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Does 1 Corinthians 4:6—“Do not go beyond what is written”—undermine the Catholic appeal to Sacred Tradition? In this episode, I show why the context of Paul’s writings and the broader New Testament actually point the other way, revealing that apostolic teaching was handed on both in writing and by word of mouth.
TRANSCRIPT:
Are Catholics crossing a boundary when it comes to Sacred Tradition? Some Christians think we are, and they appeal to Paul to prove it.
Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 4:6: “Don’t go beyond what is written.”
Does this prove what some Protestants think? I don’t think so. And in today’s episode, I’m gonna share some reasons why.
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So today we’re diving into a big topic: the Catholic view on Sacred Tradition. Now, a lot of you probably already know that Catholics believe Sacred Tradition, along with Sacred Scripture, contains God’s Word—that’s to say, divine revelation.
The Second Vatican Council, in Dei Verbum, told us that the Church doesn’t get its certainty about revealed truths from the Bible alone (Section 9). We have to appeal to Sacred Tradition as well. This is why the council says both Scripture and Tradition need to be honored with equal devotion and respect. And this is something that the Catechism of the Catholic Church reaffirms in paragraph 82.
But that’s not all. We’ve also got the Magisterium—the Pope and bishops in union with him. According to section 10 of Dei Verbum , the Magisterium is the one who’s given the job of interpreting God’s Word (divine revelation), whether that’s written in the Bible or contained within Sacred Tradition. The Catechism, in paragraph 85, says this job is entrusted specifically to the bishops in communion with the Pope.
Now, Protestants argue that Scripture alone, or sola scriptura, is the infallible rule of faith, and they challenge the Catholic view on Sacred Tradition. One objection that often comes up is from 1 Corinthians 4:6, where Paul says, “Don’t go beyond what is written.”
The question is, how can Catholics appeal to Sacred Tradition as an infallible source of divine revelation if Paul says not to go beyond what’s written?
I’ve seen this argument made in books by Protestant apologists like Ron Rhodes in Reasoning from the Scriptures with Catholics. On page 63, he references 1 Corinthians 4:6 as evidence for his claim that “Scripture sets parameters beyond which we are not free to go,” and concludes based on this that we can’t attribute to Tradition the same authority as Scripture—like Catholics do.
Others who make this argument are Matthew Barrett in his book God’s Word Alone, along with Robert Godfrey and John McArthur in both of their essays in the book Sola Scriptura: The Protestant Position on the Bible.
So, what can we say in response?
Let’s break it down.
First off, the context of 1 Corinthians 4:6 shows that Paul isn’t saying we can’t go beyond what’s written for all things related to Christian belief and practice. He’s actually addressing the factions in the Corinthian church. We discover in chapter 1 of the same letter that some people were saying, “I belong to Paul,” and others, “I belong to Apollos.” Paul’s trying to put an end to that division. His point about “not going beyond what’s written” is really about stopping that kind of divisive behavior, not about a blanket rule for all Christian belief and practice.
Second, Paul actually had a positive attitude toward traditions beyond what was written. In 1 Corinthians 11:2, for example, he tells the Corinthians to “maintain the traditions I’ve passed on to you.” Now, we know, according to Acts 18:11, that Paul spent over a year and a half teaching the Corinthians “the word of God among them.” Surely, not everything he taught them is in his letters. So if Paul was teaching them beyond what was written in those letters, it’s pretty clear that he wasn’t restricting Christian belief and practice to simply what is written in the Christian scriptures.
Moreover, it doesn’t make sense that Paul would forbid them to go beyond the Christian scriptures and then just a few chapters later praise them for doing that very thing.
And Paul goes even further in 2 Thessalonians 2:15, where he says, “Stand firm and hold to the traditions you were taught by us, whether by word of mouth or by letter.” For Paul here, the traditions handed on by word are just as binding on the consciences of his readers as the traditions contained in the letters. Thus, yet again we see that Paul’s not limiting Christian belief and practice to just what’s written.
If we’re going to take 1 Corinthians 4:6 to mean that we can’t go beyond the Scriptures for knowing what’s binding for Christian belief, we’d have to ignore these other verses where Paul speaks of oral traditions as binding. But surely we can’t do that!
Now, some Protestants argue that the content of the traditions Paul talks about are exactly the same as what’s written down. Ron Rhodes takes this route in his book Reasoning with Catholics from the Scriptures, arguing on pages 79-80,
[PHONE READ #1]
“The apostles for a time communicated their teachings orally until those teachings could be permanently recorded in written form”
He quotes for support nineteenth-century Bible expositors Robert Jamieson, Andrew Robert Fausset, and David Brown, from their A Commentary, Critical, Experimental, and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments:
[PHONE READ #2]
Inspired tradition, in Paul’s sense, is not a supplementary oral tradition completing our written word, but it is identical with the written word now complete; then the latter [written word] not being complete, the tradition was necessarily in part oral, in part written, and continued so until, the latter [written word] being complete before the death of St. John, the last apostle, the former [oral tradition] was no longer needed [from biblehub.com].
Geisler and MacKenzie follow suit when they argue on page 188 in their book Roman Catholics and Evangelicals: Agreements and Differences,
[PHONE READ #3]
“The traditions (teachings) of the apostles that were revelations were written down. . . . There is no evidence that all the revelation God gave [the apostles] to express was not inscripturated in the twenty-seven books of the New Testament.”
