However, because it was written about, as long as those records are preserved people who want to will be able to go back and see what was really thought about the Brontosaurus at different points in history.

If all we had was oral tradition, some vague memory that once their was a Bronosaurus might be preserved, but we sure wouldn’t know much about it in 100 years.

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Arguably, in many cases it’s easier to alter a written document than it is to alter what everybody who matters has heard and already knows. To use a simplistic example: It would be very easy to publish a document stating that Benjamin Franklin was the first President of the United States, and you could even point to worldly evidence that makes that sound credible (look, his face is even on the $100 bill, the largest denomination currently in circulation!). Problem is if you did that, everyone who knows anything about it will tell you it’s BS.

Or not.

We all know the anecdote that if you tell someone something, then they tell someone, then that person tells someone, do that five or six times more, and it gets back to you, you can be assured what reaches you looks nothing like what you told that first person. So much for the reliability of oral tradition.

And as far relying on Scripture alone, you prove in your own example that you’re wrong.

You state that the Pharisees purposefully altered the Tanakh. How would you know that unless you were able to compare different documents from different time periods and come to that conclusion?

If you can do that, why can’t everyone else? Why can’t a believer do the same thing for themselves today? Why is it more reliable to believe that something someone said has been accurately passed down orally for 2000 years when we know we can’t trust even our own friends and family to accurately transmit something we tell them 9 times out of 10?

You prefer this method of transmission over the relative ease your average person can access and examine Biblical documents spanning several millennium themselves? I can look at different versions of documents throughout the ages and consult experts on the accuracy of those documents very easily. I can go within and without the Church to do this.

Whom do I consult to make sure what Messiah told the Apostles has been accurately passed down orally?

Your method of determining doctrinal reliably requires more faith than I think God can reasonably request.

ADDENDUM:

To address your Ben Franklin example:

How would you disprove the person stating that Franklin was President?

Everyone knows that’s hogwash, yes, but how do they know it?

You’d disprove them by pointing to the documentary record. You’d show them there isn’t a single document from the period showing that Franklin was ever President, or sought office, and, instead, we have a long documented history that shows he was never President.

Dean, you’d point to the documented historical record. Your “proof” about the untrustworthiness of documents is no proof at all when you yourself would consult the documents to disprove the President Franklin documents. Indeed, without the authentic documents you’d have no way of knowing for sure if you were right or not.

A quibble I have is that I’m not sure Catholics accept the notion that if scripture contradicts oral tradition, scripture wins. That’s more like what the original Protestants meant when they first formulated the doctrine of Sola Scriptura, although the doctrine has mutated over the centuries to where many Christians now take it as a sort of "Scripture Uber Alles, there is nothing but scripture" level, which is intellectually and spiritually hazardous and tends to explain the incoherence of so many fundamentalists, with constant disagreement among them over the meaning of even tiny things in the Bible. Increasingly, the original Protestant doctrine of Sola Scriptura is now being called Prima Scriptura, which allows mainline Protestants to distance themselves from the Bible-only variety of Christian.

Catholics and Orthodox are agreed that there is no conflict between Sacred Oral Tradition and Sacred Written Tradition (Scripture); if there appears to be a contradiction, it just points to the limits of human faculties, and shows that you’ve misunderstood something. Since Scripture and Oral Tradition are both indivisibly part of of the same Holy Tradition, the argument just doesn’t apply, although scripture is often used to double-check that we’ve got the oral stuff right. The creeds and doctrinal statements of the Ecumenical Councils are part of all that.

This is also why we separate Holy Tradition from what’s just tradition. For example, tradition holds that Peter established the first church in Antioch. That’s not Holy Tradition and if you could prove that he didn’t do that, then, well, that would be a little disappointing but would otherwise have no great impact. Similarly, if you could prove that Jesus was crucified on a cross that was in an “X” rather than the traditional “T” represented, no one serious would have conniptions over it.

I agree that it’s important not to treat Christians outside the Holy Tradition of the Church poorly. It is important, however, to point out where they seem to be in error, and how that can be intellectually and spiritually hazardous. For example, you’d think that if Jesus and the Apostles personally established all seven Sacraments (or Holy Mysteries), as Sacred Tradition holds, you’re not doing yourself any favor to get rid of them or de-emphasize them.

BTW, I forgot to add: Christians have long held that when the intellectual descendants of the Pharisees put together the current version of the Tanakh (their version of what Christians call the Old Testament), they used (created?) versions that were clearly incompatible with Christianity and obscured or changed prophecies that pointed to Jesus. Which just goes back to the point that relying on scripture alone simply isn’t workable; when you’re talking about hand-copied documents over dozens of generations, you cannot say that written information is inherently more reliable than orally transmitted information (so long as the orally transmitted information is viewed as a very serious matter). Arguably, in many cases it’s easier to alter a written document than it is to alter what everybody who matters has heard and already knows. To use a simplistic example: It would be very easy to publish a document stating that Benjamin Franklin was the first President of the United States, and you could even point to worldly evidence that makes that sound credible (look, his face is even on the $100 bill, the largest denomination currently in circulation!). Problem is if you did that, everyone who knows anything about it will tell you it’s BS.

It is my understanding that the Catholic position is that were the traditions of the church to be in conflict with scripture, then scripture would prevail.  The Catholics don’t believe that their traditions are in conflict, while some protestants think they are, but that doesn’t change the basic principle. 

