tell) So, how can we possibly understand what we are saying in the “Our Father” if there is no other reference to the word we normally assume to mean “daily”????

Well, you are just going to have to wait for next week to find out!

(To be continued......)

RKIA's Guide to Reading the Bible... part 2

YOU SHOULDN’T JUDGE A BIBLE BY ITS COVER!

Many years ago my mother, one of the finest, kindest and wisest people I have ever known, decided to read the Bible cover to cover. Somewhere around the story of Lot and his daughters, she called me and asked, “Have you any idea what’s in this book!?!!”

Never try to read the bible cover to cover. If you do, it will make less sense than before you started the project. That’s because the Bible isn’t a book. It’s a library. How often have you heard people say that the Bible isn’t true? To say the Bible isn’t true is like walking into the lobby of a library and shouting, “This library is wrong!” Which section is wrong? The history section? The science section? The poetry section? The Bible is a library of 73 books - only 66 if you’re a Protestant. It contains poetry, ancient history, law, prophecy, and much, much more! If you go into the poetry section of a library and say that this isn’t very good science, you would be right, but by the same token if you go into the science section you wouldn’t expect much poetry. Therein lies the problem with treating the Bible like a book. If you think it is somehow a continuous narrative whose purpose is primarily historical you are going to be very confused.

In the Books of the Bible, the Holy Spirit tells us the truth about God and the way He has related to humanity over a 2000-year period from about 2000 BC to about 65AD. How can you tell what’s poetry and what’s history and what’s prophecy? Simple. Listen to those that God has made authoritative teachers, namely the apostles. But the Apostles are dead, aren’t they? Some are, some aren’t.

First of all what do we mean by “apostle?” If you think apostles are those twelve guys who followed Jesus around you are only partly right. Luke 6:13 “When morning came, he called his disciples to him and chose twelve of them, whom he also designated apostles”. The noun apostle” is used just short of a hundred times in the new Testament. It has a verb form also that is used almost 200 times. (PAY ATTENTION! GRAMMAR IS IMPORTANT, YOU MIND-NUMBED COUCH POTATO!)

The noun in Greek is “apostolos,” which means missionary or delegate, someone who is sent out with authority to represent the sender) the verb is “apostello” which means “I delegate,” “I send out.” The phrase “twelve apostles” appears only a few times. More commonly, one sees the phrase “the twelve.” Whenever you see the word “twelve” in the Bible you can bet your lunch money that it refers to government. The Bible has lots of numbers that repeat and have a special meaning, 3 (Divinity or heavenly perfection), 7 (covenant), 12 (government), 40 (testing) and so on.

That Jesus named twelve special disciples (a word which itself means “students”) shows He intended to form a government for His followers. The first Christians insisted that Jesus had commanded His followers to continue the government that He Himself had established. In about 80AD,Clement of Rome who had most probably known Peter and Paul said, “Through countryside and city (the apostles) preached, and they appointed their earliest converts, testing them by the Spirit, to be the bishops and deacons of future believers."

Nor was this a novelty, for bishops and deacons had been written about a long time earlier...

Our apostles knew through our Lord Jesus Christ that there would be strife for the office of bishop. For this reason, therefore, having received perfect foreknowledge, they appointed those who have already been mentioned and afterwards added the further provision that, if they should die, other approved men should succeed to their ministry. (St. Clement’s Letter to the Corinthians)

A century later, Irenaeus was the bishop of Lyon in France. He was a Greek who had been taught by Polycarp, who himself had been a disciple of John the Evangelist, one of the twelve. He wrote around 180 AD what he had learned from the students of the first apostles themselves.

It is possible, then, for everyone in every church, who may wish to know the truth, to contemplate the tradition of the apostles which has been made known to us throughout the whole world. And we are in a position to enumerate those who were instituted bishops by the apostles and their successors down to our own times, men who neither knew nor taught anything like what these heretics rave about....Since, however, it would be tedious, in such a volume as this, to reckon up the successions of all the churches, we do put to confusion all those who, in whatever manner, whether by an evil self-pleasing, by vainglory, or by blindness and perverse opinion, assemble in unauthorized meetings; (we do this, I say,) by indicating that tradition derived from the apostles, of the very great, the very ancient, and universally known Church founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious Apostles, Peter and Paul; as also (by pointing out) the faith preached to men, which comes down to our time by means of the successions of the bishops. For it is a matter of necessity that every church should agree with this Church, on account of its preeminent authority, that is, the faithful everywhere, inasmuch as the apostolical tradition has been preserved continuously by those (faithful men) who exist everywhere. (Against Heresies )

Okay, this is unpleasant. But it seems that the first Christians believed in what we now call apostolic succession. In other words, when someone comes up and says the end of the world is next Saturday, we have the perfect right, nay, we have the duty, to ask them where they got the authority to say that. They will answer, “From the Bible. I added up all the dates and the genealogies and this is surely the exact day!!!” “Well,” you might counter, “have you read the numbers in the poetic books, or just the historical books or just the prophetic books? Or have you just mixed them up like a stew of leftovers in a cheap restaurant?”

