(2.) To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them. [32d]
(3.) Though we or an angel from heaven preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. [32e]
(4.) From a child, thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation, through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All scripture is given by inspiration of God: and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness; that the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works. [33a]
4. The Romish Clergy are wont to tell us, that their scheme of concurrent Unwritten Tradition is recognised and enjoined even by Scripture: because St. Paul speaks of a brother, walking disorderly, and not after the TRADITION received from himself by the Thessalonians; [33b] because the same St. Paul exhorts the same Thessalonians to stand fast and hold the TRADITIONS which they had been taught whether by word or by his epistle; [33c] and because still the same St. Paul praises the Corinthians, for remembering him in all things, and for keeping the TRADITIONS as he delivered to them. [33d]
Respecting this vain plea, which can only mislead the ignorant and the incautious, we readily answer in manner following.
(1.) St. Paul must not be interpreted, so as to contradict both his Lord and himself.
(2.) The Romish Clergy cannot prove, that all the Traditions, mentioned by the Apostle, were unwritten: for some are distinctly specified as taught by a written epistle; and the simple word Tradition itself, which merely denotes any thing handed down or delivered or communicated, has no necessary reference to what is unwritten rather than to what is written.
(3.) It is not known by the Romish Clergy: whether the originally oral unwritten traditions, mentioned by St. Paul, were not finally committed to durable writing in documents, composed subsequently to those epistles in which he mentions them, and afterward added to the sacred canon; so that, what were once unwritten traditions, became ultimately a portion of our present written word: for the plain reader may be usefully taught or reminded, that several portions of the New Testament were written at a later period than the epistles in which St. Paul speaks of Traditions.
(4.) Whensoever the Romish Clergy shall prove the unwritten traditions of their Church to have been received from Christ and his apostles with as much certainty, as the Thessalonians and Corinthians knew what they had personally received from the mouth of St. Paul: we will cheerfully attend to them with all due reverence.
(5.) Both on the principle of our Lord’s own censure of the rabbinical traditions, and likewise on the principle of plain common sense, we cannot embrace oral traditions purporting to be God’s unwritten word; when they are palpably irreconcileable with, and grossly contradictory to, God’s own acknowledged written word.