Priestly Advocate of Error Discomfited

RECENTLY a person of good will who had been studying the Bible with one of the Watch Tower missionaries sent to Uruguay arranged for a meeting between her priest and this missionary.

The priest was quick to open the little home interview by sarcastically asking the missionary, “Do you speak Greek?” When the missionary replied that he was not a Greek but an American and spoke only English and Spanish, the priest tried to end the discussion by saying that since the Bible was written in Greek he would only consent to a discussion of it if the missionary understood that language. However, the missionary pointed out that the Bible was also written partly in Hebrew and that under those conditions the priest would have to be able to speak Hebrew also to have a discussion.

The missionary further added, “The Catholic lady of the house here told me that you had personally encouraged her to read the Bible, but she did not mention anything about your insisting that she read it in Greek.” Turning to the lady, the missionary asked her, “Did the priest tell you to read the Bible in Greek?” Of course the lady replied, “Why, no, he gave me a Bible in Spanish.” With that catch question thus disposed of, the discussion proceeded.

First the missionary asked the priest to show the group his support from the Bible for the church’s teaching on purgatory. Since the word does not even appear in the Bible, the best the priest could do was to refer to a citation in the apocryphal book of Maccabees, which actually supported the promise of a resurrection rather than any idea of suffering in purgatory. Next the missionary asked the priest for Scriptural support for the teaching of the trinity. Not being able to present any, he was next asked for support in the Bible for the doctrine of the immortal soul. Again not being able to answer in any way, the priest began to pace up and down the room like a caged lion, saying that he had not come to be made to appear as a dunce by having such silly questions put to him by a heretic.

However, the lady of the house managed to get the priest seated again, and this time the missionary said that since the priest did not want to answer questions, he would like to take the opportunity to point out to him texts from the Bible showing that the soul is actually mortal. The priest consented to listen to these. Strangely enough, when the missionary read from Joshua about animals’ souls dying and from Ecclesiastes about human souls dying, the priest admitted that these texts were right even though they contradicted church doctrine. But he added that the trouble with the Protestants is that they do not know that the word “soul” is mistranslated in the Protestant as well as in the Catholic Bibles, and that while it is true that the soul dies, the spirit does not. However, when he was confronted with the text in Ecclesiastes about all spirits returning to God, he saw that this thought put him in a dilemma, because it would mean that even the spirits of the most wicked would return to God, and so none would be left to go to purgatory or to hell, as he claimed.—Eccl. 12:7.

He tried to get out of this by explaining that the missionaries did not understand Greek, but that this word spirit was not spirit but another word, and he cited some strange-sounding word which he claimed was the Greek original. The missionary said it was a pity that he could not speak Greek himself, but that he had a copy of Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance with him and they could look up the original Greek word in that. The word in the text in Ecclesiastes was in Hebrew, of course, and so they looked in vain for the word the priest used, checking both the Hebrew and Greek sections, only to finally discover it was the French word for God he was using to try to confuse them. The missionary then gave the priest a lesson in Hebrew and Greek from his concordance, showing him the correct Hebrew and Greek words for both spirit and soul and what they meant. By this time the priest was very much embarrassed and doubtless wished he had never said anything about understanding Greek, because it was clear to all that he had no knowledge of it.

The lady of the house then very emphatically and plainly told the priest that she was now convinced that Jehovah’s witnesses know and teach more about the Bible than does the Catholic Church. And, speaking even more frankly, she declared that she had learned more in one hour of Bible study with Jehovah’s witnesses than she had learned in six years of study with him. Tonight, she said, he had displayed his lack of knowledge by not being able to answer even one of the questions put to him. When he protested that he was unprepared, she pointed out that his seventeen years of study in a seminary should have been more than enough to prepare him. And thus the discomfiture of a priestly advocate of error resulted in one of the Lord Jesus’ other sheep coming to a clearer knowledge and appreciation of the truth from God’s Word.