How can one tell what is poetry, or prophesy or history? That is precisely my point! You can’t, unless you have an unbroken connection to the people who first chose those books to be part of the library that we call the Bible. Just because you read it and it seems to mean something perfectly clear to you, doesn’t mean you’ve gotten it right. If you take it on yourself to interpret the books, or worse, leave it to some loon with a Swiss bank account and a mail order doctorate to do the interpreting, you are going to end up selling all your stuff, writing a big check to some weirdo who tells you to climb a hill and wait for the Lord who is surely going to show up next Saturday at 6PM. It’s certainly going to happen because he read it in the Bible.

We’ve been reading the Bible very carefully for two thousand years, guided by the delegates (apostles) who received their delegation from those whom the Lord Himself delegated, not some self appointed loon. It’s a free country. You can say to the Lord that you don’t care if He established legitimate authority in the Church. You’re going to read and interpret the Bible the way you want to. Who cares what that old Bavarian in the Vatican says? The first Christians certainly seemed to. I just hope you get a hill with a nice view, because you’re probably going to be there for a long time.

So here are principles 2 and 3

2) THE BIBLE IS NOT A BOOK. IT’S A LIBRARY.(I stole that idea from Fr. Bob Barron)

3) YOU CANNOT BEGIN TO UNDERSTAND THE NATURE OF THE BOOKS IN THE LIBRARY WITHOUT A COMPETENT TEACHING AUTHORITY TO HELP YOU.

Next Week 14+14+14 EQUALS HOW MUCH? (The Bible is not a self interpreting book. It isn’t a book at all! Haven’t you been paying attention?

Where do I find Marian devotion in Scripture?

Dear Rev Know it all,
If devotion to the Blessed Mother is authentically Christian and comes to us as part of the faith that we received from the Apostles, why doesn’t it seem to be reflected in the Scriptures?
Yours, Marian D. Voshun

Dear Marian,
Devotion to our Blessed Mother is most certainly reflected in the Scriptures. In order to point out where and how it is let me do a little speculating. WARNING!! THE FOLLOWING IS JUST A THEORY AND SHOULD BE NOT BE TAKEN AS CATHOLIC DOCTRINE (Still, it’s an interesting possibility.)
There are two Gospels that were written roughly one hundred years after the death and resurrection of the Lord, and though they are not inspired, nor considered canonical, they probably do contain some reliable historical details  about the lives of Jesus and Mary. Both these texts given evidence that, a century after the fact, Mary was already regarded as a central person in the life of the Church. When theses stories are read in the light of the four canonical gospels, they bring up some interesting possibilities.
The first is called The Gospel according to the Hebrews, preserved only in fragments in the writings of the Church Fathers. It seems to indicate that Jesus went to be baptized by John at the suggestion of our Blessed Mother. The following is a quote fro the Gospel of the Hebrews
      

And behold the mother of the Lord and his brothers said to him, "John the Baptist baptizes for the forgiveness of sins. Let us go and be baptized by him." But Jesus said to them, "in what way have I sinned that I should go and be baptized by him? Unless perhaps, what I have just said is a sin of ignorance".

Compare this to St. John, chapter 2, the wedding feast at Cana.
  

On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus' mother was there, and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine was gone, Jesus' mother said to him, "They have no more wine." "(My) Lady, what is it to you and me?" Jesus replied, "My hour has not yet come."