One thing that I once read, and I can’t recall the exact source, but it was from a Catholic source way (and I’m paraphrasing) ‘We know where the Church is, but we do not know where it is not."  This was primarily focused on salvation for non-Christians, but I think that the same thing can apply to intra-christian schisms as well.  It seems to me that a focus on proving another set of beliefs is outside of God’s grace is somewhat of a waste of time, and probably not something God is interested in having his followers spend a lot of time on.  Rather I would think that a focus on what is good would be more useful.  If, for example, someone thinks that some of the sacraments the Catholics perform are unnecessary or anti-Christian, then an explanation of how they spiritually affect you and provide a deeper understanding and a feeling of closeness to Christ would, it seems to me, be more useful, and more Christlike then proving to them that their faith is wrong.  You can, through the vehicle of you faith, be sure that the rites you follow are where the Church ‘is.’  I don’t think though that you can have that same assurance of where it is not. 

As to the Epistle to Timothy, while it is quite likely that Paul never expected his exact words to be widely used, It is fairly clear that he was teaching general principles and expected Timothy to teach those principles as well, so one can presume the applicability of what he was writing to Timothy, even if he never expected his precise writing to be a canon scripture.  We can also assume that he wrote many letters that were lost to time. 

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I’m not offended by talking about corruption in the church in the middle ages. If I were, why would I be openly discussing it and acknowledging it?

I don’t find anything else much to disagree with in what you wrote after that. I just think that if Christ genuinely established a Church, one that would endure to the end of time, then radical Protestants who actually believe that everything got corrupted even before the New Testament Canon was even formally ratified by the bishops of the Church (which they would logically have to believe if history is any guide) is awfully questionable. As are some more common and less radical Protestant doctrines stemming from the Reformation era, such as abolishing the priesthood and throwing out five of the seven universally recognized sacraments simply because they couldn’t find it spelled out in plain black and white for them.

All I really think is that if Christianity is a true faith, then we will find it in the oldest continuous branches of that faith, and not in radical reconstructionists who use "nothing but the Bible" or "have no creed but the Bible." I think that’s incredibly questionable–indeed, I consider it self-evidently false. It’s something that’s popular in SOME Protestant circles ("We have no creed but the Bible") that sounds really good and profound but is, well, crazy if you ask me.

Again I only note that if you think it’s all wrong from start to finish, that’s pretty easy to sustain intellectually as I said already. ;-)

Frankly, it is a pretty stinging indictment of just relying on oral tradition and a strong assertation of the importance of scripture. 

Obviously talking about the corruption of the church in the middle ages offends you.  I will just say that I think it was more the rule then the exception, steming from the secular political nature of these appointments being regarded as more important then their spritual nature.  History is pretty clear on the extent of nepotism and political influence that governed these appointments. 

That being said, I do think that Catholics have a fairly strong case that they have maintained fairly unchanged not because they can call upon some claim to oral tradition, but because they do have written records back to the early days of the church, although the first couple of centuries it is pretty thin. 

If, as many protestants claim, the church went wrong in those early centuries (something that is certainly logically possible) then one would expect that the majority of the worlds Christians would still follow the established (even if incorrect) dogma that was set down (in writing) at that time.  The major non protestant schisms since then have certainly not tried to revisit any of those issues. 

It is of course also true that the protestant and non-protestant schisms were remarkably different in the the other schisms were between different brands of authoritarianism, while the protestant schisms, arising out of the enlightenment, can be viewed as a conflict between authoritarianism and individualism.  The social consciousness and fabric of the enlightenment was really a pretty radical development that both fueled and was fueled by the protestant reformation.  Other societies, more steeped in authoritarianism in secular as well as religious matters would not be expected to have responded in the same way.  That the more authoritarin churches have maintained the authoritarian trappings, and mostly just worried about who is the boss is hardly surprising. 

Once again, I am making no statement that the Catholic Church is wrong or evil, I have a great deal of admiration for that organization, but I don’t think your arguments for its legitimacy provide the proof you seem to think it does. 

To a greater or lesser degree protestants tend to hold that Christ established a non-authoritarian church, with the scriptures and individual grace to guide Christians but the established Church quickly became corrupt and authoritarian although they were by and large not able to corrupt the scriptures themselves.  Saying that the different authoritarian brands all agree on the necessatity for authoritarianism doesn’t disprove this argument. 

Now, I think that the case for the protestant free wheeling Christ is weak as well.  Their is ample evidence for a structure and lines of authority in the early Church. 

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BTW, a bit of trivia, the "Magisterium" appears to be the bad guys in the popular series of children’s books by Philip Pullman known as His Dark Materials. This is part of the general anti-Christian thrust of the series; the slap at Catholics is unmistakable if you know this. (Catholics are just used to this sort of thing.)

Magisterium does not properly contain the letter " j".

Magisterium is the official organ  and  teaching authority of tradition.

Yes, it makes a difference.

Therefore, since 685 the Maronites have found themselves isolated from Christians of the Byzantine Empire and European powers. In turn, they have appointed their own Patriarch, starting with John Maron, who had been a bishop of Batroun, Mount Lebanon. Through him, the Maronites of today claim full apostolic succession through the See of Antioch. Nonetheless, a source of controversy surrounds the Maronites, as they have been accused of having fully adopted and embraced the Monothelite heresy. However, this charge has been adequately explained away, as noted in the 2003 new Catholic Encyclopedia (see reference below). Maronites themselves insist that they have "never been out of communion with the Roman Catholic Church."

I guess some don’t believe them. I didn’t know that. Now I do. To me this is a distraction from the larger point, which is as I laid out in my last comment above was that you find isolated pockets of Christianity like this, the Indian Orthodox Church, and others who are remarkably (to my eye) consistent in their beliefs and practices, which clearly shows that preservation of Christianity through Oral Tradition and the Communion of Bishops and not just the Bible works pretty well. YMMV and all that.