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• The “what” and “why” are more important than the “where” - quote “where two or three are gathered in my name; in article about house churches

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• meeting in house churches created multiple problems, as evidenced by the fact that many of St. Paul’s letters were written to various churches to address controversies: especially 1 and 2 Corinthians, 1 Thessalonians, , Galatians, Philippians and Philemon

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• “The first query concerns the nature of the first century Christian church. What did the early Christians believe?” (23) - answer all the questions Jaenen poses in an article

• The second set of questions conners the continuity of original Christianity. Has there been a continuation of the essentials of Christian belief and worship? Is it even possible to continue in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship in the twenty-first century?” (24)

  → Jaenen doesn’t bother to ask himself a third question - on what basis does he believe that following exactly what the first century Christians believed is the right thing to do? Is there no room for development?

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• “The Pontifical Biblical Commission acknowledged in 1993 that ‘the historical-critical method is the indispensable method’ for the scientific study of the meaning of ancient texts” (24),

• find some good quotes from their document The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church” found online at https://catholic-resources.org/ChurchDocs/PBC_Interp-FullText.htm — probably should quote the entire section F on Fundamentalist Interpretation and see if we can argue that Jaenen actually does this instead of the historical-critical method using the descriptions in the section and link with quotes from his book

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• “I take some comfort in Van Harvey’s assertion that the orthodox believer ‘brings faith to history’”, (24) quoting from Van A. Harvey, “The Historian and the Believer: the Morality of Historical Knowledge and Christian Belief” (London, Macmillan, 1965), p. 283. → see if we can make anything out of this

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• J says church history has been approached from 2 different views: 1) religious or theological approach and 2) prevalent historical method; J says the first is a
  “closed shop approach which invites what has been called invented tradition” (25), he prefers the second approach: Wikepedia says The historical method comprises the techniques and guidelines by which historians use primary sources and other evidence to research and then to write history. Primary sources are first-hand evidence of history (usually written, but sometimes captured in other mediums) made at the time of an event by a present person. Historians think of those sources as the closest to the origin of the information or idea under study.[23][24] These types of sources can provide researchers with, as Dalton and Charnigo put it, "direct, unmediated information about the object of study; → look at this Wikipedia page that offers a framework for the Historical Method and see if we can link it to Catholic writings in history; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_method

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the idea that humans can achieve a perfect church from the same fallible church that “went astray” is naive and simplistic

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“The movement did not follow the major lines of development in mainstream Christianity at the beginning of the period when it began to propagate its message on a world-wide basis. Rather than espousing the conservatism of the fundamentalist Protestants it engaged more in criticism of the institutional churches, the professional clergy, and invented traditional dogmas. The Bible was not taken as literally infallible in its various translations, it was the revelation of God that was inerrant….The bible was understood as a spiritual book with no special claims to secular knowledge and therefore its expositors needed to be divinely inspired rather than highly educated.” (534)