 In both cases Jesus seems to be resisting His Mother’s suggestion. It seems to me, that our Blessed Mother is reminding Jesus that the time has come  to begin the work of redemption. Remember, Jesus is 100% human and 100% divine. I wonder if, in the fullness of His humanity, Jesus didn’t realize that His baptism in the Jordan and the beginning of His miracles meant the end of the quiet life of a handy man in Nazareth in the midst of home and mother. Remember that Jesus, “...in the days of His flesh, offered up both prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears to the One able to save Him from death, and He was heard because of His piety. Son though He was, He learned obedience from the things which He suffered.” (Hebrews 5:6-8) In the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus pleaded with His Divine Father, but still He obeyed. Jesus was like us in all things but sin (Heb. 4:15). He was no masochist. Like us, He didn’t want to suffer.  If this is the case, the Gospel of John and the noncanonical Gospel of the Hebrews reflects an awareness that Mary’s role in the life of Christ was more than incidental.
Elsewhere in the canonical gospels, we see Mary’s unique status in the early church.  “Mary treasured these things in her heart.” (Luke 2:19) and Mary said “...all generations will call me blessed” (Luke 1:48)   Mary is mentioned by name about twenty-five times in the New Testament and as Jesus’ mother about 50 times. This makes me think that, for a woman who said little and wrote nothing, she had a  unique importance among the little flock of early Christians. “All right, she is mentioned,” I can hear you saying, “but where is her role as intercessor?”
Let’s consider her life. Though we have no firm dates, it is reasonable to say that she was born about 15BC., and if she lived a biblical life span she died at 70 or 80 years.  That would put her death at 65AD. Something huge happened in 64 AD: the beginning of the first persecution of the Church by the emperor Nero following the great fire of Rome. I suspect that St. John’s exile to Patmos would have happened at this time. Dr, Scott Hahn, who is one smart cookie, makes the point that the Apocalypse isn’t a prophecy of the end of the world, rather it’s a prophecy about the destruction of Jerusalem which took place in 70 AD. Jesus had prophesied this in three of the four Gospels and the Christian community did in fact abandon Jerusalem shortly before its destruction. 
If St. John is the author of the Apocalypse, (which all sorts of people say he isn’t, though tradition says he is) and if Dr. Hahn is correct, then the Apocalypse would have been written during John’s imprisonment on Patmos possibly during the Neronian persecution of the church. It is doubtful that were he exiled there as an old man he would have survived very long. In the year 64 he was still in his 50's.
This gives us some insight into the chronology of the life of our Blessed Mother, We know that Mary lived with John after the death and resurrection of Jesus (John 19:27) We also know that around 50AD, John is in Jerusalem at the First Council of Jerusalem, (Acts 15) It would seem to me that sometime after this he took up residence in Ephesus, and that Mary would have accompanied him. If John were arrested sometime around 65AD, Mary may have returned to Jerusalem as she ended her life in this world. There is a strong tradition that Mary died and was buried in Jerusalem, and there she was taken up to heaven. If the Apocalypse was written sometime around 65 AD and the other New Testament  Scriptures were written from 50 AD to 70 AD, Mary’s intercessory role in heaven would not have been apparent. She wasn’t in heaven. She was in Ephesus.
There are two Scriptures which speak clearly of the role of our Blessed Mother Acts 1:13  Those present were Peter, John, James and Andrew; Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew; James son of Alphaeus and Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James. They all joined together constantly in prayer, along with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers. The disciples are named, but the only other person named is “Mary, the mother of Jesus.”  She was singled out in a unique way at a time when she was interceding for the church.
And then there is Revelation 12 in which we read of the great sign, a woman clothed with the sun who cried out in childbirth. Her offspring was snatched into heaven to save him from the devouring dragon, and she herself fled to the desert, to a place prepared for her by God. I wonder if, when these images were brought to John by the Holy Spirit, he didn’t remember the stories that Mary told all those years she was like a mother to him. She must have told him about how she had fled with Joseph from the wrath of Herod the Great and how they traveled through the desert of Sinai to Egypt. He must have remembered how, after her son Jesus was taken up to heaven, she had fled with John from Herod’s grandson during the first persecution of the Jerusalem church. I imagine that the Holy Spirit reminded him of these things and gave them new and prophetic meaning. He understood that she was the image of the whole church, the mother who cries out in childbirth, as if interceding for the birth of the firstborn, the mother who is persecuted and exiled, the mother cared for by God.
If my chronology is at all correct, Mary only begins to be understood as the paradigm of the church after the greater part of the New Testament had been written, but as soon as she was gone, St. John wrote in veiled and prophetic language of the great symbol that she is. Having lost this mother who had been with him for more than thirty years, he understood more fully who she  was and what her life meant. From these first understandings the church has always grown in its love and devotion to her. God has no ego problem. The love and devotion offered to the saints, and to the Blessed Mother in particular, does not detract one bit from the worship offered to Him.
Rev. Know-it-all  

What do you mean, "The Church is the mother of the Bible"?

Dear Rev. Know it all,
Did I hear you correctly? The Church is the mother of the Bible? 
I feel compelled to write. Your statement implies that the Church has more authority than scripture. To say that the Roman Catholic Church is the only institution that can interpret the Bible because they were the “compilers..., editors..., authors... and guardians of the Bible" is false and misleading.  Moreover, your statement has some very dangerous implications. We know that all scripture is "God breathed" and therefore inspired and divine regardless of who or how the books were compiled.
Just because the Church compiled the books, doesn't in anyway mean that the Church somehow gave scripture its authority. Scripture's authority comes from God, not the Church! Therefore scripture must be interpreted in light of scripture - not in light of tradition or any institution. You are making the very dangerous mistake of giving an institution equal authority to God's word, which is eternal. I strongly caution anyone who raises tradition and any institution to the level of scripture. I fear that many  people are in danger of hell because of a misplaced faith. I pray that you will take your responsibility seriously by leading people to true faith in Christ alone.
Yours, 
Calvin Zwingli
 
