Transcript

Welcome back to Samus Potpourri.

I'm Joe Heschmeyer, and today, I wanna look at a video recently made by Ashley Hayes critiquing what she claims Catholicism teaches.

If you're not familiar with her, she's got more than a hundred thousand followers on YouTube, more than three hundred thousand on Instagram, more than six hundred thousand followers on TikTok, and she's using each of those platforms to preach the same message, namely that Catholicism is a false religion.

And she's clear that she's doing this because she wants Catholics to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.

Now, as a Catholic, I share that desire.

I also want Catholics and everybody else to have the fullness of the faith and to hold onto the truth about Jesus Christ and about his church, so I thought it might be worthwhile to take a closer look at some of her claims.

Now, some of those claims are common objections, the idea that Catholic teachings on the papacy, Mary, justification, and purgatory are unbiblical.

Those have all been answered many times before, so while I'll touch on them a little bit, I'm not gonna spend as much time on those arguments.

Instead, I wanna focus on the arguments that Ashley, hope it's okay if I call her that, makes that you might not have heard before because she doesn't just think that Catholics are wrong, she claims that Catholicism is-

A system that is formed intentionally to keep the masses living in sin, away from what saves them, you know, and all the while, feeling religious and saved

So her argument is that Catholics don't just interpret the Bible differently than she does, but that we do this because we've been duped by a system that intentionally leads people to hell.

Now, she claims the distinctive features of Catholicism are due to the Emperor Constantine and ancient Babylonian mystery religions.

So what is the truth, and do the Catholic doctrines that she's talking about really contradict the Word of God as she claims?

Let's start with her foundational claim, her insistence that all of our doctrines must come from Scripture and from Scripture alone.

Our doctrine should come from the Scriptures, nothing else.

Not what man teaches, not what tradition teaches, the Scriptures and the Scriptures alone.

It's very common to hear Protestants assert this, but ironically, Scripture never actually teaches this.

Not only does it not teach this doctrine, it actually teaches the opposite.

Saint Paul tells his readers in 2 Thessalonians 2 to hold fast to the traditions which the apostles taught, regardless of whether they were written traditions, what would later become the New Testament, or oral traditions.

Now, in fairness to Ashley, she may literally not have known that the Bible teaches this because if you look at her onscreen citations, it's clear that she's using the NIV, New International Version, translation, and the NIV says instead to hold fast to the teachings.

But the Greek there is paradosis, which is tradition.

It's literally a thing handed on.

When Jesus warns against elevating traditions of men over the word of God, it's the same word being used there, paradosis.

Paradosis actually appears 13 times in the New Testament.

In 10 of those cases, it's describing man-made traditions, often the traditions of the Pharisees, and in those cases, it often comes with warnings not to elevate these man-made traditions over God's commands.

But there are three other times in which that same word, paradosis, is used to describe apostolic tradition.

In 1 Corinthians 11, where Saint Paul instructs the Corinthians to, Maintain the traditions even as I have delivered them to you.

In 2 Thessalonians 2, which we've already seen, and then in the next chapter, 2 Thessalonians 3, Saint Paul actually instructs his readers to keep away from any believers who don't keep the traditions that Paul taught.

But here's the crazy thing.

In the NIV translation that Ashley uses, that many Christians use, every time a tradition, a paradosis, is spoken of poorly, they translate the word as tradition.

But in each of the three cases in which a tradition, a paradosis, is praised or treated as required, they change it to teaching instead.

So someone reading the NIV would come away, as Ashley seems to have, with the false conclusion that the authors of the New Testament simply thought tradition itself was a bad thing.

But again, that really is false.

With any tradition or any teaching, for that matter, the question is where it comes from.

If it's man-made, don't elevate it over God's word, but if it's a tradition of apostolic origin, if it's something passed on from the apostles, hold fast to it, and according to Scripture, have nothing to do with believers who tell you not to follow these traditions.

Now, bear in mind, at the time that Paul is writing, Protestants and Catholics should be able to agree plenty of doctrines haven't been written down yet.

The New Testament is still in the process of being written, and of course, Paul is not telling any of his readers to only hold to the doctrines that have been written down already, since that would mean rejecting a lot of Christianity.

No, he very clearly in 2 Thessalonians 3 and in 1 Corinthians says the exact opposite.

They are bound to hold those teachings that he has already passed on to them, even though that would've been before maybe any of the New Testament was written.

Now, there's an important takeaway from that.

This means that sola scriptura, the idea that all doctrine should come from Scripture alone, it clearly isn't true while the New Testament is being written, which is one obvious reason that the Bible never teaches it.

