Joe responds to “Catholicism Exposed: These Doctrines Contradict The Word Of God,” a video from Ashley Hays. He sets the record straight on generations of poor scholarship about paganism and Christianity.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and today I want to look at a video recently made by Ashley Hays critiquing what she claims Catholicism teaches. If you’re not familiar with her, she’s got more than a hundred thousand followers on YouTube, more than 300,000 on Instagram, more than 600,000 followers on TikTok, and she’s using each of those platforms to preach the same message, namely that Catholicism is a false religion, and she’s clear that she’s doing this because she wants Catholics to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. Now, as a Catholic, I share that desire. I also want Catholics and everybody else to have the fullness of the faith and to hold onto the truth about Jesus Christ and about his church. So I thought it might be worthwhile to take a closer look at some of her claims. Now, some of those claims are common objections. The idea that Catholic teachings on the Papacy Mary justification and purgatory are unbiblical. Those have all been answered many times before. So while I’ll touch on them a little bit, I’m not going to spend as much time on those arguments. Instead, I want to focus on the arguments that Ashley hope is okay if I call her that makes that you might not have heard before because she doesn’t just think that Catholics are wrong. She claims that Catholicism is
CLIP:
A system that is formed intentionally to keep the masses living in sin away from what saves them and all the while feeling religious and saved.
Joe:
So her argument is that Catholics don’t just interpret the Bible differently than she does, but that we do this because we’ve been duped by a system that intentionally leads people to hell. Now, she claims the distinctive features of Catholicism are due to the Emperor Constantine and to ancient Babylonian mystery religion. So what is the truth? And do the Catholic doctrines that she’s talking about really contradict the word of God as she claims? Let’s start with her foundational claim, her insistence that all of our doctrines must come from scripture and from scripture alone,
CLIP:
Our doctrine should come from the scriptures. Nothing else, not what man teaches, not what tradition teaches the scriptures and the scriptures alone.
Joe:
It’s very common to hear Protestants assert this, but ironically, scripture never actually teaches this. Not only does it not teach this doctrine, it actually teaches the opposite. Saint Paul tells his readers in two Thessalonians chapter two, to hold fast to the traditions which the apostles taught regardless of whether they were written traditions, what would later become the New Testament or oral traditions. Now, in fairness to Ashley, she may literally not have known that the Bible teaches this because if you look at her onscreen citations, it’s clear that she’s using the NIV New International Version translation and the NIV says instead to hold fast to the teachings, but the Greek there is parados, which is tradition. It’s literally a thing handed on when Jesus warns against elevating traditions of men over the word of God. It’s the same word being used there. Parados Parados actually appears 13 times.
The New Testament in 10 of those cases is describing manmade traditions, often the traditions of the Pharisees, and in those cases it often comes with not to elevate these manmade traditions over God’s commands. But there are three other times in which that same word parados is used to describe apostolic tradition in one Corinthians 11 where St. Paul instructs the Corinthians to maintain the traditions even as I’ve delivered them to you in two Thessalonians two, which we’ve already seen. And then in the next chapter, two Thessalonians three St. Paul actually instructs his readers to keep away from any believers who don’t keep the traditions that Paul taught. But here’s the crazy thing in the NIV translation that Ashley uses that many Christians use every time a tradition parados, he’s spoken of poorly, they translate the word as tradition. But in each of the three cases in which a tradition a parados is praised or treated as required, they change it to teaching instead.
So someone reading the NIV would come away. It actually seems to have with the false conclusion that the authors of the New Testament simply thought tradition itself was a bad thing. But again, that really is false with any tradition or any teaching for that matter. The question is where it comes from. If it’s manmade, don’t elevate it over God’s word. But if it’s a tradition of apostolic origin, if it’s something passed on from the apostles, hold fast to it and according to scripture, have nothing to do with believers who would tell you not to follow these traditions. Now bear in mind at the time that Paul is writing Protestants and Catholics should be able to agree, plenty of doctrines haven’t been written down yet. The New Testament is still in the process of being written. And of course Paul is not telling any of his readers to only hold to the doctrines that have been written down already since that would mean rejecting a lot of Christianity.
No, he very clearly in second Ians three and in one Corinthians says the exact opposite, they’re bound to hold those teachings that he has already passed on to them, even though that would’ve been before maybe any of the New Testament was written. Now, there’s an important takeaway from that. This means that so of scripture the idea that all doctrine should come from scripture alone, it clearly isn’t true while the New Testament is being written, which is one obvious reason that the Bible never teaches it. So Ashley’s doctrine, this doctrine that all doctrine must come from the Bible is a doctrine she’s not getting from the Bible alone. It’s rather just a manmade tradition that she’s repeating. The second problem though is that there’s a double standard at work here, one which is worth calling out because Protestants like Ashley will insist that we Catholics must defend our teachings from scripture alone even though we don’t believe in solo scriptura.