Dear Calvin,
Yep, you heard me right. The Church has more authority than the Bible. That's what the Bible says. 1Timothy, 3:15 “...the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of truth." Do you really believe that, “The scripture must interpreted in the light of scripture?!?” There are somewhere around 40,000 different Christian denominations in the world today, each of them a fruit of someone who disagreed with someone else’s interpretation of scripture. The scriptures are not self interpreting as Luther and Calvin and the reformers believed. The classic example are the genealogies of Jesus found in Matthew 1:1–17 and  Luke 3:23–38,
   In the Gospel of Matthew, Joseph’s father is Jacob, whose father is Matthan whose father is Eleazar. In the Gospel of Luke.   Joseph’s father is Eli, whose father is  Matthat  whose father is Levi.  Note that these are two completely different families until you get to King David.  Which Gospel is right and which is wrong? The relatives of Jesus explained the answer to an ancient Christian historian about a hundred years after the time of Christ. One was a legal genealogy and one was biological. In order to keep families from dying out there was something called levirate marriage and Joseph was the product of such a family.
My point is that without an external source this problem would be inexplicable. There are other problems with the genealogies, but if you’re Catholic, it’s not a big deal. We have always known that the Bible has to be understood in the light of customs and context. We have always taught that there are levels of meaning and that there are parables and allegories, as well as history in the Bible. The Bible is full of fact and poetry. The problem is, who gets to say what’s poetry and what’s history? 
What do we mean by “Roman Catholic” anyway? The “Roman” is relatively new.  It was given us by Protestants. Around 1620, King James I (of King James Bible fame) was trying to wangle a wedding for his son Charles with the princess of Spain in a diplomatic fiasco called “the Spanish Match.” He referred to the Spaniards as Roman Catholics. Before that, we were just Catholics and before that were just the Church. After the Reformation, Roman Catholic was used to refer to those groups in union with the pope in Rome.
The use of the word Catholic referring to the Church goes back to the first days of the Church. “Catholic” is the Greek word for universal, or worldwide. It is only one of the four “marks” or qualities of the Church. She is the Church, One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic, not just Catholic. Catholic is only one of her four titles, or attributes. 
The earliest recorded  use of the term “Catholic Church" is found in the Letter to the Smyrnaeans written by Ignatius of Antioch about 107AD. “Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the people be. In the same way, wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church."  So Catholic is an ancient term, but for one thousand years, there was just “the Church.” She was called Catholic to differentiate her from the little sects that rose up now and then like the Nicolaitians or Docetists or ... a hundred other little groups with their own special interpretations of Christianity.
Though there were different styles of liturgy, there was essentially one worldwide understanding of the Gospel that involved the sacramental system and a hierarchical structure.  There were different centers of Christianity, principally Alexandria, Antioch and Rome from the beginning, but Rome was always looked at as the source of the authoritative teaching. The Church of Rome had been founded by Paul and Peter, especially Peter to whom Christ had given the keys of the kingdom. The first Christians believed this.
Around 175AD, St. Irenaeus of Lyon wrote “Against Heresies.” In it he said that Rome was the Church with which all other churches had to agree. He was a Greek bishop in France who had been educated by a disciple of St. John. He certainly didn’t invent the idea of the primacy of Rome. He inherited it.
The bishops of Jerusalem and Constantinople were given the status of patriarchs in 451 AD. The council of Constantinople in 381 tried to say that  "The Bishop of Constantinople shall have the primacy of honor after the Bishop of Rome.” At first, the other patriarchates, Rome, Antioch and Alexandria didn’t sign off on the idea.  Constantinople was founded in 330AD as the new capital of the Roman empire. Why should the new kid on the block be recognized as a patriarch? Jerusalem had been the first Church, but she had been wiped out around 135 AD by the Romans and her members had blended in with the Syrian (Antioch). Still, Jerusalem had been a Church at the time of the apostles. So, in the end there were five: Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and the new guy, Constantinople.  But they were all “the Church.” and so it endured for the first thousand years.
By the year 1000AD, Rome was a malarial swamp with maybe 10 or 20 thousand inhabitants. Constantinople was a city of a million people who actually took regular baths. Why should the new Rome bow before the old Rome? They had been growing apart for years and finally the break came in 1054. The Roman emperor in Constantinople spoke Greek by then and not Latin. He and his bishop went their own merry way, and pretty much took Antioch with them, but the Eastern and Western Churches still thought of themselves as one Church. Alexandria had been in a huff about the nature of Christ since the fourth century anyway. Things changed pretty fast however. The Muslims overwhelmed the east and the great churches of Alexandria, Antioch and Constantinople lost their freedom. At the same time, the Roman Church took off among the barbarians (my ancestors). The Visigoths kicked the Muslims out of Spain and Spain eventually brought the faith to half the world. 
Despite all the unpleasantness, these different churches recognized each other as “the Church” united despite her squabbles, holding essentially the same theology, the same liturgical kind of worship and all sharing ordination and authority from the apostles delegated by Jesus.  Over the years, some groups within the Byzantine and Eastern Churches have once again recognized the teaching authority of the bishop of Rome. They are known as Uniate, or Eastern Catholic Churches. Fasten your seat belts. The groups who have returned to reunion with Rome are as follows:
The Alexandrian Churches are:
  1) Coptic Catholic Church
2) Ethiopic Catholic Church.
The Antiochian or West Syrian Churches are:
1)Maronite Church
2) Syrian Catholic Church
3)Syro-Malankara Catholic Church. 
The Chaldean or East Syrian Churches are:
1) Chaldean Catholic Church
2) Syro-Malabar Church (in India, dating back to the Apostle Thomas)
The Byzantine (Constantinopolitan) Churches are:
1) Albanian Byzantine Catholic Church 
2) Belarusian Greek Catholic Church 
3) Bulgarian Greek Catholic Church  
4) Byzantine Church of the Eparchy of Križevci
5) Greek Byzantine Catholic Church 
6) Hungarian Greek Catholic Church
7) Italo -Albanian Catholic Church 
8) Macedonian Greek Catholic Church 
9) Melkite Greek Catholic Church  
10) Romanian Church United with Rome, Greek-Catholic
11) Russian Byzantine Catholic Church  
12) Ruthenian Catholic Church 
13)Slovak Greek Catholic Church  
14)Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.
 
