Scripture & Tradition: From Jewish Roots

• For most Protestants, the only reliable source of divine revelation is the Bible. This tradition of relying on the Bible as the sole means of receiving God’s revelation, however, is fairly recent as it was only introduced in the 16th century Protestant Reformation.
•  Catholicism on the other hand, is not a “religion of the book,” rather, it is the religion of the “Word” of God
•  The Church teaches that both Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture form one sacred deposit of the word of God (DV 10).
•  In the apostolic preaching, the Gospel was handed on in two ways: – orally “by the apostles who handed on, by the spoken word of their preaching, by the example they gave, by the institutions they established, what they themselves had received
•  the relationship between Scripture and Tradition as one – but not the same. “They were the hydrogen and oxygen that fused to form living water. They were the words and the tune of a single song. They were two sides of the same apostolic coin”
•  the apostles appointed bishops as their successors, giving them “their own position of teaching authority”
•  it was Jesus who said to Peter, the first pope, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatever you shall bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you shall loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven”
•  idea of a living, continuing authoritative presence did not begin with the Catholic Church. In the Old Testament we see an ongoing authority in the Mosaic priesthood as well as the Royal dynasty of David and the Sanhedrin established just prior to Jesus birth.
•  the bishops around the world in union with the bishop of Rome, the pope, constitute the teaching authority of the Church.
•  This authoratative body is often referred to as the Magisterium.
•  apostolic Tradition, however, comes from the apostles as they received it from Jesus’ teaching, from His example, and from what the Holy Spirit revealed to them.
•  From the beginning of the Bible until Moses (1400 BC), oral tradition was the only means of passing on the words of God.
•  It was also understood by Jesus and the early Church that the Word of God was transmitted by two means: orally and in written form. Paul clearly understood this to be true as we see in his exhortation to Timothy: “hold to traditions which you have learned, whether by word or by our letter”
•  The fact that God put His will into writing does not come as a surprise to most Christians, but what does cause people, particularly Protestants, to theologically stutter is the fact that the Jewish community of the Old Testament as well as the people of Jesus’ time all believed that God gave to Israel an oral law (oral tradition) in addition to the written law.
•  Along with the written Torah, the Oral Torah which Moses received at Sinai, was “transmitted to Joshua, and Joshua to the Elders, and the Elders to the Prophets, and the Prophets to the Men of the Great Assembly…” (Ethics of the Fathers 1:1).
•  It is fair to say that the new concept of God’s Word coming only in the written form (Sola Scriptura) was a foreign idea to the Jews both in Moses’ and Jesus’ day.
•  The very idea of the Word of God being both written and oral flows from our Jewish roots.

SOURCE: http://biblestudyforcatholics.com/scripture-tradition-part-jewish-roots