So Ashley's doctrine, this doctrine that all doctrine must come from the Bible, is a doctrine she's not getting from the Bible alone.

It's rather just a man-made tradition that she's repeating.

The second problem, though, is that there's a double standard at work here, one which is worth calling out because Protestants like Ashley will insist that we Catholics must defend our teachings from Scripture alone, even though we don't believe in sola scriptura.

But many of her own attacks on Catholic doctrine aren't coming from Scripture alone.

They're coming from various things she's heard about the early Christians or about Constantine or about Babylonian mystery religions.

Let me show you what I mean.

One of her biggest arguments is that Catholicism has taken all this stuff from paganism, and nothing in the Bible says that.

Rather, she's basing this belief, and she's very clear that she's basing this belief-On a nineteenth century pamphlet that later becomes a book called The Two Babylons.

You don't have to take my word for it.

She describes how allegedly the confessional actually comes from ancient Babylonian paganism.

Just a little research will show you that all religions of this world lead back to pagan god worship, back to the Egyptian gods, back to Babylon, to Nimrod's story.

Semiramis, Isis, who is Nimrod's sister wife, walking in rebellion to God Almighty, formed the basis for many of the counterfeit mother-son cults of history, and ultimately is what led Catholicism to the unbiblical exaltation of Mary.

And when you look into the mystery religion that was shaped by Nimrod, it literally serves as a prototype for many Catholic practices, including confession.

Now, this is just a side note that relates back to the near deification of popes, but shortly after the flood, during a time when open promotion of idolatry was kind of risky due to lingering patriarchal faith, Semiramis, or Isis, established a secret system, a system in which one could confess their sins privately to a priest.

Hyslop's eighteen fifty-three book elaborates on this and says that the Catholic confessional is, quote, borrowed from Babylon and that the Roman priesthood's power, quote, culminated in the erection of the confessional.

She literally set up confessionals and priests where you could secretly confess your sins to her as a mediary to God.

Now, Alexander Hyslop's book, The Two Babylons, is very popular among some groups of Christians, some Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, some Evangelicals, and I think it's worth addressing it directly because Hyslop's belief is coming from a nineteenth century belief called pan-Babylonianism.

Now, his argument is that all of the world's pagan religions were ultimately started by these Babylonian mystery religions that practice astronomy.

And ultimately, this can be traced back to the worship of Nimrod.

Now, originally, pan-Babylonians actually argued that Judaism and Christianity also were just forms of Babylonian religion, and they would claim that even the story of Jesus was borrowed from the Babylonians.

I have no doubt you can find some non-Christians on TikToks making those kind of claims today.

But Alexander Hyslop was a Presbyterian minister, so neither he nor the Christians quoting his book today are going to endorse that version of pan-Babylonianism.

Instead, Hyslop kind of invented a Protestant version of the idea in which Protestantism is true, but all the Catholic stuff that Protestants reject, all of that stuff happens to all come from Babylon.

You'll sometimes find Unitarians quoting Hyslop as well because he does claim things like that the pagan Babylonians and ancient Egyptians held to a doctrine of the Trinity in the very same sense that Catholics do.

But hopefully, if you're even a little bit familiar with the history of world religions, you'll realize that's false.

The Trinity doesn't come from any of those religions, and those religions don't teach the Trinity.

So you might be wondering how Hyslop was qualified to make these sweeping claims about all the religions in the world coming from Babylonian mystery religion.

Well, the answer is simply, he had no qualifications to speak of whatsoever.

In the words of Professor Bill Ellis, Hyslop's book was just the mingling of a sketchy knowledge of Middle Eastern antiquity with a vivid imagination.

For instance, Hyslop claims in his book that the evidence is decisive, proving that Mexicans before fourteen ninety-two used to worship the Norse god Odin, and that this is why all the ancient pagans of Mexico and Egypt and Persia believed in baptismal regeneration.

But literally none of that is true.

One of the bits of evidence Hyslop cites to try to prove that it's true is that Mexicans used to call Wednesday Woden's Day, exactly as we ourselves have.

They don't and didn't.

So the problem isn't just that Hyslop's book is filled with these kind of false historical claims.

All of pan-Babylonianism is completely and obviously untrue.

Even in recent history, we've seen new religions be created.

There's no reason to believe that ancient cultures were unable to invent their own religious systems.

There's absolutely no reason to imagine that one single pagan religion gave rise to all the other forms of paganism.