And we can’t forget the Armenian Catholic Church. The Armenian Church started in 301 when St. Gregory the Illuminator, baptized King Trad. Gregory was from the Syrian tradition, but there are elements of the Greek and Latin Churches in the Armenian Church and it really is its own rite, though it most resembles the Syrian tradition. These along with the Latin rite, (us) are usually known as the Roman Catholic Church.
Then around 500 years ago in Europe, something really unpleasant happened: the Reformation. Not that the reformers didn’t have a point. The Church in Europe had really gotten caught up in European politics and needed reform. Everyone agreed on that. The problem was that a German priest (Luther), decided to do it his own way. He not only disagreed with the money and the politics, he disagreed with almost everything about basic theology. Things went from bad to worse. A French lawyer (Calvin) jumped into the fray. They both decided to reform the Church in their own way. Since then about 40,000 people have decided to reform the Church in their own way and the results have no historical or doctrinal continuity with what the apostles started.
So, who has the duty and ability to make sure the scriptures are understood? When you say that the Church is the “pillar and foundation of truth," which Church do you mean? Does the text apply to the Church in Ephesus which no longer exists? Do you mean the Greek Orthodox (founded 1054 by the Bishop of Constantinople, a city which didn't even exist when Paul and Peter were martyred in Rome? Or Lutheran (1517 Martin Luther in Germany) or  Anabaptist (1521 Nicholas Storch &Thomas Munzer, Germany) or Anglican (1534 Henry VII England and his charming wife Anne Boleyn) or Mennonites (1536 Menno Simons, Switzerland) or Calvinist (1555 John Calvin, Switzerland) or Presbyterian (1560 John Knox, Scotland) or  Congregational (1582 Robert Brown, Holland) or Baptist (1609 John Smyth, Amsterdam) or Dutch Reformed (1628 Michaelis Jones, New York) or Congregationalist (1648 Pilgrims and Puritans, Massachusetts) or Quakers (1649 George Fox, England) or Amish (1693 Jacob Amman, France) or  Methodist (1739 John & Charles Wesley, England) or Unitarian (1774 Theophilus Lindey, London) or Methodist Episcopal (1784 by 60 Preachers in Baltimore, MD) or Episcopalian (1789 Samuel Seabury, American Colonies) or United Brethren (1800 Philip Otterbein & Martin Boehn, Maryland) or Disciples of Christ (1827 Thomas & Alexander Campbell, Kentucky) or Mormon (1830 Joseph Smith, New York) or Methodist Protestant (1830 by break away Methodists,United States) or Church of Christ (1836 Warren Stone & Alexander Campbell, Kentucky) or Seventh Day Adventist (1844 Ellen White, Washington, NH) or Christadelphian or Brethren of Christ (1844 John Thomas, Richmond, VA) or Salvation Army (1865 William Booth, London) or Holiness (1867 Methodist, United States) or Jehovah's Witnesses (1874 Charles Taze Russell, Pennsylvania) or Christian Science (1879 Mary Baker Eddy, Boston) or Church of God in Christ (1895, by a convention in Arkansas) or Church of Nazarene (1850-1900 Pilot Point, TX) or Pentecostal (1901 Charles F. Parham ,Topeka, KS) or Aglipayan (1902 Gregorio Aglipay, Philippines) or Assemblies of God (1914 by a convention in Hot Springs, AK ) or Iglesia ni Christo (1914 Felix Manalo, Philippines) or Four-square Gospel (1917 Aimee Semple McPherson, Los Angeles, CA) or United Church of Christ (1961 Reformed and Congregationalist convention in  Philadelphia, PA) or Calvary Chapel (1965 Chuck Smith, Costa Mesa, CA) or United Methodist (1968 by Methodist and United Brethren convention Dallas, TX) or Harvest Christian (1972 Greg Laurie, Riverside, CA) or Saddleback (1982 Rick Warren, California) or all the non-denominational denomination mega-churches that have sprouted up since the 1990's.
Or THE Church which is one, holy (despite the best efforts of some) universal (catholic, that is ) and apostolic, established by Jesus through the ministry of the Apostles in Jerusalem and in the city of Rome by Sts. Peter and Paul around 50-60 AD? You decide if there is an organization that has the historical and biblical right to call itself THE Church.
You worship God in your way and I'll worship Him in His.

