How to improve this question?

Question

I asked this question, expecting that the answer could be as simple as a YES or a NO followed by a brief history of what are the new things introduced in the Roman Catholic Church which originally were not there in the early Christianity period, 200-300 AD.

I removed some of my presumptions which appears to be false (but I'm still not sure about it). Is this answerable or it's more complicated than how it looks and their cannot be any straight answer? After I get a better format from here, I would like to ask that question again.

Answer 1

I'm pretty sure you'd biting off more than one question can chew. There are two main problems with with what you're trying to do:

• The question assumes the answer is a straight forward matter of history, but it's not. You have several significant perspectives on the issue. The Catholic church will try to defend its traditions as merely preserved while other groups will try to identify traditions that were added one by one over time.

• The question is absurdly broad, covering potentially hundreds of significant actions that each have hundreds of data points to look at through hundreds of years. Never mind books, libraries have been devoted to this stuff.

Combined, these two issues leave your question with no launching point to build an answer on. There is simply too much material and too many conflicting ways it could be covered to hang an answer on. There is no objective way to judge whether answers that do come in are good because of the perspective issue. Different presuppositions lead to a different model and how you fit the historical data points into that model is going to conflict with somebody with a different set of presuppositions.

The issue doesn't even lend itself to any sort of summary or overview. The answer is: early church history. You're going to have to get your hands dirty in order and to come up with issues specific enough and some framework on which to hang a question.