1) Scriptures that reference church members practicing willful disobedience: (Galatians 3:1; Titus 1:16; 2 Peter 2:15; 1 Timothy 5:15; James 2:6) especially immorality: (1 Corinthians 5:1; 2 Corinthians 12:21; James 4:4; 2 Peter 2:14; Jude 1:4,8, 17-19, Revelation 2:14)
2) Scriptures that reference an apostasy in progress: (Revelation 2:5—"candlestick" means church, ref: Rev 1:20; 2 Timothy 1:15; Acts 20:29)
3) The Bible ended. Has the church continued, revelation would have continued. To suggest that we do not need more revelation beyond the Bible is to deny reality. Never in the history of mankind has a voice from heaven been more needed than it is needed today.
4) The apostles died, and there is no evidence that new Apostles beyond Matthias were called. It isn’t certain how or exactly when each one died, though with the exception of John, all were gone by 100 A.D.
Fox’s Book of Martyrs researched their deaths, and recorded the most likely alternative. Some are more certain than others:
a. Peter, Philip, Andrew, Jude, Bartholomew, and Simon were crucified
b. James was beheaded
c. Matthew was slain by a spear and a battle axe
d. The other James was beaten and stoned to death
e. Thomas was killed with a spear
f. Judas committed suicide
g. Fox notes that John the Beloved was “the only apostle who escaped a violent death”
5) Not only were new apostles not called, but there is no historical evidence that they somehow passed their authority to others. In A.D. 258, Cyprian (the bishop of a place called Carthage) called a council of 87 bishops. Together they wrote that there was no central leadership in place (no “pope”):
“For neither does any of us set himself up as a bishop of bishops, nor by tyrannical terror does any compel his colleague to the necessity of obedience, since every bishop according to the allowance of his liberty and power, has his own proper right of judgment, and can no more be judged by another than he himself can judge another.”
6) The bishop of Rome finally achieved dominance around A.D. 860 by declaring himself as such. Documents were also forged at the time to make it seem as though earlier Christians had also held this view. It wasn’t until 1440 that the fraudulent documents were exposed by Lorenzo Vallo.
7) The leaders of the church ended up among the most wicked in the world, with contemporaries testifying of their love of pornography, prostitution, orgies, sanctioned torture, love of blood, blackmail and extortion, assassinations, drunkenness, selling permission to commit sins, and so on. John Huss is quoted to have said: “And these very ones who ought to be leaders in imitating Christ are his chief enemies.”
While there is precedent to say that God calls men in weakness to be his leaders on earth, there is not precedent or reasonable scriptural justification for claiming that God would continually call men in total unrepentant wickedness to be his leaders on earth.
8) Other scriptures testified that the apostasy would occur: (Amos 8:11-12; 2 Thessalonians 2:2-3; Revelation 13:7)
9) Most importantly, the Spirit testifies of the truthfulness of the Restoration. But that isn’t evidence you can cite, you have to experience it to be convinced of its worth.