Rev. Know-it-all 

Why do Catholics call priests "Father"?

Dear Rev. Know it all,
My neighbor, a member of the First Fire-Baptized Church of God in Christ with Signs and Wonders Following Inc., says that Catholics are in violation of the Holy Scriptures because they call their pastors “father” but the Bible says “Call no man father!” Can you explain this or should I join their church?
Yours,
Pat Ernity
 
Dear Pat,
When people hit me with this I always ask them, “If you should call no man father, what do you call that man who married your mother?” People who use the Bible that way are about as deep as a puddle. They take individual verses out of context, and a text without a context is a pretext. They are looking for a fight. They sound like they know the Bible, but they’ve only interiorized certain parts of it — the parts that are fun in a fight. It’s the same spirit that motivated pseudo-liberalism. It is allows you to be virtuous and cantankerous at the same time. I call it the baptized anger.
Let’s look at the passage in the 23rd chapter of Matthew. “Then Jesus said… ‘The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat..... but everything they do is done for men to see.....they love the place of honor at banquets and the most important seats in the synagogues.... They love..... to have men call them Rabbi....But you are not to be called Rabbi, for you have only one Master and you are all brothers. And do not call anyone on earth father, for you have one Father, and He is in heaven. Nor are you to be called teacher, for you have one Teacher, the Christ.’ ”
First of all, the word Rabbi means “my great one” or “my revered one” — “reverend” in English and the word “doctor” is Latin for teacher. I don’t know a single Christian group that doesn’t use one of those three titles. For instance, we have, the Rev. Doctor Billy Graham. And we have the Rev. Ernst Angely (Oh Lord, heal my toupee!) All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, as St. Paul says.
St. Paul tells the Corinthians (1Cor.4:15 ) “Even though you have ten thousand guardians in Christ, you do not have many fathers, for in Christ Jesus I became your father through the gospel.” Actually, in Greek it reads “I begot you” and not “I have become your father,” but he does concede that they have fathers in Christ, though not many among whom he clearly counts himself. Apparently St. Paul doesn’t realize this title is forbidden.
What’s really going on here? Some rabbis at the time of Christ really believed they deserved perks. The question was asked, “If your father and your rabbi were drowning, and you could only save one of them, who should you save?” The correct answer was, of course, your rabbi, since a father confers only physical life and your rabbi confers spiritual life. People vied to dress their rabbis, to tie their shoes, in general, to be at their beck and call. Even in our own time, the fuss made over great rabbis is amazing. The great Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, the last of the Lubavitcher Rebbes, was followed and fawned over like a rock star and, from people who knew the Rebbe, I have gotten the impression that the Rebbe was pretty sick of it. Little orthodox Jewish kids even have “Gedolim” cards, literally “great men cards.” These are famous Rabbi trading cards, similar to baseball cards.!!!
This is what Jesus is referring to, not so much the idea of titles. I have known people in some really weird wacky sects that would never dream of calling their ministers “father,” but their preachers and pastors tell them whom to marry, what to say, how to eat and how to dress. Believe me. Few Catholic priests are in danger of this kind of status.
What Jesus is saying here is that your salvation should never be dependent on any one human being. People leave the Church over the darndest things. The priest yelled at them or missed an appointment or didn’t attend their third cousin twice removed’s funeral. Far more serious is scandal. We get so discouraged when we hear of priestly scandal. Jesus warned us that scandal was inevitable. Priests are not only weak men, but they are under unusual pressure. I don’t just mean day-to-day stress; I mean demonic attack. St. Paul says that it isn’t against flesh and blood that we war, but against powers and principalities. (Eph.6:12)Jesus said that “...they will strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered.” (Mark14:27) In other words, if the devil can ruin a priest, he has done a good day’s work, at least what he would call a good day.
If you are a Catholic because you met the perfect priest or deacon or nun, I would suggest you leave the Church now and avoid the delay. You may have been led to the Catholic faith by a good man or woman, but trust me, they aren’t perfect. God alone is good, as Jesus tells us. The rest of us are original sinners. This includes the clergy. The reason to be a Catholic is that the Catholic Church holds the truth and that it is the Church founded by Jesus. However, it is to be remembered that Jesus founded the Church through the ministry of the apostles, that bunch of cowardly reprobates. We, the clergy, have been walking in their footsteps ever since.
Rev. Know-it-all

Does the Q document prove that Jesus never intended a Church hierarchy? pt 2

Continued from last week….

