• "the majesty of the Bible is that it is self-justifying"

You've said my argument is circular. That Tradition is considered prior to Scripture, and yet cites Scripture to justify this, or something. Fine, I get where you're coming from, but Catholics generally refer to it as a spiral, rather than something circular. We have to begin with Scripture by taking it at face value: as describing real world events, including various publicly witnessed miracles. This, combined with the history of the Church itself, lends the Bible its initial (face-value) credence. If there was no Church, were no Christian relics, no remains of cathedrals, no portraits of saints, no fallen down monasteries, no mark whatsoever of this Christian faith on history, then people would be far more compelled to dismiss it as myth. Like with Homer, many people dismissed it entirely as mythic, questioning the existence of Troy itself, until the remains of Troy were purported to be found, thus lending more credence to the notion that the substance of the matter of that text (namely, the war described) was true.

We have such an abundance of historical situating of the Christian faith, and dating so far back, that it just is not reasonable to dismiss the Scriptures, especially the New Testament, as mere myth, at least when looking at it only at face value. Of course when looking at them more closely it is revealed that the Old Testament in fact typified and pointed to the New with just about every word. The point is, without noticing the hyperlinks, without noticing the fulfilled prophecies (such as the , or Daniel 9 setting a for the Messiah's coming, lining up perfectly with the coming of Christ, etc.), Scripture is given its credence by history. And in fact, even the hyperlinks and prophecies depend on being situated in history, lest they be explained away as retro-active writing or Jewish cleverness. So insofar as Church history is Tradition, I affirm and maintain that the two are not separable.

So back to my spiral point, we can take Scripture (in conjunction with the history of the Church, inclusive of the martyrs who died to bear witness to the truth of the claims in Scripture - which The Iliad lacks) as a legitimate documentation of events. Given this, we can then treat the Church's spiritual authority as legitimate, and on this basis we can then return to Scripture and rightly treat it as an infallible revelation from God. You could reach this conclusion by other means, but I maintain that those means would not be entirely separate from the history surrounding the events described, and thus the history of the Church itself, and thus the Tradition in some sense. Whereas, contrariwise, the Protestants claim sola Scriptura, as if the infallibility of Scripture can be deduced without any reference to non-Scriptural entities, such as history itself. But without situating certain books of the Bible in certain periods of history, "prophecy" suddenly becomes back-dating or just narrative-construction. Do you see what I mean? If anything it is the Protestant view that is circular, since they affirm Scripture as infallible because it speaks of Jesus as God, and Jesus quotes from the Scriptures, so it must be infallible - but they have assumed their conclusion in order to prove it. That is the true fallacy.

• "My “own” Saints certainly do not affirm the sort of Papal Supremacy current today" - presumably a la Unam Sanctum "all humans must submit to Roman pontiff"

Again from KOWA; I referenced this above, asking what post-schism Eastern saints oppose the papacy, and in what ways specifically. As I cited from the Catechism, the Church still recognizes the "means to salvation" that, say, the Orthodox Church provides for people, and therefore the ability to sanctify - but this is not and cannot be fully separated from the Catholic Church as the Body of Christ, and of course the East would not disagree; they would just disagree with the association. But for the sake of argument, if the Roman Catholic Church, as constituted by its structure and teachings, does correspond to Christ's intention for His Church, also known as the Mystical Body of Christ, then it goes without saying that no one who is saved is saved outside of the Catholic Church, which includes all its teachings, including the papacy properly understood.

The submission required of all men to the Roman Pontiff is equivalent to the submission required of all men to the Catholic Church, not insofar as the Pontiff is concerned as a man, but only insofar as he concerned as Vicar of Christ, as authoritative representative and safeguard of all the teachings of the Church - and this is a spiritual submission only, not a temporal-political one.

• Orthodox Church is a body of "right-believing" Churches

From KOWA. I commented already on the difficulty I see there being in the East with properly establishing "right belief" insofar as the churches in the East are in disagreement, and I elaborate on this further in my response to the list of post-schism Orthodox councils.

• By giving the keys to St. Peter, Christ gave the power to bind-and-loose to The Church. The idea that Rome somehow interprets this to mean that the Pope has this power, is absurd to us.

As I touched on elsewhere, while the typological view of this verse has truth, not every element can be applied to all the Church in the same degree. Yes, Peter was given the ability to bind and loose, and this was given also to the Apostles generally. But the keys were only given to Peter, and so what happens when all the bishops, with the ability to bind and loose together, are in disagreement? Peter comes along, jingles the keys, and asserts his Divinely-instituted authority to bind and loose universally, and clarifies the dispute.

• The core of the idea is that Peter, in contradistinction with each of the other apostles, is the first to come to faith in Christ (true gnosis of Christ as the Son of God) by way of the Father solely. Each of the others required seeing with their eyes, a reason why Peter is able to answer Christ's question: "Who do you think I am?"

Of course, Peter was given the keys for a non-arbitrary reason, and this first-born angle plays into that. But that doesn't diminish the nature of the vicarious office he was given, nor the need for such an office.

