Thanks for the link, which is helpful.
1. Unfalsifiable, ipse dixit proclamations by church "overseers," i.e., bishops (Greek: ἐπίσκοπος, episkopos, whence English's episcopal) aren't persuasive.
Long ago I read translations of the surviving writings of some of the earliest church fathers — such as in the page you linked. I was struck by the distinct impression that the first bishops essentially bootstrapped themselves into authority — they peremptorily announced:
- that they were successors of the Apostles; and
- that their apostolic succession entitled them to be in charge.
(EDIT: This foreshadowed, by some 1,700 years, the U.S. Supreme Court's bootstrapped declaration that judges have the power to decide the constitutionality of congressional legislation, in Marbury vs. Madison, where Chief Justice John Marshall famously said that in case of conflicting statutory- and constitutional provisions, "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. ...")
And these first bishops persuaded their (self-selected?) flocks to acknowledge their authority; eventually, what started out as an arguable heresy on the part of these "overseers" became carved in stone as a core principle of church governance. [0]
2. The church fathers relied extensively on the letters of Paul, né Saul, of Tarsus. Recall that Saul/Paul started out as a fiery persecutor of Christians — then suddenly "flipped" and became equally zealous preaching his version of Christianity.
And remember that Paul preached what he claimed to be his own gospel, not received from any man, but directly from Jesus himself, whom he had never met in life — if Paul had known Jesus before the latter's execution, he surely would have trumpeted the fact, in his Epistle to the Galatians and elsewhere.
[0] https://www.questioningchristian.org/2006/04/what_is_the_pro...