If then the only reason to believe that the Gospels are written generations after Jesus is the prediction of the destruction of Jerusalem, what reasons are there to believe that the Gospels are actually written in the first generation of Christianity?
There are quite a few.

First, we know when St. Paul was executed: 64AD. Luke and Acts are two volumes of one work that deal with the lives of Jesus and St. Paul. They seem in the view of some scholars to be some sort of legal defense of Paul. They don’t tell you anything about Paul’s death and execution. They end before his trial. If they were a biography of Paul, don’t you think they would include his death? They end before his death. In fact they end a couple years before his death. From other early Christian documents we know that Paul was acquitted at his first trial, that he went to Spain, then back to the Holy Land, and finally back to Italy where he was once again arrested and put to death in Nero’s persecution. That would put the writing of Luke/Acts somewhere around 61 or 62AD.  If, as the theory maintains, Matthew and Luke are more or less contemporary and Mark is written still earlier, that would put Mark at perhaps 50 AD. which would put Q even earlier.
Dr. Peters gives us the single most original and convincing argument for the early dating of the Gospels I have ever heard. We are pretty sure that St. Paul did his writing around 55AD. He had a developed atonement theology, which says that Jesus is the atoning sacrifice for sin. The Gospel of John seems to allude to this also when it calls Jesus the Lamb of God. So, in 55AD, only 22 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection in 33AD, there is a developed theology of atonement by 55 AD. There is not a developed theology of atonement in Matthew, Mark or Luke. In other words you find the Gospel in Paul. You don’t find Paul in the Gospel. Therefore, the Gospels would reasonably predate the work of St. Paul. That puts the Gospel texts at from 45 to 55 AD and Q even earlier.
(Wait a minute. I thought Jesus was born in 4 BC at the latest because King Herod died in 4BC at the latest. That means Jesus would have been crucified in 29AD if he was thirty three years older at the time. You are once again the victim of sloppy pseudo-scholarship. We learn the date of Herod’s death from Josephus a Jewish historian. All the manuscripts used to date Herod’s death that put it at 7-4 BC are  copies of one faulty manuscript printed in Geneva Switzerland in 1544. Older better manuscripts put the date at 1BC. Just when it was always thought to be.)
There are still two interesting points about Q. Q is full of sayings and miracles from Jesus’ Galilean ministry. They don’t mention His death or Resurrection. Perhaps that is because they are compiled in Galilee, by people who weren’t eyewitnesses to His death and Resurrection. Or, as Professor Peters says, perhaps they were compiled during Jesus own lifetime, before His death and Resurrection.
The second point that intrigues me is that  Q, whether it is a written or an oral source, is in Greek, not Aramaic. Jesus’ first language was quite probably Aramaic, a linguistic near cousin to Hebrew. Jesus may have spoken some Greek. Galilee was a multi-lingual place, and Jesus did preach and teach on the Greek speaking side of the lake as well as the Aramaic speaking side, but His sayings, at least some or most of them would have been originally in Aramaic.  Q is not Aramaic. It is Greek. How do we know this?. The Greek vocabulary and phrasing of Q is almost exactly the same in the verses shared by Matthew and Luke. Why should this be remarkable? There seems to be an authoritative source for Jesus sayings that produced the sayings in Greek. Where there is an authorized text, there is an authority.  Herein lies the rub!
Late dates for the Gospels are crammed down our throats because it makes a hierarchical Church something that Jesus never intended. The Church and its pesky bishops are not found in Q whatever Q may or may not have been. If Q is the real Jesus, then the church is a power-grab by con artists a generation or two after Jesus. This is the non-sense of The DaVinci Code which would have us believe that Jesus was thoroughly modern and certainly ordained women and  must have married Mary Magdalene etc. etc. Furthermore, tenured university professors at Catholic schools can claim an authority which supersedes the illegitimate authority of the bishops.
On the other hand, the Church is certainly contained in the Gospels. If the Gospels are written almost immediately after the death and Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, they are in fact, the words, the deeds and intentions of Jesus, the God-Man and the moral authority and the unbroken Apostolic Tradition of the Church are His invention.
Question what your kids are being taught at Catholic schools, from preschool to university. Read their textbooks. Ask questions. Call their teachers. After all, you’re paying for it. And don’t let them con you into submitting to their authority. They don’t really have any authority since they submit to no authority, and no one seems to be able to stop them from the secularization and corruption of young people which Mother Marianna warned us four hundred years ago.  Oops! I forgot. There is no such thing as prophecy.
Yours,
Rev. Know-it-all