And if you are going to believe that, if you do believe that pagans from Mexico to Egypt, India, all got their same belief system from Babylonian astrologers, then it's going to have to follow that Babylonian astrology is extremely old, old enough that the peoples who eventually migrate to the New World could be exposed to it before they left.

And that creates a problem.

As Dr. John Steele, professor of Egyptology and Assyriology at Brown University, puts it, Pan-Babylonians had to push back the history of Babylonian astronomy to very ancient times, often claiming preposterously early dates for the composition of Babylonian astronomical texts.

The problem is we know that none of those preposterously early dates are true.

It was actually a brilliant Jesuit priest, the scholar Father Francis Xavier Kugler, who debunked pan-Babylonianism once and for all.

As Dr. Steele explains, Father Kugler was at the time the leading scholar of Babylonian astronomy, and he easily disproved the pan-Babylonians' claims for the antiquity of Babylonian astronomy and ridiculed the whole pan-Babylonian enterprise.

He was able to demonstrate conclusively that Babylonian astronomy did not emerge before the first millennium before Christ, much too late to be the source of all of the world's religions.

As Peter Lancaster Brown explains in his book on the history of astroarchaeology, Almost in scholastic isolation, Kugler demolished the great edifice of pan-Babylonian theory piece by piece.

The pan-Babylonians had no answer to the criticism put forward in his books, and so it was scientifically dead by World War I and then banished forever to the lunatic fringe of pseudoscientific writings.

And that's where it remains.

So that's one problem with relying on Hyslop.

His work isn't serious history.

It's just Hyslop.

But there's a second problem for any Christian.

Hyslop's whole argument was that he could prove that Catholic worship was really the worship of Nimrod and his wife.

That claim is his thesis.

It's even on the cover of the book.And Nimrod is a biblical figure.

He's mentioned briefly in Genesis ten as a mighty hunter before the Lord as a son of Cush, a great-grandson of Noah, and is a ruler over and possibly founder of places like Babel before ultimately building the city of Nineveh.

But the problem is the Bible doesn't really describe Nimrod as anything like what Hislop claims.

There are only nine verses in the entire Bible which mention Nimrod.

And as Joel Richardson points out, he's never described as being married to a woman named Semiramis or having a son named Tammuz.

And that's the pagan trinity that Hislop claimed we allegedly find across the world's religions.

The Bible never says that Nimrod was married to Semiramis.

The Bible never says that Semiramis and Nimrod had a son named Tammuz.

It doesn't say that anywhere in the Bible, and in fact, when we actually turn to legitimate historical sources, we really don't find it there either.

But all of these, um, stories come from extra-biblical traditions.

Okay?

So you've only got a handful of verses in the Bible about Nimrod, a handful of verses in the Bible about the Tower of Babel, not a lot of information to go on.

However, we have all of these extra-biblical stories, traditions, myths, legends, whatever you wanna call them.

I want you to imagine for a moment that Ashley Hayes and Alexander Hislop are right, that if you wanna understand Catholicism or really any of the world's religions other than Protestantism, you've got to first know the secret history of the worship of Nimrod and his wife and their son.

Now, Nimrod is the key to understanding everything, and God in His inspired Word is about to tell us about Nimrod in the book of Genesis.

Does He mention any of this?

No.

He instead tells us a guy who's good at hunting and founding cities.

Is that plausible if the real story of Nimrod is that he is the origin of all of the world's religions?

But instead of simply limiting themselves to what the Bible says about Nimrod, Ashley and Hislop have turned to a completely different version of Nimrod, one largely created by extra-biblical legends and by Hislop himself relying upon unreliable and contradictory man-made traditions.

The problem with all of these things is all of these traditions are outside of the Bible, and we cannot rely on them.

Why do I say that?

Well, listen, even these particular traditions and myths contradict each other.

For instance, in the Talmud, you have some stories about Nimrod where he is a righteous person.

He's actually presented as a righteous guy.

In some of the other stories, he's treated as an enemy of Abraham and a real evil guy.

So the question is, which of these are true, because they're fundamentally contradictory.

And, and in my book, again, I go through how these various traditions con-contradict with one another.

They conflict with one another.

And yet we sort of just pick and choose which parts of these extra-biblical traditions we want to keep, and people have written entire books about these things, especially Alexander Hislop.

When Christians credulously repeat this kind of unbiblical, unreliable nonsense as if it was real history, it makes us look like Nimrods.

Eh, I couldn't do that to the little Nimrod.

Ironically, when Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck refer to Yosemite Sam and Elmer Fudd as Nimrods, that's actually more biblically literate than Ashley Hayes' critique of Catholicism.

