"the camps were not public knowledge during the war"
(media.scored.co)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (114)
sorted by:
I have a little elasticity. I get along with people who are very straitlaced about those things but I also get along with people who question them. As a great advocate of the primitive Christianity of James, which was more closely connected with the Essenes than people realize because Essene is from Oseh, James's word for being a Doer, I see bridges between what the creeds are attempting to convey and the concerns of antitrinitarians and upholders of original Christianity. Between James and the formal creeds we have many steps, not only Paul, then gnostic influence, then Roman hegemony, then the very significant Lapsi controversy of 251, and finally the Constantinian revisions, so it's essential to distinguish the problems at each step when we talk about the creeds.
If we were to say all doctrine must be taken from the portion of the Bible excluding Pauline Christianity, I'd be very happy to agree, and aspects of your perceived "Christian core" are naturally a bit removed from that source. First, the connection of God's nature to the words "trinity", "three", and "person" is tenuous and not very Biblical. "Dying for sins" has in America gone quite far removed from the Mosaic teaching of animals dying for sins, or from Peter's view "For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit" (1 Peter 3:18); would you accept Peter on this or are we to exclude him too? "Second coming" and "final judgment" are also poor and unbiblical summary phrases; "coming again" is Johannine (14) but doesn't mean what people think, "final judgment" is in the NLT but not the Greek, and in my experience Christians are least united about eschatology, which your core framing has several elements of. In particular Christians often fail to realize that "heaven" and "hell" are not the names of the final states, which are more rightly called new heaven-earth and fire lake.
So what I actually believe is taken from the Bible alone (which is holistic enough to permit the removal of all Pauline books and Hebrews): if you wish to excise anything else, feel free and I will compensate. (1) We are to baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost (Matt. 28:19). (2) Father and Son bear witness (John 8:18). (3) Spirit bears record (1 John 5:7a, 8b; excluding the disputed portion that might have been written by Tertullian). (4) A matter is established by three witnesses (Deut. 19:15; but don't infer anything the text doesn't actually state). (5) Christ suffered for sins and was put to death (1 Peter 3:18). (6) Jesus will come in like manner as the apostles saw him go into heaven (Acts 1:11). (7) The dead will be judged every man according to their works (Rev. 20:12-13). (8) Jesus was ordained of God to be the Judge of quick and dead (Acts 10:42). (9) The Son of Man will separate all nations as sheep from goats (Matt. 25:32). (10) The goats shall go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into life eternal (Matt. 25:46).
Ebionites and Essenes revered all these Scriptures if I'm not mistaken. Is there a problem with any of them?
(Add: I should've expressed concern also about your including Mormons (the COJCOLDS) as a denomination or as Christian, because neither Christendom nor Mormons include the other, and they don't agree on this core. Instead of a corporate trinity in unity they have a tritheist language of "three personages"; instead of dying for sin they have modeling all the godhood that we are to "become"; instead of heaven and hell they have three destinies, "celestial, telestial, and terrestrial", which don't overlay heaven and hell. But that's tangential.)
I question everything, including what you have to say. And I doubt you would get along with me, because I think you are a person with an agenda. That's why you are a gatekeeper.
Are you referring here to Oséh, meaning the one who acts as in Freemasonry? to masons this is not just an exclamation but a sacred affirmation of the Builder’s purpose. I also know of the Hebrew origin from 'oseh ("doer," as in "doers of the Torah") calling for strict legal observance. Perhaps that's what you mean here, since the Ebionites regarded Yeshu as the Messiah but insisted on keeping the law and traditions.
I'm not saying Pauline Christianity is the only thing wrong with the Bible. Maybe it's nothing wrong with the Bible and Paul belongs there, although there is little doubt in my mind he was an agent of Rome, not only a citizen, and doing the work the Pharisees tasked him to do. Maybe everything is wrong with the Bible starting with Genesis where in the first two chapters we find two distinct and contradictory stories of creation. And continuing with the Ethiopian Bible which has 81 books, compared to 66 books for Protestants, 73 for Catholics. And hundreds of manuscripts, including Gospels, and religious writings, were considered merely Apocrypha, not part of the accepted canon of Scriptures.
I assume you mean exclude him as a disciple of Christ. Despite considerable research we know surprisingly little about the historical Yeshu (Jesus). But, we know a few things with reasonable certainty. He was born around 4 BCE in Galilee, a cosmopolitan coastal region in the north part of Judea. The NT also refers to him as a “Nazorean” (from Nazareth) and a Galilean (from Galilee). He was crucified by the Romans, and although they were very cruel people, the crucifixion as a form of execution in ancient Rome, was reserved for special cases, such as very low-life criminals and worst enemies of the state. To me that implies Yeshu was considered a very dangerous person by the Roman authority. And one more thing, most historians think that Yeshu was a disciple of John the Baptist before breaking away to form his own movement.
