Many thought that the Catholic Church had messed up the simple
Christian faith by inserting all kinds of practices, customs and doctrines over
the centuries. They thought the Church in their day was culpable of exactly the
same Pharisaical obsession with traditions condemned by Jesus as presented
in (Mark 7:1-23).
If we’ll try to revisit the Bible closely, the Lord is not telling
that tradition is an unclean word. In fact, Paul tells in 2 Thessalonians 2:15 to “hold fast to the traditions you
received from us, either by our word or by letter.”
Sacred Tradition is the oral teaching of Jesus Christ handed down
to His apostles, who in turn handed it down to their disciples (the early
Church Fathers), and then to the next generation.
There was no written New testament for almost 400 years. All of the apostles and disciples
taught orally for the first 400 years. Saints Paul, Peter, John, Luke, etc.,
wrote everything down in their epistles and gospels but none of it was widely
available to geographically separated disciples and it wasn't part of "The
Bible" until the Councils of Rome, Hippo, and Carthage put the 27 books of
the New Testament together in 382 AD, 393 AD, and 397 AD.
“Tradition”
simply means something that is handed or passed on from one person to another, from
one generation to another. The question
to ask when analyzing any particular tradition is to establish its origin where
its value depends on its source, whether it come from Jesus, from His apostles,
from some devout believers who lived centuries later. The traditions Paul passed down were from the
Lord and apostolic traditions, like the meaning and significance of the
Eucharist (1 Corinthians 11:23-24) or the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus (1 Corinthians 15;3-11)and so were of greatest importance.
The
traditions of the Pharisees were quite dissimilar. They were not of themselves wicked
but were pious customs of human origin passed down to support the practicing of
the law. Unfortunately, the Pharisees
were unable to make a distinction between a Divine Law from its human support
system. The worse about it was they
actually used virtuous customs as loopholes to help them get around the
difficult demands of the Torah.
For
example in Mark chapter 7, everyone knows that when God gave Moses and the Israelites
the 10 commandments, He meant business.
The fourth commandment, “honor your father and mother,” means not just
that young kids ought to obey their parents, but that adult children should
provide for the financial needs of aging parents, guaranteeing their lives in
declining years in honor and dignity.
But the Pharisees had resort to a non-biblical religious custom that released
them from this heavy accountability, by placing their money “dedicated” to God
and thereby “sheltered” it, making it unavailable for parental support.
Taken
from the above-mentioned situation, it’s not “tradition” that’s the issue here,
but the deceitfulness of the human heart that uses piety as an excuse to avoid
the accountability of true religion, which include, looking after orphans and
widows and presumably elderly relatives in their distress (James 1:27).
And
this is exactly Jesus’ point in the gospel that the kinds of foods that humans
eat don’t make them spiritually impure. It is the foul things that come out of
the deep recesses of the human heart, injured by original sin, that separate
every human from God and to one another and lead to all the wretchedness in
this world.
The
Pharisees believed that they’d purify Israel through nutritional laws and pious
customs. Protestant Reformers of the
16th century thought they could cleanse the church by overstepping
ecclesiastical traditions and customs.
History has ascertained that both undertakings are pointless.
There
are some examples of Sacred Tradition in the Bible that are interesting. Acts 20:35 for example were not recorded
anywhere else in the Bible, including the 4 gospels, so this is one example of
an oral teaching of Jesus being handed on to Paul, who passed it on to the next
generation.
Another
in the book of Jude 1:9, wherein the dispute between the Archangel Michael and
the devil over Moses' body is nowhere to be found in the written text of the
Old Testament.
Sacred
Scripture does condemn in many places the traditions of man specifically with
Jewish practices about not healing on the Sabbath, hoarding money, not helping
Samaritans, etc), but these have nothing to do with the Traditions Paul is
talking about, as enumerated below which supports Sacred Tradition:
1 Corinthians 11:2 I praise you because you remember me in everything and hold
fast to the traditions, just as I handed them on to you.
2 Thessalonians 2:15 Therefore, brothers, stand
firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught, either by an oral
statement or by a letter of ours
2 Thessalonians 3:6 We instruct you, brothers, in
the name of (our) Lord Jesus Christ, to shun any brother who conducts himself
in a disorderly way and not according to the tradition they received from us.
References:
- Marcellino D'Ambrosio, Ph.D., Does Jesus Condemn Tradition?,
- http://www.catholicbible101.com/sacredtradition.htm, Sacred Tradition
- http://www.catholicbasictraining.com/apologetics/coursetexts/1l.htm, The History of the Bible (CCC 105-108)
- http://christianityinview.com/timeline.html, Timeline of Christian History
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