Perhaps my greatest reasons for staying Protestant are practical. The refrain of lay Catholic apologists is that Protestants must submit to the Magisterium. Yet if the primary lens of theological inquiry is authority, why is so much of the heavy lifting done by Catholic laypersons? In the time I spent considering conversion to Catholicism, every single apologetics book, essay or article recommended to me was written by a lay Catholic. Why aren’t the bishops engaged in apologetics? Aren’t they the authoritative teachers within Catholicism? If so, why would I trust the exegetical, theological, and philosophical arguments put forth by lay Catholics who have no direct oversight or approval of bishops? To trust these arguments would be to trade one set of private interpretations for another.

This is downstream of another problem. As a Protestant, I have two basic options when informing my study of the Bible. The first is consulting scholars who think the text is inspired and more or less inerrant. This comes with arguments or assumptions about the nature and quality of the Bible’s authorship: Matthew really did write Matthew, the disciples’s memory of Jesus’s teachings is entirely or almost entirely accurate, Jesus really did make accurate prophecies, he really did miracles as described, and so forth.

The other option is consulting scholars who doubt or actively disbelieve all of the above propositions. They approach the text with a hermeneutic of suspicion. They doubt Matthew wrote Matthew. They doubt Jesus said and taught everything ascribed to him. Many claim that Jesus’s teachings were issued as a fallible man: given perhaps as a (mostly) good man, but certainly not as a divinely inspired God-man.

When it comes to Catholicism, most or all of the NT Catholic scholars I’m aware of fall somewhere in the second camp. Why would I follow a denomination that approves of or passes over scholars within its own ranks that seem to deny or doubt the reliability and authority of the Bible on such a regular basis? Consider, for example, how the NAB and the USCCB hedge on Pauline authorship. If Paul didn’t author some of the letters purported to be his, that raises questions about their inspiration and, therefore, divine authority.

If the intellectual leaders of Catholicism have a fairly low view of Scripture, that directly undermines the lay Catholic apologists who appeal to the Bible as if it actually teaches what Jesus and Paul really said. Who am I to believe? The Catholic scholar who questions whether half the Pauline corpus was really written by Paul or the lay Catholic apologist who argues assuming traditional authorship? If I take Catholicism at face value, then I would have to believe the intellectual over the lay apologist. And that would mean there’s no reason to take the lay apologists seriously if their arguments appeal to suspect passages written by someone pretending to be Jesus or Paul.

In my experience, lay Catholic converts and apologists aren’t even aware of these scholarly issues, even though they ultimately undermine their Biblical arguments for Catholicism.