If you’ve ever read any of the books of the Apocrypha it becomes clear they weren’t inspired by God. Even the names of some of them are huge tip-offs—I mean, there’s actually one called “Bel and the Dragon.”

Sounds like a children’s story from C.S. Lewis! In this bogus book only a chapter long is the passage: “Then said the king unto him, Thinkest thou not that Bel is a living God? seest thou not how much he eateth and drinketh every day? Then Daniel smiled, and said, O king, be not deceived: for this is but clay within, and brass without, and did never eat or drink any thing.”

Nowhere in the entire Bible is the word “smiled” used!

What a lot of Christians don’t know, or don’t remember from Bible history, is that in 1545, the Council of Trent put an official curse on anybody who didn’t believe all the books of the Apocrypha were pure, unadulterated Holy Scripture.

As Jordan explains, “There are 14 books in a Roman Catholic bible that you don’t have in your Bible. These books are found in a Roman Catholic Old Testament. So, you people who don’t believe the Apocrypha is Holy Scripture like Jesus didn’t, you’re in trouble—if you’re afraid of Rome.

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In the early years of Christianity, Antioch, Syria was the center of the literal interpretation of Scripture. The belief there was you should study the Bible literally using what’s called the “grammatical, historical approach.”

By contrast, Alexandria, Egypt promoted the Platonic idea of allegory, or the Greek philosophies approach of interpreting Scripture allegorically.

“Allegory got its real impetus in the 2^nd Century with Origen,” says Jordan. “He didn't invent it—it came from Plato via Philo via Clement and then to Origen—but Origen was the guy who was the real whiz-bang fellow. He was the real spark plug for it.”

*****

It was with controversy between Nestorius and Cyril, one of Antioch and the other of Alexandria, that the ability to study and understand the Bible “took its last stand,” says Jordan.

“Cyril absolutely just flat-out lied about Nestorius in order to win the debate, and smeared him, defamed him and slandered him,” he explains. “And what is called ‘Nestorianism’ in church history is a heresy.

“Nestorianism historically is identified as teaching that Jesus Christ was two people; it wasn’t just that He had two natures in one person, but that He was actually two separate people.

“Of course, that's a deviant, unscriptural view of the person of Christ, but Nestorius never believed anything even close to that and you can easily see this from quotes by him in Encyclopedia Britannica and other places.

“Nestorius was very scriptural. Cyril, who opposed him, was the guy who was a whack-job! What he was mad at Nestorius for was his opposition to the notion that you could use a title for Mary and that she was ‘the Mother of God.’ Now which one would you agree with?

“Their conflict gives you an idea of how the controversy goes. When you get studying church history, you see it doesn't take long—truth is lost early. In Jeremiah 42:2, talking about the ‘believing remnant’ left in Israel, Jeremiah said, ‘You see how we are the few of many,’ and that's exactly what you're going to find when you study church history.

“Truth is lost early and you see the establishment of religion over reality. There will always be a remnant, but you see that remnant always slandered.”

*****

Beginning in the 4th Century onward, the true church—the spiritual movement of the real Body of Christ—became much more distinctly defined by the organized religious hierarchy that is Romanism and the Roman Catholic Church.

“Polycarp was the first person to use the term ‘Catholic,’ according to historians, and he used it to mean ‘universal,’ ” says Jordan. “And when he talked about the Catholic Church, he meant the universal church in the Apostles Creed . . .

“It’s when they began to define the Body of Christ as a political organization—as a physical entity—that you begin to have problems, and it wasn't long before that physical entity began to be identified as the Roman Catholic Church, and edicts were actually pronounced by the Roman emperors that you had to acknowledge the Roman church as ‘the one and only church.’ That's why you hear people talk about Roman Catholicism with such vigor, because it's the specific thing that's going on.

*****

The anti-Semitic viewpoint of these “early church fathers” is a commonly understood thing. Eusebius, for example, proclaimed the promises of the Hebrew Scriptures were for the Christians, not the Jews, and the curses were for the Jews.

“After the Council of Nicene in 321 A.D. anti-Semitism among the early church fathers becomes very aggressive,” says Jordan. “And what you’re reading when you read what the church fathers believed is that ‘replacement theology’; that is, that Israel has been replaced by the Body of Christ and that we are Israel.

“That's what you hear all around you today, but that isn't (an idea) that was invented in the 19^th and 20^th Century—that goes back to the 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th Century. By the 4^th Century, that was the standard view of the professing, visible church as a whole, and you find that in the literature.

“So, what happened? Well, when you lose the ability to study the Bible literally, then Jerusalem doesn't have to mean Jerusalem; it can mean your hometown. And Israel doesn't have to mean Israel; it can mean the Church of the Body of Christ.

“They needed that allegorical method of interpreting the Bible to sustain those views and they had that method available to them through the great universities. I read an article one time that said, ‘The Body of Christ went into apostasy early on, led there by the world's most unusual Christian university.’ That's the university at Alexandria! It’s the Christian school at Alexandria, as opposed to the one at Antioch, that produced all the other rampant heresies and goofball ideas.

“The slipshod approach to studying the Bible is what led to the acceptance of the idea that Mary could be ‘the mother of god’ rather than the mother of Christ and simply the mother of His humanity.”