Because sarcastically calling a bad hunter Nimrod is like calling a dumb person Einstein.

The whole joke is that the one detail we know about Nimrod from the Bible is basically that he's a great hunter.

But when Hayes and Hislop compare our belief system to Nimrod, they're not going off his biblical depiction.

They're going off of Hislop's imaginary version.

So whenever you hear people talk to you about Babylonian mystery religions being the origins of Catholic practices, understand that this is not biblical, and it's also not serious history.

They're deep in the realm of the lunatic fringe of pseudoscientific writings.

This then leads to a third problem and a genuinely tragic one.

Because it's not just that they're turning to unreliable extra-biblical tradition.

It's that when you allow your mind to be polluted in this way with this slop, it starts to darken your mind.

When you see Christians celebrating the birth of Christ or his resurrection, you won't be able to accept the simple, obvious Christian explanation of why they're doing that.

You'll be forced to invent some insane pagan explanation instead.

Hislop, for example, claims that all the major Catholic feasts from Christmas to Easter, even the birth of John the Baptist, can be proved to be Babylonian.

None of that is true.

For Christmas in particular, I urge you to check out episode one thirty of this show where I debunked a video called A Very Pagan Christmas by looking at the actual scholarly sources.

But it's a spiritual problem when you start to see evil conspiracies even in things that are good and holy like the birth of Christ.

In Matthew chapter two, when the Magi come to visit Jesus, we're told that going into the house, they saw the child with Mary, his mother, and they fell down and worshiped.

You don't need a global pan-Babylonian conspiracy to explain a mom holding her baby.

It's not surprising that ancient art, whether it's depicting real-life women or ancient goddesses, often depicts these women holding babies, just like it's not surprising that depictions of babies often show them being held by their moms.

But Hislop looks at this ancient art, and he sees evidence of a global Babylonian conspiracy.

He claims that the Babylonians and their popular religions supremely worshiped a goddess mother and a son who is represented in pictures and in images as an infant or child in his mother's arms.

From Babylon, he claims, this worship of the mother and child spread to the ends of the earth.

In Egypt, the mother and the child were worshiped under the names of Isis and Osiris.

Now, look, that's obviously wrong.

Isis and Osiris were brother and sister, also husband and wife, gross, not mother and son.

He then claims that this mother-child worship spread to India, where the pair are worshiped even to this day as Isi and Iswara.

Now, again, this is just obviously wrong.

Iswara is just a term meaning personal god as opposed to the impersonal deity Brahma.

It's not the name of a particular god.

The chief gods described in this personal way are Vishnu and Shiva, who also are not mother and son.

I could go on, but the point here isn't just that many of his facts appear to be completely wrong or entirely invented, although that's also true.is that there's actually something spiritually alarming if your first thought at seeing an image of a mom and a baby is, Aha, this must be Babylonian paganism.

We see this in Ashley's arguments as well.

She claims

If Jesus Christ founded the Catholic Church, then we would see clear evidence of the disciples praying to Mary, called the Queen of Heaven, but we don't.

We actually see God condemn it.

In Jeremiah 7:18, it says, The children gather wood, the fathers kindle fire, and the women knead dough to make cakes for the Queen of Heaven, and they pour out drink offerings to other gods to provoke my anger.

In Jeremiah 44:18, it says, But since we left off making offerings to the Queen of Heaven and pouring out drink offerings to her, we have lacked everything and been, and have been consumed by the sword and by famine.

If you are Catholic, it should bother you that Mary is called the Queen of Heaven, the same title that the pagan god, the demonic god in the Old Testament was called, and that offerings to her, prayers to her, sacrifices to her angers God Almighty.

In Heaven, there is no queen.

There is no queen in Heaven.

But there is a Queen of Heaven biblically.

In Revelation chapter 12, St. John sees a great sign in Heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of 12 stars.

However you interpret that passage, whether you think that queen is Mary or the church or Israel or all of the above, there's clearly a queen wearing a crown in Heaven.

And unlike the daughter of the king in Psalm 45, who is clothed with gold, the mother of the king in Revelation 12 is clothed with something even better, the sun itself.

And it's clear that this woman is the mother of the king.

She's a queen who's pregnant.

She gives birth to a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron.

That's pretty obviously Jesus, our Lord and King, the ruler of all nations.

So the idea of a heavenly queen who gives birth to our God-King, Jesus Christ, that's not some idea coming from some obscure pagan text or esoteric Babylonian practice.

It's the plain meaning of the scriptures, particularly Revelation 12.

Why go looking for a fake pagan explanation when there's a perfectly clear Christian one?