But many of her own attacks on Catholic doctrine aren’t coming from scripture alone. They’re coming from various things she’s heard about dearly Christians or about Constantine or about Babylonian mystery religions. Lemme show you what I mean. One of her biggest arguments is that Catholicism has taken all this stuff from paganism and nothing in the Bible says that rather she’s basing this belief and she’s very clear that she’s basing this belief on a 19th century pamphlet that later becomes a book called The Two Babylons. You don’t have to take my word for it. She describes how allegedly the confessional actually comes from ancient Babylonian paganism.
CLIP:
Just a little research will show you that all religions of this world lead back to pagan God worship back to the Egyptian god’s, back to Babylon, to Nimrod’s story semi ramus Isis who is Nimrod’s sister wife, walking in rebellion to God Almighty formed the basis for many of the counterfeit mother son cults of history and ultimately is what led Catholicism to the Unbiblical exaltation of Mary. And when you look into the mystery religion that was shaped by Nimrod, it literally serves as a prototype for many Catholic practices including confession. Now, this is just a side note that relates back to the near deification of Popes, but shortly after the flood, during a time when open promotion of idolatry was kind of risky due to lingering patriarchal faith, semi ramus or ISIS established a secret system, a system in which one could confess their sins privately to a priest Hislop 1853 book elaborates on this and says that the Catholic confessional is borrowed from Babylon and that the Roman priesthoods power culminated in the erection of the confessional. She literally set up confessionals and priests where you could secretly confess your sins to her as a mediary to God.
Joe:
Now, Alexander Hassel’s book the two Babylons is very popular among some groups of Christians, some Jehovah’s Witnesses, seventh Adventists, some evangelicals, and I think it’s worth addressing it directly because his lips belief is coming from a 19th century belief called Pan Babylon communism. Now, his argument is that all of the world’s pagan religions were ultimately started by these Babylonian mystery religions that practice astronomy, and ultimately this can be traced back to the worship of Nimrod. Now, originally Pan Babylonians actually argued that Judaism in Christianity also were just forms of Babylonian religion, and they would claim that even the story of Jesus was borrowed from the Babylonians. I have no doubt you can find some non-Christians on tiktoks making those kind of claims today, but Alexander Haslip was a Presbyterian minister, so neither he nor the Christians quoting his book today are going to endorse that version of Pan Babylonian.
Instead, Haslip kind of invented a Protestant version of the idea in which Protestantism is true, but all the Catholic stuff that Protestants reject, all of that stuff happens to all come from Babylon. You’ll sometimes find Unitarians quoing his slip as well because he does claim things like that. The Pagan Babylonians and ancient Egyptians held to a doctrine of the Trinity in the very same sense that Catholics do. But hopefully if you’re even a little bit familiar with the history of world religions, you’ll realize that’s false. The Trinity doesn’t come from any of those religions and those religions don’t teach the Trinity. So you might be wondering how Haslip was qualified to make these sweeping claims about all the religions in the world coming from Babylonian mystery religion. Well, the answer is simply he had no qualifications to speak of whatsoever. In the words of Professor Bill Ellis hiss book was just the mingling of a sketchy knowledge of Middle Eastern antiquity with a vivid imagination.
For instance, his claims in his book that the evidence is decisive proving that Mexicans before 1492 used to worship the Norco Odin and that this is why all the ancient pagans of Mexico and Egypt and Persia believed in baptismal regeneration. But literally none of that is true. One of the bits of evidence his lip cites to try to prove that it’s true is that Mexicans used to call Wednesday Walden’s day exactly as we ourselves have, they don’t and didn’t. So the problem isn’t just that his lips book was filled with these kind of false historical claims. All of Pan Babylonian is completely and obviously untrue. Even in recent history, we’ve seen new religions be created. There’s no reason to believe that ancient cultures were unable to invent their own religious systems. There’s absolutely no reason to imagine that one single pagan religion gave rise to all the other forms of paganism.
And if you are going to believe that, if you do believe that pagans from Mexico to Egypt, India all got their same belief system from Babylonian astrologers, then it’s going to have to follow that Babylonian astrology, extremely old, old enough that the peoples who eventually migrate to the new world could be exposed to it before they left. And that creates a problem. As Dr. John Steele, professor of Egyptology and Aerology at Brown University puts it Pan Babylonians had to push back the history of Babylonian astronomy to very ancient times, often claiming Preposterously early dates for the composition of Babylonian astronomical texts. The problem is we know that none of those preposterously early dates are true. It was actually a brilliant Jesuit priest, the scholar father Francis Xavier Kugler, who debunked Pan Babylonian once and for all. As Dr. Steele explains, father Kugler was at the time the leading scholar of Babylonian astronomy and he easily disproved the Pan Babylonians claims for the antiquity of Babylonian astronomy and ridiculed the whole Pan Babylonian enterprise.