Everything else like virgin birth, miracles, walking on water, resurrection, including Peter being a disciple, comes from texts written decades later by people who never met Yeshu.
To be honest I don't much about Mormon's beliefs, but I think Mormons believe God the Father and Jesus Christ do exist, but as very distinct and separate entities. And I think Mormons believe Jesus Christ, atoned for our sins, and that he is the Son of God. I'm not sure if they believe we all could be Sons of God, like it's clearly spelled out in the Gospel of Thomas, Saying 3: "When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty.".
Oh, I get along, and so far you're getting along. I have only one agenda, the One who laid hold on me, I am his love-slave and can do no other than serve him, I'm very predictable that way.
No, clearly the Masons stole that word from the Hebrew, Oseh doer, Asah to do or make. When Jesus said "It is finished" he was quoting the last verse of Psalm 22 (as he had quoted the first verse), "He has done it", which is "Asah" in Hebrew. Not my fault if the Masons culturally appropriated it from the correct Hebrew meaning you describe.
Good. I've tested the first theory and haven't found problems with it. I've tested the second theory and found that it relies on faulty assumptions and people inventing perceived contradictions from extreme cultural distance after thousands of years of regular readers not seeing anything contradictory. Nobody treats any other ancient book that way, as if the whole book is garbage after thousands of years of preservation because a 19th-century German doesn't understand the first two pages in their context.
Correct. Note that this is not about shutting anything out, this is about what books rose to the level of canon over hundreds of years of testing by covenant people. All three agree on the same 66 books (and the Jews agree on the Hebrew books), so it's the same covenant tradition of the same books being recognized, because they all passed the same tests and none of the others came anywhere close. The extra books were always regarded, by each group including Protestants, as attaining to a secondary level of utility (deuterocanon), not meeting the marks of the protocanon but still retaining broad utility. Yes, the hundreds of other books could be counted as close to the deuterocanon, and it's a disappointment the church doesn't share more about them (let me plug Odes of Solomon again). The modern idea that the fourth century made a random list and censored everything else is totally false; rather, each book, when it was written, was preserved by the covenant people as a candidate and, after the centuries of testing, rose in esteem until it was accepted as inspired. It's a pretty well-regulated process, actually.
Well, I meant exclude his writings as inspired. See, you're free to select any writing as inspired, or reject them all, but I do ask people to make decisions and be consistent. If you were to imply that the words of Yeshu only appear in Thomas, well, you can say that straight out and we can work with it. But if you act as if the gospels have some historical value, those (a) give lots more words of Yeshu, (b) indicate that he believed every letter and serif of the Hebrew Scriptures, (c) indicate something extraordinary and unparalleled happened among Yeshu and his disciples. The idea that none of the Greek Scriptures were written by people who knew Yeshu is very recent and actually falls apart upon a little inspection (IMHO), but if you'd like to put forward standards for judging historical documents we can easily work those details out. But when you present as a person who feels free to quote Scriptures but who doubts Paul, I state my positions from Scripture without Paul. If you'd like the truth derived only from Thomas, it's a slower route but it might be doable. I hold back from overwhelming you with links unless I'm confident you'd enjoy them.
Whaddaya mean we, kemo sabe?
Actually, the first evidence we have, as many scholars are now recognizing, is that 1 Cor. 15:3-4 quotes an oral tradition that Paul formally "received" from Peter and James and that had to have been circulating 2-5 years after the crucifixion, and it indicates the belief in the supernatural nature of the death had already begun entrenching itself. Luke is often regarded as the best historian of the era, given his accuracy, and he describes (as if written for a court review, which it probably was) how a demoralized group suddenly became accepted leaders of a new Jewish movement that rapidly spread worldwide, with regular reference to miracles; these statements were written when contemporaries were alive to dispute them, and often challenge them to do so. So by ordinary historical standards, something extraordinary caused a massive new movement that taught the supernatural from its origin (a supernatural that, incidentally, the surrounding Jewish culture universally taught as well). But let me know what core you want to start from and we can go from there. I doubt you'd want to propose both that none of the NT was written by people whose names are on it and that Thomas nevertheless wrote Thomas, that would be a bit of special pleading.
So I appreciate very much the consideration. But ultimately it comes down to Truth. Truth apprehended me and enslaves me, and so I ask people if they are committed to pursue Truth at all costs, or if there is some reason one couldn't commit that. If you question everything for the sake of establishing Truth, you're making that commitment and you'll come to find what of the Scriptures is true. It sounds like you've come across many conflicting sources (churchianity, gnostics, skeptics, Mormons, Masons) and so you are cautious about making truth commitments. Except Thomas sounds good to you (it's so ambiguous and twistable, it serves that purpose for many). But I find you only need that one commitment, Truth, and by the time you find yourself making it you realize it was already made for you. From then on it's easy to receive more truths every moment.