PabloSerna said:
apostolic succession.
Apostolic succession is not the claim Thaddeus is making, but since you are we can go down that route.
Apostolic succession is not the handing of a title down from one person to the next. I drove by a bible church a while back that had a big sign out front.
|-----------------------------------------------|
|-------- "____ Bible Church"----------- |
| "We have apostolic succession" |
|__________________________________|
And they probably did have a lineage of successors up a family tree who had a history with the anabaptists, the reformers, the catholic church, the united orthodox and catholic church, the apostles, and eventually Jesus. Ipso facto direct line to Jesus!
Most first wave protestant churches also claim apostolic succession. Shoot, the American anglican church used Scotland as a market competitor to get a bishop over to the states when England, fresh off losing a revolution, wasn't in the mood to endorse an american branch of their church.
So if its not just X bestowed Y as a priest, then what exactly is succession? It clearly is the handing down of not a title, but a teaching and a tradition.
So does the catholic church have a lineage of teachers and students back to the apostles? Yes. But so does that bible church and most other christian teachers. The only way you wouldn't would be if you just picked up a bible and started preaching. So its all about the preservation of the claims and teachings of the apostles that makes or breaks Apostolic succession, not just genealogy of teachers.
Catholics like to claim they have preserved the teachings wholly. Others will refute that.