He was able to demonstrate conclusively that Babylonian astronomy did not emerge before the first millennium, before Christ much too late to be the source of all of the world’s religions. As Peter Lancaster Brown explains in his book on the history of astro archeology, almost in scholastic isolation, Kogler demolished the great edifice of Pan Babylonian theory piece by piece. The Pan Babylonians had no answer to the criticism put forward in his books, and so it was scientifically dead by World War I and then banished forever to the lunatic fringe of Pseudoscientific writings and that’s where it remains. So that’s one problem with reliant on his slip. His work isn’t serious history, it’s just his slop, but there’s a second problem for any Christian. His slips whole argument was that he could prove that Catholic worship was really the worship of Nimrod and his wife. That claim is his thesis.
It’s even on the cover of the book, and Nimrod is a biblical figure. He’s mentioned briefly in Genesis 10 as a mighty hunter before the Lord as a son of Kush, a great grandson of Noah and as a ruler over and possibly founder of places like Babel before ultimately building the city of Nineveh. But the problem is the Bible doesn’t really describe Nimrod as anything like what Haslip claims. They’re only nine verses in the entire Bible, which mention Nimrod and as Joel Richardson points out, he’s never described as being married to a woman named semi ramus or having a son named Tamo, and that’s the pagan trinity that his claimed we allegedly find across the world’s religions.
CLIP:
The Bible never says that Nimrod was married to semi ramus. The Bible never says that semi ramus and Nimrod had a son named Timus. It doesn’t say that anywhere in the Bible, and in fact, when we actually turn to legitimate historical sources, we really don’t find it there either. But all of these stories come from extra biblical traditions. So you’ve only got a handful of verses in the Bible about Nimrod, a handful of verses in the Bible about the Tower of Babel. Not a lot of information to go on. However, we have all of these extra biblical stories, traditions, myths, legends, whatever you want to call ’em.
Joe:
I want you to imagine for a moment that Ashley Hayes Alexander Hasper w write that if you want to understand Catholicism or really any of the world’s religions other than Protestantism, you’ve got to first know the secret history of the worship of Nimrod and his wife and their son. Now, Nimrod is the key to understanding everything and God in his inspired word is about to tell us about Nimrod in the book of Genesis. Does he mention any of this? No. He instead tells us a guy is good at hunting and founding cities. Is that plausible? If the real story of Nimron is that he is the origin of all of the world’s religions, but instead of simply limiting themselves to what the Bible says about Nimron, Ashley and Haslip have turned to a completely different version of Nimron one largely created by extra biblical legends and by his lip himself relying upon unreliable and contradictory manmade traditions.
CLIP:
The problem with all of these things is all of these traditions are outside of the Bible and we cannot rely on them. Why do I say that? Well, listen, even these particular traditions and myths contradict each other. For instance, in the Talmud you have some stories about Nimrod where he is a righteous person. He’s actually presented as a righteous guy. In some of the other stories, he’s treated as an enemy of Abraham and a real evil guy. So the question is, which of these are true? Because they’re fundamentally contradictory? And in my book, again, I go through how these various traditions can contradict with one another. They conflict with one another, and yet we sort of just pick and choose which parts of these extra biblical traditions we want to keep. And people have written entire books about these things, especially Alexander Hislop.
Joe:
When Christians credulously repeat this kind of unbiblical unreliable nonsense, if it was real history, it makes us look like nimrods me. I
CLIP:
Couldn’t do that to the little nimrod.
Joe:
Ironically, when Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck refer to Yosemite Sam and Elmer Fudd as nimrods, that’s actually more biblically literate than Ashley Hayes critique of Catholicism because sarcastically calling a bad hunter Nimrod is like calling a dumb person Einstein. The whole joke is that the one detail we know about Nimron from the Bible is basically that he’s a great hunter, but when Hayes and his lip compare our belief system to Nimrod, they’re not going off his biblical depiction. They’re going off of his lips imaginary version. So whenever you hear people talk to you about Babylonian, Mr. Religions being the origins of Catholic practices, understand that this is not biblical and it’s also not serious history. They’re deep in the realm of the lunatic fringe of Pseudoscientific writings. This sin leads to a third problem and a genuinely tragic one because it’s not just that they’re turning to unreliable extra biblical tradition.
It’s that when you allow your mind to be polluted in this way with this slop, it starts to darken your mind. When you see Christians celebrating the birth of Christ or his resurrection, you won’t be able to accept the simple obvious Christian explanation of why they’re doing that. You’ll be forced to invent some insane pagan explanation. Instead, his lip, for example, claims that all the major Catholic feasts from Christmas to Easter, even the birth of John the Baptist, can be proved to be Babylonian. None of that is true for Christmas in particular, I urge you to check out episode one 30 of this show where I debunked a video called a very Pagan Christmas by looking at the actual scholarly sources, but is this spiritual problem when you start to see evil conspiracies even in things that are good and holy like the birth of Christ?