*****

Jordan continues, “The 4^th to the 9^th centuries is the church ‘flattered and fashioned.’ They develop a hierarchical form of government, and as soon as you do that, inevitably you're going to have a sense of political power, and as the political structure of Rome—the Roman Empire—waned away, well, the quasi-political power of the Church began to ascend.

“Constantine, with the Edict of Milan and all that kind of stuff, made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire and that gave it status and political clout.

“That's why it was Leo the Great, the bishop of Rome (440-460 A.D.), who gave the theological foundation to the papacy. He's the one who took Matthew 16—‘upon this Rock I will build my church’—and formalized the theological foundation of the papacy based upon that passage.

“The idea was that Peter was given the keys to the kingdom of heaven, but it says ‘keys’ plural. So he's given the keys to the kingdom of heaven—which is a physical, visible, earthly government—and the keys to the kingdom of heaven, which is the spiritual key.

“So, Peter’s got both the keys to the political and spiritual kingdom and is ‘the rock upon which the church is going to be built.’ And ‘the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.’ Now, you tell me, the (Bible) expression ‘the gates of hell’—what is that said to mean? What do people say that it means? ‘The powers of hell.’ Right? What does it say? People say, ‘Well, that's a figure of speech.’

“In the Bible, the term ‘gate’ has a metaphorical or figurative meaning attached to it. Solomon, for example, sat in the gate of the city. What is that referring to? It’s talking about the government.

“Jacob sees the ladder and says, ‘This is the gate of heaven.’ What's he talking about? He's talking about, ‘This is the place where the seat of the government is.’ So, if you're going to put a metaphorical meaning on the term ‘gates of hell’ you wouldn't just run off and take ‘power of hell.’ You'd use the meaning that it is in Scripture. The gates of hell would be the government of hell.

“In other words, who governs hell? Who has the power of death at that time? Hebrews 2 says Satan did. So, if you're going to tie Scripture to Scripture to interpret it, that would be the way you'd go. But you wouldn't say there weren't gates there.

“If you're going to take Matthew 16:18-19 and come up with the idea that Peter is the first pope, and that therefore the church in Rome inherited his authority . . .according to Paul, Peter was never in Rome! They just made that up!

“When you study the Bible allegorically your imagination can be whatever it wants to be and you can make it that. And so they needed that, and Leo used that as the theological foundation for the papacy. The governmental hierarchy was there long before Leo, but that kind of put the nail on the head.”

*****

Jordan continues, “Now, we already talked about Origen and Cyril, but let me tell you about two others who are critical in this issue of establishing religion over reality—

‘that form of godliness and denying the power thereof,’ as Paul says, ‘making a fair show in the flesh’ rather than in spiritual reality.

“There are two guys; Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage, from 200 to 258 A.D., and Augustine, considered ‘the greatest Christian thinker of all the ages.’

“Cyprian is the guy who introduced and formalized the concept of ‘baptismal regeneration,’ or the idea that water baptism is a grace-conferring ritual—it's a means of imparting God's grace to you.

“He held that the one Catholic Church the institution possessed the only valid sacraments, and that there was no salvation outside of the Catholic Church, and therefore, under no circumstances, could baptism be performed by those who had been separated from the ‘mother church,’ or who had been pronounced heretics by the Church.

“Of course, there's no baptismal generation ANYWHERE in the Bible; that comes out of paganism and this ecumenical assimilation.

“. . . As for Augustine, he wrote the book The City of God, which you can still read today, emphasizing two doctrines. One is the doctrine of grace, which really is the doctrine of depravity, and the other is the doctrine of the church state, which is what The City of God was about.

“Augustine is where Calvinism comes from; the Five Points of Calvinism that developed later in the Reformation. Calvinism is really just Augustinianism.

“As for the doctrine of the church state, when you hear people take up a collection and pray, ‘Father, we pray you bless these tithes for the spreading of thy kingdom’ . . . when you hear that expression, you're not hearing Bible, you're hearing Augustine! And this idea of ‘spreading the kingdom’ is the idea of an ecclesiastical organization of the Church being spread out!

“Now, inherent in that is there's no salvation outside of the Church—outside of the organization—so Augustine said it’s okay to use ‘force of arms’ to what Jesus said in the parable in Luke 14 ‘to compel them to come in.’

“Just yesterday, I heard D. James Kennedy on the radio preaching about the Augustinian doctrine of ‘the just war.’ Ever hear that? Augustine had this big convoluted doctrine of how to have a ‘just war.’ And the reason he did that is not so you can justify going into Iraq and bumping off Saddam Hussein. That wasn't it.

“The reason he did that was because he believed that by use of force of arms it was right to compel people to submit to the Catholic Church. That it was that important that they be a part of that.

“Now, you need to remember that! That's in 350-400 A.D.. Mohammed didn't come along until the 7^th Century. And when you hear people complaining about Islam, and how it’s a religion of the sword, you need to remember that four centuries before that, ‘the greatest thinker in the Christian church,’ according to everybody's estimate, had promulgated the doctrine of a ‘just war,’ meaning ‘my side wins!’

“So there were some really important things going on back there during that time when the church is being flattered—the persecution is over with—and it's the state religion. As soon as that happened, it began to be fashioned like the hierarchy of the Roman government, and you get these great leaders who begin to fashion what's going on in the organized church.”