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God has a sense of humor.

I was converted from Nihilistic Atheism to Christianity by the genuine faith of a group of lay Catholic Charismatics. So I eventually checked out a Mass and, other than it being hard to follow that little book to know what came next and a lot more stand-sit-kneel calisthenics than I expected I had no real problems with it.

As I stated, I was reading the Catechism for Inquirers to find out what a MEMBER was expected to believe and I was reading an old RSV bible that I had been given more than a decade before when I visited a Lutheran Pastor to ask some questions about my infant baptism.

[I was baptized in a Lutheran Church as a compromise between my Methodist Paternal Grandparents that wanted me raised Protestant and my Catholic Maternal Grandparents that wanted me baptized as an infant and my Atheist father who just wanted to keep the peace and raise me a ‘Lily and Holly’ christian until I grew up and came to my senses on my own].

So a confluence of events brought me to the section on a new Catholic affirming by oath their belief in the doctrines of the Catholic Church, and the preparation for the upcoming Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin and the story in the gospel where Jesus’ family think he has lost his mind and come to bring him home and the people tell Jesus “your mother and brothers are here”.

I may not have been an expert in theology, but I knew enough biology to know where brothers came from and how that posed a problem for the premise behind the “Blessed Virgin” whose feast we were preparing for. So I sat down with a Priest and had a talk about what I had read in scripture and the Virgin Mary. He explained about Joseph’s other children and Jesus’ step brothers.

That made sense to me, so I wanted to know where I could read about that in the Bible (I hadn’t really gotten very far through it yet, since I started with Matthew and was reading through the New Testament and was only on Luke IIRC). That was when I was brought face-to-face with the issue of Tradition vs Sola Scriptura (without realizing it or knowing the fancy terms).

Giving it a lot of thought and prayer, I knew that I could not honestly take an oath claiming to believe the doctrine of the Catholic Church when my heart could probably never except “because the Church Tradition says so” as a reason to contradict the plain meaning of the words on the page. Forced to discard either the Bible or Tradition, I chose to trust that the Bible would lead me to God.