• The thoroughgoing case you are making is that only Tradition could have decided this. But this deposit, the words of Christ, was had by the apostles, and so whatever MC is, it did not include the office of pope in {X, Y, Z...N}. If it were the case that it had, there would be no schism.

But you would say the schism could have occurred in theory at the time of the apostles themselves?

And further, the impossibility of schism is not Scriptural, because Christ beseeches that the Apostles allow no schism among them ().

In fact, those above verses beautifully articulate the very thing the Orthodox think that the Catholic Church denies, namely, the maintained significance of the non-papal bishops. "And the eye cannot say to the hand: I need not thy help; nor again the head to the feet: I have no need of you." It is not as if the Pope declares himself bishop of the world, as if all the world is one dioceses, and other bishops become superfluous. It strikes me that there are many in the Orthodox community who think this is what the Catholic Church teaches, and thus rightly object to it. But this is not the case. The Church simply teaches that the Pope has universal jurisdiction, universal authority, not that he therefore has the right (even if he has the power) to contradict a bishop's true teaching in his own dioceses. Think of it this way; say we have a knight, and that knight has a sword. If the knight claims that he has the ability (the potens) to unsheath his sword and slay an innocent maiden, does this equate to asserting his right to do so? He maintains the ability to do so at any time, but because he operates according to the Divine law, he will only unsheath his sword when "duty calls"; when someone attacks the maiden, for instance. This is what Jordan Peterson has defined "meek" (from "the meek shall inherit the earth") as meaning; not weakness, but power tempered by virtue; to have a sword, but only draw it when one ought to. Likewise, the Pope has total and absolute authority in the Church, as vicar of Christ; he can ordain priests in another bishop's dioceses, he can toss out bad canons from a Council; but it is understood that these powers will only be used when needed - during times of dispute, rather than times of peace (see my reply about the post-schism councils). This power, if legitimate, and if it is to be trusted when used, must always exist, rather than being contingent upon "the right conditions", lest those involved deny that the context really constitutes a time of dispute. The teaching of the papacy is solid and does not deny the right and powers and significance of the college of bishops; it simply affirms what must be affirmed if the final authority and dispute-clarifying ability to the key-holder is to be exercised at all; and this extraordinary authority is, like infallible pronouncements, understood to be guided by the Holy Spirit itself.

• Regarding the need for today's deliberation by Church authority to contextualize Church teachings to modern circumstances, there is simply no convincing case that this could not be accomplished by a council absent a Pope

See the case I make in my reply to the list of councils. I simply do not see that the Orthodox Church has the potency here that it claims.

• So why didn't any of the disciples act as if Christ explained Peter's official supremacy to them?

I think this question supposes that it was appropriate or required that this be demonstrated within Scripture, at the time the New Testament epistles were being written, but with what I've said above, I don't see that this is the case.

• As far as we’ve seen, there’s no “objective, absolute proof” either way, and no existing evidences outside of our specific Traditional rejections of said Claims, are free from being subject to inescapable confirmation bias

I comment on this in my reply to the council list; that the very fact that there is a schism, when East and West are looking at the same Tradition, suggests to me that just getting all the bishops together to hash it out cannot possibly (i.e. in potency) manage to resolve this; without a key-holding dispute-settler, there is no solution. That there may be no "objective, definitive proof" in the Tradition, therefore, is not relevant; given that two halves of the episcopate can look at the same evidence and come to different conclusions suggests that there must be a temporal Head (vicar) among them with the authority to say "it is this way, not that".

Do the sins and inaction of Pope Leo X by necessity diminish the reality of his office and teaching authority? Not at all; it is a principle, recall, that "act necessitates potency, but potency does not necessitate act (within a subject)".

If you get the time and inclination, I'd like you to elaborate a bit more on this connection you're establishing between the pope as office and these metaphysical principles. Honestly, the more reading that I'm doing on the subject of the New Testament gospels the more I am realizing that a historicist interpretation applied to them must fail miserably. But following on this realization comes confusion, because whereas some of the crucial 'events' of the gospels are not to be taken historically, we are to apply their symbols as a hermeneutic for interpreting the papacy (for example, the Last Supper or the Keys).

I see parallels here which exist between the Eucharist and the pope, for this reason, but whereas the Eucharist is merely liturgical and ritualistic, the high office of pontiff is consequential in a way beyond the spiritual. Where the Eucharist is something like a correspondence in sympathy to something taking place at a spiritual level (in Heaven), the papal office can influence the very 'magisterium' which was thought to have entered the physical world but originated in Heaven. I'm not sure I am making this clear, but imagine that you say, "The pope cannot alter the core of the magisterium." There appears to be a bit of convenient back-and-forth here, i.e. between the less substantive position of a viceregency alone and the literal Vicar of Christ on earth.

Where it suits, one can point to the pope's lack of authority, but at the same time it removes the 'teeth' from the arguments that support his position on theological grounds. So what happens is a kind of wavering between a power-level which would honor the theological justification, and the more mundane human side of things. If the man can say things which even bridge the unholy, then where are the distinctions drawn? Is it merely in what he chooses to label a given utterance or piece of writing? If it is called X it is binding, but if it occurs as a Y, then it is just a man talking. When and where do these powers 'kick in', at will? It's hard to conceive of a Vicar of Christ on earth which can be such a thing and exist in such a way that at one moment, he is speaking blasphemy, and in another he is speaking with Christlike authority.

