Page 75 - SoulWinning Crash Course

with signs and wonders, and with divers miracles, and gifts of the Holy
Ghost, according to his own will?"

1 Corinthians 4:9 "For I think that God hath set forth us the apostles last,

as it were appointed to death: for we are made a spectacle unto the
world, and to angels, and to men." According to some interpretations of
that verse, Paul's contemporaries were the last people to be "apostles."

Catholics have to believe in apostolic succession so they can claim that what
Jesus said in John 20:23 applies to catholic priests: "Whose soever sins ye
remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain,
they are retained."

Some say Jesus was addressing all the disciples in the room (not just the
apostles), and He meant that Christians have the power to remit people's sins
INDIRECTLY by introducing them to Jesus (the remitter) by preaching.

A more literal interpretation is that Jesus was addressing only the apostles,
and since, as shown above, this apostleship was TEMPORARY, so was their

power to remit and retain sins, just as the "signs of an apostle" (2
Corinthians 12:12) such as
drinking poison and healing the sick (Mark
16:17-18) were temporary. (2 Corinthians 12:9,
1 Timothy 5:23, 2 Timothy 4:20) The likely means of this temporary
"remitting" referred to in John 20:23 is when the apostles acted as
intermediaries for the Holy Ghost by water-baptizing or laying their hands
on new believers (Acts 2, 8, 19), as a sign to prove to the Jews that what the

apostles said about Jesus was true (Acts 5:29-32, Hebrews 2:3-4), because
"the Jews require a sign" (1 Corinthians 1:22). This intermediary remitting
was phased out, the first clear contradictory case being in Acts 10, where the
new believers received the Holy Ghost immediately upon belief, before any
apostle could do anything to them. (See Lesson 4.)

The "remitting" never had anything to do with masses, confessionals, or

saying "Hail Mary"s and "Our Father"s (scripted prayers that catholic
priests tell confessors to say multiple times in a row, even though Jesus
warned against that).