Catholics are in continuity with the Church of Jesus and the Apostles, while Protestants are not.

Thank you Tony for accepting the challenge. I want to say I appreciate your willingness to discuss/debate such an important issue. For full disclosure, I wanted to note that I am a former Protestant (Baptist, Presbyterian) who converted to the Catholic Church. I would first appeal to the following Scriptures to demonstrate that Jesus communicated His authority to the Apostles. "As the Father has sent me, so I send you." (John 20:21) "Whoever listens to you listens to me. Whoever rejects you rejects me. And whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me." (Luke 10:16) "Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." (Matt. 16:18; Matt. 18:18) Next, we must note that Scripture confirms this authority passed from the Apostles to their successors: [Paul to Timothy] "And what you heard from me through many witnesses entrust to faithful people who will have the ability to teach others as well." (2 Timothy 2:2) "They appointed presbyters for them in each church." (Acts 14:23) [Paul to Titus] "For this reason I left you in Crete so that you might . . . appoint presbyters in every town, as I directed you." (Titus 1:5) The earliest Christians, including the immediate successors of the Apostles, claimed to have the authority of the Apostles. St. Ignatius of Antioch, who was most likely a disciple of the Apostle John, said: "For we ought to receive every one whom the Master of the house sends to be over His household, as we would do Him that sent him. It is manifest, therefore, that we should look upon the bishop even as we would upon the Lord Himself." (St. Ignatius to the Ephesians, between A.D. 98-117) Pope St. Clement of Rome, in the early second century, claimed the authority of the Apostles passed to their successors, as he wrote the following: "Through countryside and city [the apostles] preached, and they appointed their earliest converts, testing them by the Spirit, to be the bishops and deacons of future believers. Nor was this a novelty, for bishops and deacons had been written about a long time earlier. . . . Our apostles knew through our Lord Jesus Christ that there would be strife for the office of bishop. For this reason, therefore, having received perfect foreknowledge, they appointed those who have already been mentioned and afterwards added the further provision that, if they should die, other approved men should succeed to their ministry" (Letter to the Corinthians 42:4"5, 44:1"3 [A.D. 80]). Tertullian, while debating the Gnostics, who claimed to have the true teachings of the Apostles, appealed to this argument as he stated that we can only know what Jesus and the Apostles taught by looking to the very churches they established (since the canon of Scripture was not entirely determined at that time): "From this, therefore, do we draw up our rule. Since the Lord Jesus Christ sent the apostles to preach, (our rule is) that no others ought to be received as preachers than those whom Christ appointed . . . Now, what that was which they preached " in other words, what it was which Christ revealed to them " can, as I must here likewise prescribe, properly be proved in no other way than by those very churches which the apostles founded in person." (Prescription against Heretics, 21). By appealing to Church history, I know that this does not carry the same weight as Scripture, but it can at least serve to demonstrate the earliest Christians believed the authority of Jesus passed to the Apostles and then to their successors. Moving forward, we note that the Catholic Church maintains Apostolic succession (i.e., the Bishops in the Catholic Church of today were ordained through the laying on of hands by Bishops who were ordained by Bishops that go back in unbroken succession to the Bishops the Apostles ordained) and Protestants do not dispute this. Now that we have established that Jesus passed His authority to the Apostles, who passed this authority to successors, which makes its way in an unbroken line to present day Catholic Bishops, we must note this is not the case with Protestants. Most Protestants do not claim to have Apostolic succession (the Anglicans do but Catholics and Orthodox Christians do not accept their ordinations because they lost the sacrament of Holy Orders for various reasons) and are thus unable to demonstrate that they are the legitimate successors of the Apostles. They may appeal to Scripture all they would like in order to say that they are in continuity doctrinally with the Apostles, but it can be demonstrated that some Protestant doctrines were not the doctrines passed down to the successors of the Apostles by reading what the earliest Christians believed in the Ante-Nicene era. Additionally, the Protestant is ultimately unable to appeal to Scripture because there has to first be a magisterium (i.e. a teaching authority established by Jesus) in order to determine which books belong in the Bible. Once that is determined, a magisterium is still needed in order to determine who has the correct interpretation of Scripture, since not all matters of doctrine are evident by Scripture alone (see 2 Peter 3:16). Thank you, Tony, for allowing me to give the Catholic position and I await your response.