The Queen of Heaven is Isis of Egypt, Semiramis of Babylon, Ishtar of Syria, Venus of Rome.

Only if you're more fixated on paganism than you are on scripture.

As I pointed out in my episode, What the Davidic Kings Reveal About Mary, ancient Israel didn't use the term queen to describe the wife of the king.

At the time, the king might have had countless wives.

Instead, royal honors were given to the king's mother.

So if you approach the Bible through the lens of Judaism rather than approaching world history through the lens of paganism, it's perfectly clear why the mother of Jesus Christ, our King, would be described in queenly terms.

To ignore the plain meaning of these passages and to try to find an esoteric pagan reading really is to strain at gnats and to swallow camels.

There is the King of Heaven, God Almighty, the Lord of Hosts.

He does not, though, share his authority with anyone.

Even a basic reading of the New Testament will reveal this claim to be false.

The Gospel of Matthew ends with the Great Commission in which Jesus says, All authority in Heaven and on Earth has been given to me.

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.

And lo, I'm with you always to the close of the age.

So Jesus receives all authority from the Father, and he then uses his authority to send his followers out.

That's sharing his authority.

Elsewhere, he says things like, He who hears you hears me, and he who rejects you rejects me, and he who rejects me rejects him who sent me.

Or, Whatever you bind on Earth shall be bound in Heaven, and whatever you loose on Earth shall be loosed in Heaven.

Matthew even tells us directly that Jesus calls the 12 disciples to himself and gave them authority over unclean spirits to cast them out and to heal every disease and every infirmity.

The idea that God doesn't share his authority with anyone is not only false, virtually the opposite is true.

Anyone with any authority has it only because it's been shared with them by God.

St. Paul literally says, There is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.

And Jesus tells Pontius Pilate much the same thing in John 19.

Now, perhaps you're going to say that's only true on Earth.

Maybe Ashley just means that God doesn't share his authority with anyone in Heaven.

But that's still false.

The Bible is quite clear that if we endure, we shall also reign with him, in the words of St. Paul.

Or, as Jesus tells the 12 at the Last Supper, You are those who have continued with me in my trials.

As my Father appointed a kingdom for me, so do I appoint for you that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom and sit on thrones, judging the 12 tribes of Israel.

And sure enough, when St. John sees the vision of the New Jerusalem in Revelation, The wall of the city had 12 foundations, and on them the 12 names of the 12 apostles of the Lamb.

But according to Ashley, that can't be right, because there can be only one foundation, Jesus alone.

The 12 sinful apostles are not allowed to be the foundations.

Ephesians 2:19-20 says, Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God's people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone.

The true foundation, the rock, is Christ and Christ alone, not a sinful man.

I want to slow this interaction down, because it's absolutely fascinating to me.

Ashley's objecting to the idea the apostle Peter could be described as a foundation of the Church.She says that

The true foundation, the rock is Christ and Christ alone, not a sinful man.

And her support for that claim is Ephesians 2, in which St. Paul says that the Church is

Built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets.

Again, I'm amazed by this.

She's quoting St. Paul, who is describing the apostles and prophets with Christ as the foundation of the Church, and then immediately uses that line to try to prove that the apostles aren't the foundation of the Church because it has to be Christ alone.

It seems like she's so blinded by these man-made Protestant traditions that she's not even hearing the words of St. Paul coming out of her own mouth.

We see the same thing when she talks about the Virgin Mary.

She claims

We do not pray to anybody else but God.

We do not use any other mediator, any other intercessor but Jesus Christ.

That is what Scripture commands.

But she puts up on screen 1 Timothy 2:1 in which St. Paul tells us that we're all to be intercessors.

This is a cut-and-dry, black-and-white topic in Scripture, and yet Catholics don't see an issue with it.

If you truly love God, if you want to obey Him and His Word, and He says that there is one mediator, one intercessor between God and man, and that is Jesus Christ, why are you then walking in direct rebellion to His command and praying to somebody else?

Because Jesus doesn't say that.

She's adding to His words in a way that is not faithful to His teachings.

He never says there's one intercessor.

No one in the Bible says that.

Quite the contrary, St. Paul says, Brethren, pray for us, and that, We always pray for you.

That's intercession.

St. James says, Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed.

That's not Babylonian paganism, that's intercession.

And in 1 Timothy 2, in the very text Ashley put on screen, Paul tells us that we are to be making supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings for all men.

Now, Ashley quotes from a Catholic Answers article in which we point out that it's obviously okay to ask your friend to pray for you, and this alone should be a red flag.

