But there is an interesting nexus.
The development of Church doctrine and practice doesn't happen in a vacuum but is a reaction to many things that are happening.
So the early Church found itself lost after the death of Jesus and shortly thereafter the Romans destroy the temples and with it the ruling class of the psuedo Jewish state, the Saducees. The remnant Jewish community reorganizes around two competing non temple schools of thought, the Pharisees and the Christians (this is why there is so little aimed at the Saducees in the New Testament).
The Christians also start to include non Jews (which as I point out above is a common occurence when a religion is forming under a revised systematic metaphysical understanding). But how to understand what is happening. You have letters being written trying to explain the new reality, especially by Paul. Then Mark comes out with a gospel that explains the whole story, except that there are no resurrection appearences in the early Mark manuscripts.
The resurrection is understood to be an actual physical resurrection by most while some have a more symbolic understanding of the event as the Church being the resurrection of the Body of Christ. Also these, called gnostics, take a more philosophical approach borrowing more from Greek philosophy to understand the whole story of Jesus.
Eventually there are two schools; what is commonly understood to be Christian today and the Gnostics. They have a number of meetings and eventually at the First Nicene Council a well defined orthodoxy emerges. Virgin Birth, Crucifiction, Resurrection. And they also try to solve the difficult Christology by inventing the Holy Trinity.
The orthodox position is defined and eventually all of the Gnostic Bishops are forced to agree (even though it is obvious that some don't).
The reason that Christians generally don't consider Mormonism Christian is that it doesn't accept the basic orthhodoxy of the first Nicene Creed or things like the Holy Trinity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaea_I
Now there are some difficult holes remaining. For example Mark, the first gospel written (we know this because it is plaguerized by both Luke and Matthew) has no virgin stories. And while both Matthew and Luke have virgin stories, they are completely different.
You see the gospels are not historical narratives but works of art. Just as a great religious picture can illustrate the essential truth of the religion without being correct in irrelevent details so are the gospels, they are literary works of art that illustrate religious truths.
These holes (including the absence of Resurrection appearences in Mark) create a problem for the Church powers. How to keep it simple for the common man who cannot read and study and see broader philosophical issues?
The Catholic option is, as you point out, to appoint a local Priest that is the final authority. Until the 19th century it was illegal for a lay person to own a bible.
The Protestants took a different approach saying simply, "Its the Bible Stupid". It was thought that by eleveating the Bible to an unerring source that it would be easily solved and Princeton Theological Seminary initated the principle of inerrancy. Serious study at PTS quickly proved this untenable and they moved away from it, almost 100 years ago. In reaction to this a competing seminary, Fuller Seminary, was established in California to maintain the principle of inerrancy. It took the founders son to grow up and eventually work on the Bible at an advance degree level but they too eventually walked away from the principle of inerrancy. It is simply untenable.
Today the idea that the Bible is an inerrant Word of God is without any seriously respected defenders, so both the Catholics and the Protestants had untenable positions and they moved away from it, and there is now wide consensus among Jewish, Catholic and Protestant Biblical scholars about who wrote, why and so on.
All of this illustrates my previous point that the Christianity, and the other religions have an ongoing peer level scholarly debate that continues to challenge assumptions and the meanings of those that went before them. Its the same process the developed the Old and New Testament.
Both Mormonism and Scientology, on the other hand have books that were found either in New York in the ground or written by a failed science fiction writter in Los Angeles. Neither have developed over traditions and neither have scholars who are challenging the basic assumptions and interpretations. There are no Mormon or Scientology Priests or Pastors that receive serious theological training, they don't challenge the established understanding, and they aren't studying holy scripture that went through a similar 'vetting' process centuries ago. That is why I say that Mormonism and Scientology share an identical Epistomology.
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