In Matthew chapter two, when the Magi come to visit Jesus we’re told that going into the house they saw the child with Mary, his mother and they fell down and worshiped. You don’t need a global pan Babylonian conspiracy to explain a mom holding her baby. It’s not surprising that ancient art, whether it’s depicting real life women or ancient goddesses, often depicts these women holding babies just like it’s not surprising that depictions of babies often show them being held by their moms, but his looks at this ancient art and he sees evidence of a global Babylonian conspiracy. He claims that the Babylonians and their popular religions supremely worshiped a goddess mother and a son who is represented in pictures and in images as an infant or child in his mother’s arms from Babylon, he claims this worship of the mother and child spread to the ends of the earth.
In Egypt, the mother and the child were worshiped under the names of Isis and Osirus. Now look, that’s obviously wrong. Isis and Osirus were brother and sister, also husband and wife, gross, not mother and son. He then claims that this mother child worship spread to India where the para worshiped even to this day as ISI and isoa. Now again, this is just obviously wrong. Ishvara is just a term meaning personal God as opposed to the impersonal deity ramma. It’s not the name of a particular God. The chief Gods described in this personal way are Vishnu and Shiva who also are not mother and son. I could go on, but the point here isn’t just that many of his facts appear to be completely wrong or entirely invented, although that’s also true, is that there’s actually something spiritually alarming. If your first thought at scene, an image of a mom and a baby is aha, this must be Babylonian paganism. We see this in Ashley’s arguments as well. She claims
CLIP:
If Jesus Christ founded the Catholic church, then we would see clear evidence of the disciples praying to Mary called the queen of heaven. But we don’t. We actually see God condemn it. In Jeremiah seven 18, it says, the children gather wood, the father’s Kindle fire and the women need dough to make cakes for the queen of heaven and they pour out drink offerings to other gods to provoke my anger. In Jeremiah 44 18 it says, but since we left off making offerings to the queen of heaven and pouring out drink offerings to her, we have lacked everything and have been consumed by the sword and by famine. If you are Catholic, it should bother you that Mary is called the queen of heaven, the same title that the Pagan God, the demonic God in the Old Testament was called, and that offerings to her prayers, to her sacrifices, to her angers, God Almighty, in heaven there is no queen, there is no queen in heaven,
Joe:
But there is a queen of heaven biblically. In Revelation chapter 12, St. John sees a great sign in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and on her head a crown of 12 stars. However you interpret that passage, whether you think that queen is Mary or the church or Israel or all of the above, there’s clearly a queen wearing a crown in heaven. And unlike the daughter of the king in Psalm 45 who is clothed with gold, the mother of the king in Revelation 12 is clothed with something even better, the sun itself. And it’s clear that this woman is the mother of the king. She’s a queen who’s pregnant. She gives birth to a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a wr of iron. That’s pretty obviously Jesus, our Lord and king, the ruler of all nations. So the idea of heavenly queen who gives birth to our God king Jesus Christ, that’s not some idea coming from some obscure pagan text or esoteric Babylonian practice. It’s a plain meaning of the scriptures, particularly Revelation 12. Why go looking for a fake pagan explanation? There’s a perfectly clear Christian one.
CLIP:
The queen of heaven is ISIS of Egypt, semi ramus of Babylon, Ishtar of Syria, Venus of Rome
Joe:
Only if you’re more fixated on paganism than you are on scripture. As I pointed out my episode, what the Davidic kings reveal about Mary Ancient Israel didn’t use the term queen to describe the wife of the king at the time the king might’ve had countless lives. Instead, royal honors were given to the king’s mother. So if you approach the Bible through the lens of Judaism rather than approaching world history through the lens of paganism, it’s perfectly clear why the mother of Jesus Christ our king, would be described in queenly terms. To ignore the plain meaning of these passages and to try to find an esoteric pagan reading really is to strain it gnats and to swallow camels.
CLIP:
There is the king of heaven, God Almighty, the Lord of hosts. He does not though share his authority with anyone,
Joe:
Even a basic reading of the New Testament will reveal this claim to be false. The gospel of Matthew ends with the great commission in which Jesus says, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you and Lo, I’m with you always to the close of the age. So Jesus receives all authority from the Father and he then uses his authority to send his followers out that’s sharing his authority elsewhere. He says things like He who hears you hears me, and he who rejects you rejects me, and he who rejects me, rejects him, who sent me or whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven and whenever you loose on earth shall be loose in heaven.
Matthew even tells us directly that Jesus calls the 12 disciples to himself and gave them authority ov... Read more on Catholic.com