If intercession is evil, if Jesus is to be our only intercessor, why would it be okay for my friend to intercede for me?

Well, Ashley has an answer to that, but one that unfortunately betrays her biblical ignorance.

Those of us on Earth are alive.

Our friend that is praying for us is alive, not dead.

Second, we are not praying to that friend.

The act of prayer is directed to God the Father through Christ alone, period.

The Bible commands us not to entertain the dead, anyone who has passed away, anyone.

And why?

Because they cannot hear us.

Ecclesiastes 9:5 says, The dead know nothing.

Isaiah 38:18, The grave cannot praise you, death cannot sing your praise.

The living, the living, they praise you, as I am doing today.

When we involve the dead, when we pray to the dead for help, it literally mirrors forbidden practices like necromancy, which we see prohibited in Deuteronomy.

And why is it prohibited?

Because the dead cannot hear us.

So what are we actually doing in that moment?

We are involving the demonic realm.

This is another one of those moments where the very passages that Ashley quotes from disprove her case.

Her argument is that

Mary is no longer on this Earth.

She is in Heaven with her Savior and cannot hear us.

So Mary's with her Savior in Heaven.

Great.

But Ashley claims that this means that she's thus unable to hear us because

Ecclesiastes 9:5 says, The dead know nothing.

Isaiah 38:18, The grave cannot praise you.

Death cannot sing your praise.

The living, the living, they praise you, as I am doing today.

So wait, is Ashley claiming that Mary is one of the dead who know nothing and cannot praise God, or that Mary is praising God right now in Heaven?

It obviously can't be both.

When the Sadducees in Jesus' day were cynical about the fate of those who died, Jesus replied to them by proving to them that the saints are right now alive.

He quotes God's line to Moses and the burning bush, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.

And Jesus says of this, He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.

You are quite wrong.

In fact, he doesn't just say, You are quite wrong, he asks them, Is not this why you are wrong?

That you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God?

And I think that's a good question for Ashley to grapple with, because she's convinced she's actually just too well-read on the Bible to be Catholic, even as she spouts this kind of ignorance.

I could never be a Catholic because I read my Bible, and I think that's the issue here.

If some of you were to actually sit down and read it for yourself, you would find that it contradicts the very foundation on which your religion is based.

I simply wish she had the humility to realize, number one, that many of her objections to Catholicism actually aren't based on anything she read in the Bible.

They're based on things people duped her into believing about the early Church, about Babylonian religions, or as we're gonna see, about Constantine, things which turned out to be false.

And number two, if your interpretation of the Bible contradicts Catholicism, that might not be our problem.

Maybe you just don't understand the Bible as well as you think you do.

Jesus' words to those who believe the saints are dead, as you do, Ashley, are that you don't know the Scriptures or the power of God.So maybe start there.

Now I've alluded a few times now to Ashley making false historical claims about Constantine and about the early church.

I want to give you a taste of what I mean.

Through all of this bloodshed and suffering, the early church remained pure, simple, and faithful to scripture.

They met in homes or secret gatherings, rejecting idolatry, emphasizing salvation by grace through faith alone in Christ, and refused to compromise or align with pagan worldly practices.

There was no elaborate priesthood, no veneration of Mary or saints as intercessors, and no blending of Roman practices.

Their loyalty was to Jesus and Jesus alone, even unto death.

This was the authentic body of Christ that Jesus promised to build.

Now fast-forward to the early fourth century and enter the Emperor Constantine the Great.

Now here we have a point of agreement.

We both love the idea of the early Christians, but Ashley claims that prior to the Emperor Constantine in the early fourth century, those early Christians taught salvation by grace through faith alone, that they had no elaborate priesthood, that there was no veneration of Mary or saints as intercessors.

Now, as it happens, I've actually written a book on this time period, and what she's saying here is provably false.

Now, you don't actually have to take my word for it.

The Protestant historian Philip Schaff said of the period one hundred to three eleven that, If anyone expects to find in this period or in any of the church fathers, Augustine himself not excepted, the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone as the article upon which the church stands or falls, he'll be greatly disappointed.

Now, the one possible exception that Schaff can find is St. Clement of Rome, who talks about us being justified by faith rather than by ourselves nor by our own wisdom or understanding or godliness or works which we have wrought in holiness of heart.

That, as you're going to see, is completely consistent with the Catholic position.

But just two paragraphs earlier, Clement also talks about our need to be justified by our works and not our words.

So he doesn't seem like an obvious candidate for Sola Fide Teacher of the Year.