The big problem with this Protestant comeback is that it just assumes everything was written down—that the oral teaching is basically identical to the apostolic writings. But here’s the thing: there’s simply no evidence for that. Nowhere do Jesus, Paul, or the other apostles ever say, “Hey, don’t worry, everything that we say will eventually be written down.” Yet that’s exactly what a Protestant would need in order to defend the idea that the oral traditions Paul mentions are the same thing as the written Word, given their belief in Sola Scriptura.
For Protestants, Scripture is seen as the sole infallible source of Christian belief. That’s the doctrine called sola scriptura—Latin for “Scripture alone.” And the logic is that anything not found in the written word shouldn’t be accepted as binding Christian doctrine.
So, for a Protestant to believe that the oral traditions are identical to the sacred writings he would need to produce evidence for it in Scripture.
But here’s the catch: the belief that “the apostolic preaching is identical to the written word” isn’t found anywhere in Scripture. Which means, by their own standard, a Protestant shouldn’t accept it as a binding Christian teaching. And if that’s the case, then it can’t serve as a defeater of our appeal to the traditions that Paul mentions. So Sola Scriptura actually works against this counter argument.
The last thing to say in response to this idea that the apostolic oral traditions are identical to the sacred writings is that the New Testament proves it false. We have evidence that some apostolic traditions aren’t identical to what’s in the sacred writings. Take Paul’s words about the “man of lawlessness” or “son of perdition” in 2 Thessalonians 2:3–6. Paul says,
[PHONE READ #4]
Let no one deceive you in any way; for that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God. Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you this? And you know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time.
Now, notice that last line: “And you know what is restraining him now.” Paul lists this right alongside the other details about the “man of lawlessness” (v.3), and he reminds them that he taught them these things in person (v.5). But here’s the kicker: he never actually identifies in his writings what that “restraining” force is. So clearly, there are teachings he passed on orally that didn’t make it into Scripture, thereby proving false Geisler and MacKenzie’s claim that “there is no evidence that all the revelation God gave [the apostles] to express was not inscripturated in the twenty-seven books of the New Testament.”
Here, a Protestant might counter that it does no good to appeal to this detail about the man of lawlessness because not even Catholics profess to know what Paul’s talking about. Thus, so it’s argued, it’s not something that God willed for us to know as part of divine revelation. Only those things that God wills for us to know, the argument continues, are identical to the sacred writings.
This does dodge my response. However, it shifts the target.
We started with the claim that what the apostles preached as divine revelation is identical to the sacred writings. Now, the claim is that whatever God intended for us to know as divinely revealed is identical to the sacred writings.
But this is proven false as well by some of Protestants’ own beliefs. One obvious example is the belief that public revelation ended with the death of the last apostle. Nowhere in the Bible does it ever say, “When the last apostle dies, divine revelation will cease”?
And if a Protestant tries to appeal to Jude 3—“the Faith [has been] once for all delivered to the saints”—well, that creates a new problem. Because if that verse means everything was already fully delivered at that point, then they’d have to toss out the rest of Jude, or at least everything written after verse 3. But of course, no Protestant is going to do that.
So, Protestants actually do believe an apostolic oral tradition that is not identical to the sacred writings, thereby disproving their contention that only what God wills for us to believe as divinely revealed is identical to the sacred writings.
So, to sum it up: not only is there no evidence that everything the apostles taught orally ended up in Scripture, but we actually have positive evidence that oral tradition and Scripture are not identical.
Okay, let’s now get back to the original counter argument from 1 Corinthians 4:6. There’s one last thing to say in response—the objection assumes “what is written” refers to the whole Bible, but that’s not actually clear from the text.
Even respected Protestant scholars like Gordon Fee admit that it’s tough to pin down what Paul meant by “what is written.” On page 170 of his book The First Epistle to the Corinthians, which is part of the New International Commentary on the New Testament, Fee says that the phrase is “so obscure that [scholars] despair of finding its meaning.”
Let me run through some of the ideas people have proposed for what Paul might mean by “beyond what is written.” These are based on the works of Joseph A. Fitzmyer in First Corinthians: A New Translation (pages 215-216) and Gordon Fee in The First Epistle to the Corinthians (pages 167-170).
Here’s what some scholars suggest:
- It could be referring to general scriptures about how preachers should behave.
- It might point to the Old Testament passages Paul already quoted earlier in 1 Corinthians 1:19, 31; 2:16; 3:19-20.
- It could also refer to the metaphors Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 3:15-17 about planting and building, warning us to avoid false teachers who try to add to the gospel.
- More broadly, it might cover everything Paul already wrote earlier in the letter about Christian conduct (see verse 5).
- It might be a Christian saying or proverb used to call out people causing division in the church, something like ‘stay within the lines.’
- Or it could be referring to a public document Paul made for the Corinthians, kind of like a set of rules to keep peace and order in the community.”
The point with all these suggestions is that the phrase “what is written” doesn’t necessarily mean the entire Bible, as sola scriptura advocates would suggest. And given such ambiguity, 1 Corinthians 4:6 can’t be used as a defeater of the Catholic belief in Sacred Tradition.
So, in short, the objection from 1 Corinthians 4:6 doesn’t hold up for three reasons:
- First, it assumes Paul meant we can’t go beyond what’s written for all aspects of belief and practice, but the context shows he’s specifically addressing division in the church.
- Second, it doesn’t fit with Paul’s attitude towards traditions beyond what’s written, as seen in other parts of his letters.
- And third, it assumes “what is written” means the entire Bible, but there’s no clear evidence to support that.
If you’re interested in getting my responses here in book form, be sure to check out my book Meeting the Protestant Response: Answering Common Comebacks to Catholic Arguments published by Catholic Answers Press. You can purchase a copy at shop.catholic.com.
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