Does the Q document prove that Jesus never intended a Church hierarchy? pt 1

Dear Rev. Know it all,
 My kid goes to St. Ignorantia’s, a very expensive Catholic high school, and she  came home telling me that the Emperor Constantine made up the church in 325 AD and that he is the one who decided Jesus was a god.  She said the four gospels were all written one or two generations after Jesus and they are full of mythology. They are teaching her to find the historical Jesus, not the Jesus of faith. She claims that the only true gospel is the Q document which is a collection of the authentic sayings of Jesus, who was only a teacher. The Q document has no mention of the crucifixion, the resurrection and the church, so these must obviously be made up by a later generation. Is all this true?
Yours truly ,
Moses “Moe” Dernist
 
Dear Moe,
Not all that glitters is gold and not all that claims to be Catholic is Catholic. As it just so happens, I have recently just finished an excellent series of lectures on the Q document and the search for the historical Jesus by Professor E.E. Peters of New York University. Let me begin by explaining what the Q document is. It is a non existent, hypothetical collection of the sayings of Jesus. 
A German theologian, Friederich Schleiermacher in 1832, interpreted a statement by the early Christian writer Papias, bishop  of Hierapolis (in present day Turkey circa 125AD) "Matthew compiled the sayings of the Lord in a Hebrew" as meaning that Papias was talking about a collection of the sayings of Jesus that was available to the Gospel writers. Developing this idea, other liberal Protestant German theologians proposed the Two-Source Hypothesis, in which both Matthew and Luke used Mark and another source of the sayings of Jesus. In German “source” is “quelle”, hence the Quelle, or Q document. Many modern scholars theorize it existed. No copy has ever been found. However there are about 230 verses common to Matthew and Luke that are not found in Mark. The theory is that they are so closely alike in phrasing and vocabulary that they must come from a common source, written or perhaps unwritten.  That source is called “Q.”
This may well be so, but what does it mean? In the hands of the pseudo-scholars who control many formerly Catholic institutions, liberal Protestants, and members of the Jesus seminar, it means that the real Jesus is found in the Q document, not in the Gospels which were products of a later generation who had not actually been eyewitnesses to the events they describe. Thus, the Gospels are full of mistakes and mythology. If we strain out all the mythology of these late documents that pretend to be eyewitness gospels, we can get back to the real Jesus, who was a nice teacher and loved everybody.   
Their  reason to say that the Gospels must be written years after Jesus is that the Gospels prophesy the destruction of Jerusalem (Matt. 24 Mark 13 Luke21) and everybody knows that there is no such thing as prophecy. This is circular reasoning. There is no such thing as prophecy, therefore the Gospels cannot really be prophesying the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. Therefore the Gospels must be written after 70 AD. This is idiotic.  We have evidence that the Christian community escaped the destruction of Jerusalem precisely because Jesus had prophesied it. In our time we have all sorts of examples of prophetic fulfillment. Fatima comes to mind.
Or how about the following prophecy from
Sr. Marianne de Jesus Torres (17th century, Quito, Ecuador): 

"The Church will find itself attacked by waves of a secret sect ... corrupted priests will scandalize the Church ... Moreover, in these unhappy times there will be unbridled luxury which, acting thus to snare the rest into sin, will conquer innumerable frivolous souls who will lose themselves. Innocence will almost no longer be found in children, nor modesty in women, and, in this supreme moment of need of the Church, those whom it behooves to speak will fall silent." 
“As for the Sacrament of Matrimony, which symbolizes the union of Christ with His Church, it will be attacked and deeply profaned. Freemasonry, which will then be in power, will enact iniquitous laws with the aim of doing away with this Sacrament, making it easy for everyone to live in sin and encouraging the procreation of illegitimate children born without the blessing of the Church.
"The Catholic spirit will rapidly decay; the precious light of Faith will gradually be extinguished until there will be an almost total and general corruption of customs. Added to this will be the effects of secular education, which will be one reason for the dearth of priestly and religious vocations. The Sacrament of Holy Orders will be ridiculed, oppressed, and despised, for in this Sacrament, the Church of God and even God Himself is scorned and despised since He is represented in His priests.
"The Devil will try to persecute the ministers of the Lord in every possible way; he will labor with cruel and subtle astuteness to deviate them from the spirit of their vocation and will corrupt many of them. These depraved priests, who will scandalize the Christian people, will make the hatred of bad Catholics and the enemies of the Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church fall upon all priests.
"This apparent triumph of Satan will bring enormous sufferings to the good Pastors of the Church, the many good priests, and the Supreme Pastor and Vicar of Christ on Earth, who, a prisoner in the Vatican, will shed secret and bitter tears in the presence of his God and Lord, beseeching light, sanctity, and perfection for all the clergy of the world, of whom he is King and Father."

Our Lord told her: "My Justice will be tried to the limit by the evils and sacrileges of the 20th Century ... I shall punish heresy, blasphemy and impurity." These things were said on Jan 20, 1610 almost exactly 400 years ago last month. Still think there’s no such thing as prophecy?

Continued next week 
Rev. Know-it-all