And to be clear, there are plenty of things that these early Christians teach about saving faith that Catholics and Protestants alike are going to happily agree about.

But Ashley's simply wrong in believing that they clearly teach the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone because scholars looking for it can't agree on anybody in this time period who clearly teaches it.

For more on that, you can check out my earlier episode, The Doctrine That Didn't Exist, Early Christians vs. Sola Fide, or Trent Horn's episode, Sola Fide's Absence in the Early Church.

What we do find instead are things like the priesthood and asking the saints for intercession, the very things that Ashley denies.

As Carol King and Michael Garton point out, we see prayers for intercession in both the theological writings in this period as well as the catacomb inscriptions, showing that the early Christians turned to the saints in heaven for their intercession in this period before Constantine.

During this time period, we have archeological evidence of the intercession of saints.

We do, and written evidence too.

I go over some of it in the chapter The Good Shepherd as Early Icon.

I talk about some of it briefly.

St. Hippolytus of Rome seems to attest to a practice of addressing the three holy youths in the fiery furnace in prayer.

Now, in addition to the theological writings, catacomb inscriptions, you also have things like the so-called Frankfurt Silver Inscription.

That's a prayer worn like an amulet found on the body of a Christian whose death can be reliably dated to between two thirty and two seventy.

And the prayer on his body opens with the intercession of St. Titus.

Now, you might think that the early Christians were right or wrong to write things like, Peter and Paul, intercede for Victor, in the catacombs.

That's not the point I'm trying to prove today.

My point is much simpler.

Surely it is simply untrue to pretend that they didn't speak and act that way in this pre-Constantinian period.

The same is true when we're talking about their views on the priesthood.

Around the year two hundred, Tertullian refers to the bishop as the chief priest and says that his presbyters and deacons act sacramentally only as his authority on account of the honor of the church.

A hundred years earlier, St. Clement of Rome similarly seems to compare the bishop, presbyter, deacon, layman distinction in the church to the Old Testament distinction between high priest, priest, Levite, and layman.

Now, all of this is closely connected to the doctrine of the Eucharist, which the earliest Christians were explicit was a sacrificial offering to God.

And not just any sacrificial offering, but the offering of his own son, Jesus Christ.

As the Anglican theologian J.N.D. Kelly put it, By the end of the first century, meaning before one hundred, we find clear evidence of the Eucharist being treated as the distinctively Christian sacrifice.

And Kelly can point to several other bits of early evidence, like the writings of the Didache, St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. Justin Martyr, and St. Irenaeus of Lyon, all of them written well before the year two hundred.

Again, my point here is not right now to show that those early Christians were right to believe this about the sacrifice of the mass or about the priesthood.

I've made that case elsewhere.

My point today is just to show it is flatly untrue to claim that the early Christians before Constantine didn't have a priesthood, that they didn't ask the saints for intercession, or that they believed in the Protestant justification of faith alone doctrine.

Those things are simply untrue, and blaming these Catholic teachings on Constantine doesn't pass basic historical muster.

What Ashley is doing right here is making baseless assertions about history, and we have enough history to know it's not on her side.

Now, as you might imagine, I really am just scratching the surface here.

Ashley makes all kinds of claims about the Bible, about church history, about pagan history, about the official teachings of the church, and it's much easier for her to say the false thing than for me to show why it's false.

Early on in the episode, she talked about how she was going to carefully compare official Catholic teaching to scripture.

So now we're going to go a bit deeper into specifically what the Catholic Church teaches, kind of bullet point it, if you will.

We're going to draw from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, some papal encyclicals, and some historical councils, and we're going to hold those teachings up to the words of scripture.

And unless I missed it She just literally doesn't do this.

I don't know of a single moment in any of her episode where she directly quotes from the Catechism or from papal encyclicals or from historical councils.

Instead, she's content to just make bold assertions on these subjects, even when her assertions are wildly wrong.

For instance, she says

Moving right along, the Catholic Church teaches that the gospel of salvation is works-based.

And yet in Scripture, at the heart of the gospel, we see the truth that we are saved by grace through faith and that it's not of ourselves.

And yet Catholic teaching presents salvation as works-based, faith plus works, merit, sacraments.

So a way to pay for your sins, according to the Catholic Church, is to give them money.

The system turns grace into something earned, saying plainly that what Christ did was not enough.

And of course, Scripture warns against this.

In Romans 11:6, it says, If it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works.

Otherwise, grace would no longer be grace.

So much of what you just heard is wrong.

If I may do the thing Ashley said she was gonna do but didn't, allow me to quote the Council of Trent so you can find out what the Catholic Church actually teaches.

