angellous_evangellous said:That the church will never fail is directly associated with who the Church says that Jesus is. Peter never said that Jesus is who Joseph Smith says Jesus is...
Matthew 16
13Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?" 14And they said, "Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets." 15He said to them, "But who do you say that I am?" 16Simon Peter replied, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." 17And Jesus answered him, "Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. 18And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. 19I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." 20Then he strictly charged the disciples to tell no one that he was the Christ.
Ah, so Catholic. The problem is that that interpertation ignores every logical application. The Greek here does not refer to the church. The gates of Hell will not prevail against what? The Greek is in the partitive genitive. That means that whatever it is referring to it is the rightful property of those gates. The church does not qualify. In layman's terms, "It" does not refer to the direct object (my church), but to something else alltogether. What is a gate for? To keep something in or out. In no place in the scriptures does a gate denote anything other than that. What belongs to the gates of Hell? The spirits in prison, of course. Christ has said in numerous places that he will preach the gospel to the dead and they will be let out of spirit prison. Despite all the conviction you may have, an understanding of the Greek language and the bIble as a whole render your interpretation completely and totally invalid. It is wrong, pure and simple. You can whine all you want, and I'm sure you will, but it simply cannot work given the original Greek. It is impossible.