When it comes to the Pope, when do these correspondences between earth-Heaven (as in what is bound here is bound there, and what is loosed here is loosed there) cease and then resume again?

In fact, extending this Eucharist example, one could say that it is not contained in Scripture with the same degree of explicitness or lack of ambiguity as the Ten Commandments, but nonetheless it is affirmed by both East and West, and it is contained I would say clearly in Scripture, but not undeniably in Scripture - just like the primacy of Peter.

It is interesting that you bring up the Eucharist, again because most of the evidence shows that the concepts contained in this particular ritual preceded Christ, and certainly preceded the gospels. Take the Didache from the 1st century:

Concerning the eucharist, give thanks thus:

First, concerning the cup: We give thanks to you, our Father, for the holy vine of David your servant, which you have revealed to us through Jesus your servant. To you be glory forever.

And concerning the broken bread: We give thanks to you, our Father, for the life and knowledge which you have revealed to us through Jesus your servant. To you be glory forever.

As this broken bread was scattered upon the hills and has been gathered to become one, so gather your church from the ends of the earth into your kingdom.

The Didache predates the gospels, and we see a quite different focus of the eucharistic rite here, with no mention of the blood or body of Christ, but of the wine as symbol for the Vine (or branch cf. Jeremiah XXIII 5) of David's House and the bread as a reunification of its crumbs in one body of followers. As I think about this ritual, it is so obviously a mixture of Greek and Hebraic components. The bread and wine are a perennial component of rites of theophagy, going back to the most ancient proto-Greeks (contemporary with the Hebrews of Deuteronomy) who consumed them to worship Bacchus. The signature Hebraic component of this early Eucharist evidenced in the Didache is precisely that it does not celebrate either the death or resurrection of Christ, but instead worships the lineage of David through Christ as a revealed holy 'branch'. They praise this branch, or vine, symbolically via the fruits of the vine - as Christ is The Fruit of the Davidic branch, King of kings.

So what are we to think of the Eucharist as supposedly issuing from the Last Supper of the gospels? It's really impossible to think of this in historical terms. For one, Christ was a Jew and the ethnoreligion of His apostles was deeply Jewish. It is unthinkable they would have espoused the consumption of blood or of the body.

No, the far likelier origin of the Eucharist is not from Christ himself or from the gospels. Instead, the gospels adapted an existing and widely respected ritual into the gospels, including the highly non-Jewish (I really can't stress enough how much Jews themselves would have anathematized theophagy, especially involving blood consumption symbolism) aspect of theophagy, at once uniting the narrative of the Jewish messiah together with a would-be priestly liturgical rite. (I don't rule out the possibility that Christ himself could have known of the Greek tradition though and possibly introduced it to the apostles in a Judaized manner).

The point is that what we find in the Catholic Church as Eucharist today is not strictly scriptural, but no doubt relies on certain commentaries and oral traditions arising throughout and after the time of Christ. You have said as much about the papacy itself, and I am inclined to agree that although the papal office is not laid out concretely by scripture, it is a Christian tradition which is not unique to Christians, but is something featuring an admixture of Jewish and Roman influence.

I don't think these facts diminish much in the case of the Eucharist. In fact, I'm not at all convinced that it does. If as Plato told us (after many others had) in philosophical terms that what happens on earth corresponds with what happens in Heaven, and Christ conferred by way of knowledge to His apostles the first powers to govern how that transmission from earth-to-Heaven would go, it almost seems as if Christ might have been conferring some power to decide what way is best to facilitate the binding of people to the earthly church so as to bind them to the Kingdom of Heaven (in the spirit). Therefore, would we not expect some of these extra-scriptural rituals - many of which had already been proven, despite their roles in pagan traditions - to be claimed and modified for the Christian Church?

I truly believe my difficulty is coming from the way I interpret both Jesus Christ and the pope. If I take a historical view of the Christ (but not merely a historical version of him), it's hard to see how Christ did not establish an eternal kingship in the Spirit, and abolish any and all need for priestly offices. At the same time, there are the practical and earthly matters that attend what PS has called the temporal church. If Christ gave the crucial news to the apostles and expected from them to 'fan out' this good news, then something of an institution is implied (even if not laid out explicitly). The latitude given to these men in terms of their ability to best build on earth that which would bind in Heaven, may leave room for considerations in praxis that Christ did not simply hand them.

So there is one aspect in which we could choose to view the Catholic system as a 'paganized Christianity', and another where we could choose to view the Catholic system as 'Christianity that took for itself the useful, but errant (in object) rituals of the pagans and adapted them to direct their power to binding in Heaven by the authority of Christ.'

It's interesting because to view things the former way is almost to give more power to paganism, i.e. if paganism 'paganized' Christianity, we see it as an interloper on Christianity that was able to alter Christ's church. But if we view things from the latter perspective, why wouldn't Christianity have the power to say, 'Yeah, that ritual you have there? Christ is the one way, the one truth, the one life. That ritual literally belongs to us now.'