TWO OF ROME’S SEVEN SACRAMENTS STILL IN THE PROTESTANT BIBLE.
With the advent of Gutenberg’s 15th C printing press the 16th C Puritan Fathers of the Reformation began printing Bibles in the national tongues of nearby regions. Precious Greek manuscripts came to Europe, when Islam invaded Constantinople in the early 15th C. Thus the Renaissance Christian humanists gained unprecedented access to the original Koine Greek Scriptures. One of these was Erasmus who published a Greek New Testament about 1519, only two years after Martin Luther began the Reformation.
This opened the eyes of scholars and translators to five of the seven Latin sacraments that did not appear in the original Greek. They had been inserted by the Roman Emperor Constantine shortly after ascending the throne in the early 4th C. He had instructed Eusebius and his team of literati to revise the Old Latin Bible and scroll fifty new Latin Bibles endorsing his seven priestly sacraments for the inaugural founding of his Church of Rome.
However, the first German, English, and French Bibles printed included only the rites of water, wine and wafer integral to the two ordinances found in the Greek Testament of Erasmus.
During this study we will look at these two rites and the disparities between the three apostolic commissions found in Matthew, Mark, and Luke’s Acts of the Apostles. Not only was each commission different from the others, but two of them were , in hindsight, never endorsed by the Saviour during the entire length of his earthly ministry before his arrest. While this can be verified from any of the three Synoptic Gospels, it is also true of the fourth Gospel, notwithstanding one rumour to the contrary in John 3.