Quote, Faith is the beginning of human salvation, the foundation and the root of all justification, without which it is impossible to please God and to come under the fellowship of his sons.

But we are therefore said to be justified freely, because that none of those things which precede justification, whether faith or works, merit the grace itself of justification.

For if it be a grace, it is not now by works.

Otherwise, as the same apostle says, grace is no more grace.

End quote.

The actual Catholic teaching, the Council of Trent, literally quotes the very verse that she claims disproves the Catholic teaching because she doesn't present the real Catholic teaching.

I've heard Protestants and even some Catholics speak as if the Catholic view is that you have to have faith and good works, and then you'll be justified.

That is simply not the Catholic view.

Our initial justification is a free gift.

It is received by faith, even by faith alone, if you want to put it that way.

No works can earn it, and not even faith earns it.

So we explicitly don't believe in works-based salvation.

Now, that said, it's also true that once you receive this free gift, you are required to maintain it, and that's where good works come in.

Just as you might have to maintain any other free gift you receive, if somebody gives you a kitten or a new car, there's no tension between saying salvation is based on a free gift of faith and also that we're required to maintain it, and maintaining it might require good works.

Whether you agree with that view or not, hopefully you can see that the claim that

The Catholic Church teaches that the gospel of salvation is works-based.

Is simply untrue.

And what about her frankly bizarre claim that Catholics think we can pay for our sins by giving the church money?

Now, this part is a complete muddle, but as best I can tell, she's confused about both indulgences and what are called acts of spiritual communion.

What is an example of an indulgence, you may ask?

The act of spiritual communion, aka giving the church money.

So a way to pay for your sins, according to the Catholic Church, is to give them money.

So let's see if I can clear up the confusion on a couple points here.

For starters, indulgences actually have nothing to do with becoming justified.

They don't even have anything to do about remaining in a state of justification or restoring a state of justification if it's been lost.

Indulgences relate only to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven, as St. Paul VI explained.

Now, maybe Ashley missed this.

It's in the Catechism.

But she literally quotes the Catholic Answers article making this very point.

This is from catholic.com.

It says, In short, after God forgives one's sins, there typically remains temporal punishment due as a result of that sin.

An indulgence is what lessens or removes that remaining punishment.

After God forgives one's sins.

So this is not a way of obtaining the forgiveness of God either way.

And spiritual communion has literally nothing to do with giving the church money.

Father Hugh Barber in another Catholic Answers article explains how a spiritual communion very simply is an act, an interiorly expressed or exteriorly expressed act of desire to receive the blessed sacrament and to receive the effects of the blessed sacrament.

In other words, the more you long for communion with Jesus Christ throughout the day, the more you grow in relationship with him.

Whatever you might think about the Eucharist, I hope this is a point Catholics and Protestants can agree on.

It has literally nothing to do with the idea that we need to be giving the church more money to have our sins forgiven.

Now look, the Gospel of John ends with these words.

But there are also many other things which Jesus did.

Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.

In what I hope is a similar spirit, I'd say this.

There are also many other things which Ashley claimed.

After all, her video is over 37 minutes long.

Were I to try to respond to every allegation she made, disproving each of them, would take more hours than the ones I've already devoted to this.

So if there are other arguments she made that you'd like to know more about, please let me know in the comments.

Many of her claims are ones I've actually already responded to elsewhere, and I'm happy to at least point you in the right direction.

In any case, I hope that this admittedly incomplete reply suffices to show that her arguments against Catholicism are rooted largely in her ignorance of Scripture, of church teaching, of pagan history, and of the official teachings of the Catholic Church.

Now, having said that, I'm genuinely grateful that she seems to have at least tried to understand what the church teaches in order to respond to it, even if she did miss the mark in many ways.

And I'm hopeful that this response will help her and help any of you who may have believed these falsehoods into a deeper knowledge of the truth.

Finally, as you might have noticed already from my forehead, I'm recording this on Ash Wednesday.

It's the first day of the season of Lent.

And as you might have guessed, Alexander Hislop claimed that this 40 days' abstinence of Lent was directly borrowed from the worshipers of the Babylonian goddess.

By now, hopefully you're a little suspicious of that claim.

Is it really true the Babylonians had a 40-day fast?

No.

But there was someone who did fast for 40 days.

And as I show in this video, it was his example that gave rise to the early Christian practice of Lent.

So if you want to know more about the true history of Lent with historical documentation, check out this episode on the history of Lent that you never knew.

For Shameless Popery, I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

God bless you.