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and there was a time when Catholicism with its present non-compatible beliefs (which it has not always held, BTW) was the only real Christian church.

I know Catholics like to think that, but is it really true? The Nag Hammadi material seems to show that Christianity, or to prevent circular arguments let's call it Jesus-worship, covered a wide array of fairly divergent beliefs even before the end of the first century AD. Gnosticism, Catharism, Eastern Orthodoxy -- multidenominationalism is hardly a new thing.

And depending what's meant by "the world prevailing over the Church", surely the whole point of the Reformation was that worldliness (selling of indulgences, Borgia popes, etc) had prevailed over the Church at least enough to distort Christ's intentions, insofar as those intentions could be guessed from the available material?

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Protestants reject this and require any doctrine must be supported biblically.

A lot of Protestants, at least as Protestantism is practised in the UK, hold that Biblical support for doctrinal matters is necessary but not sufficient proof: in other words, that while God is divine and Christ was divine, the Bible is a human enterprise and thus potentially flawed, and "tradition" (especially as mediated by a 2000-year-old, immensely wealthy, political bureaucracy, with all the dangerous temptation to self-interest that implies) is a very human enterprise and thus potentially very flawed.

Peter