Duvduv

So then there must have been a "cutoff" point for doctrine or detail changes in the texts when no further changes were accepted to the senior echelon of the religion, and a way to convince the literati to accept the changes and the rationale for them. So, for instance if the GMatt Rock passage, or the introductory passage in GJohn were added in a late period, there had to have been a method for determining how far to go with changes ("why these changes and not others") AND to convince the literati of the church to accept them and eliminate the older versions.

And then again, there is the matter of HOW MANY manuscript copies of any set of the Scriptures were available to bishops and other clergy before the age of printing. If every town with a church or at least bishop in the empire had at least one copy, it would have taken a long time to withdraw them from circulation and replace them with the new versions.

MrMacSon

Yes, there is strong indications that, relative to the early Christian ideas in the early or pre-Christian ["Gnostic"] texts (Docetism, Arianism, Montanism, etc), modern Christianity is 'the heresy'.

That is why posts such as this are significant -

Duvduv

So we see that not only would Hippolytus have been confused vis a vis his scriptures, but the church never bothered to take note of the fact that the Logos idea that is discussed in some writings of apologists and GJohn never appears in the epistles. And they must certainly have asked "why" from their own point of view........

Duvduv

In fact "Hippolytus" doesn't himself reject the notion of the Logos, but only the way Cellestius interprets it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippolytus_of_Rome

In any event, the "truth" or "falsehood" of the Logos idea never seemed to bother the later church when noticing that the epistles never discuss Jesus as the incarnated Word, even if the introductory passages of GJohn were added to the gospel later.

sotto voce

Presumably, it takes a Reverenced person to decide on such things.

Duvduv

However one ones to argue the timeline of the emergence of the NT texts, it has to be of interest the way church officialdom in the earliest period showed no interest in trying to eliminate clear contradictions and discrepancies.

Perhaps there is someone who considers himself a NT apologist in 2012 who visits this forum would want to engage in this discussion. Thus, if the author of the epistles did not have an idea of the Logos/Word, why is that the case, and why would he believe that even in GJohn the notion introduced in the introductory passage is not pursued in the rest of the story or even adopted by any of the other three gospels.

Iskander

For your edification you should read the answers to the OP. Please stop hijacking this thread.

sotto voce

One might even get the impression that the only impression that one must get into one's head is that the NT Christian canon has been decided. A false and very papist notion, of course.

'church officialdom in the earliest period'

Bullshit par excellence.

Sheshbazzar

A rare occurrence, something that we may agree on.

Too bad though, that most of the great whore of Babylons harlot daughters have followed their mother whore's bad example by fashioning and deciding upon their own myopic variation of the false and papist notion of a closed canon.


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Net2004

why doesn't dove dove attack the stories in his torah? he claims to be an orthodox jew.
if he claims to be "orthodox jew" then i assume he believes in the existence of people who have absolutely no evidence for thier existence.