Amedeo

You seem to confuse the divulgation of the "good news" with the divulgation/publications of the package of "sacred scriptures."

All the constituents of the package were available before, and all may have been used by some individual churches. The packaging is simply and editorial fact, althought it presupposes an official decision to make all those ingredients "official". So, the package represents the orthodox documents of the whole Church -- what the Church adopts as true. This standardization of the faith occurred in the laying out of the Creed a bit earlier, which states the necessary beliefs of a member of the Church. (But while the New Testament was to be believed literally and in full, the Hebrew Bible which was used by the Church and the theologians was actually evaluated, expurgated, and largely allegorized in Philo's fashion and since Philo's time.)

So, the "good news" as consisting of the whole package was never something delivered; the "good news" was delivered when its was historically delivered. The news-reporter were ancient prophers or Bible-narrators and Jesus the King-Messiah, and of course there were many secondary reporters and theologians whose words became part of the Sacred Scriptures.

When I saw the heading of your thread, I immediately thought of the delay of the delivery of the "good news" (the Gospel or Eu-Aggelion, the Good Announcement or Message), which, of course, was Jesus' announcement. So, my thought was, "Why was Jesus delayed in coming?" Why did he not come earlier? Why weren't the Israelites given the message before?

Thinking in terms of the Christianity of the Gentiles, today one would normally ask, Why wasn't mankind given the Message earlier? Or, Why not later?

This question (whether from the standpoint of the Israelites or of the Christians) has been answered by some theologians, but I don't know much about the theological accounts, except for the idea that Jesus came in the fulness of time, that is, when the historical conditions for his coming were realized.

I suppose, and some of you may provide information, that there was some reasoning from Scriptures that he had to be born when he was. Indeed, all the evangelical accounts of events in the life of Jesus the Messiah explain that this or that happened in fulfilment of the Scriptures. So, for instance, he had to be born in Bethlehem and he had to be born of a maiden [or unwed woman].
Now, taking a further step in thinking, we could say: God could have caused a maiden in Bethlehem to become pregnant at any time during the existence of Israelitic Bethlehem. But apparently we must understand from the Scriptures that Mary specifically was chosen to be the mother of Jesus. (The Biblical God chooses His People as well as the individuals for his interventions into history.) But we don't know why He chose Mary; so, we don't know why the bearer of the good news was not born at some other time.

However, if we inquire as to what exactly the good announcement is, we might be able to figure out what "the fulfilment of time" means.

Sticking to the texts of the Gospels, I understand that Jesus endeavored to save Israel from hell, which would be the consequence for them, after the IMMINENT end of the world, if they did not live morally (according to the prescriptions of the Commandaments and the implied prescriptions of the Beautitudes (Blessead are those who...) and faith in Him (the way, the life, the truth). He preached the kingdom of God and about who would enter into it, or who would sit at the right hand of the Father. He foretold that the end would come before the end of the present generation. So, he delivered an URGENT message, and this was the time to deliver it -- immediately before the end of the world, for those who know about some future end don't bother preparing for it.

The messiah, then, was an apocalyptic teacher and guide to and means of salvation. He came at the right time. But his coming when he did implies also that it is the present generation that is corrupt and deviant and thus requires salvation; former generation were righteous and will sit at the right hand of the Father. So, Jesus is the good shepherd, for he leads the sheep that have gone astay on the right path. It is through him, The Path, that the present generation can be saved.

Speaking in matters-of-fact, Jesus was a rabbi, learned in the Scriptures, who modeled his biography according to the Scriptural expectations of what the Messiah will be and where he will arise. So, in order for him to be born in Bethlehem, there had to be a reason why Joseph and the pregnant Mary had to go to Bethlehem. The census, not the visiting of relatives or friends, was the reason.


So, in order that the prophesies might be fulfilled at the appropriate time before the cosmic cataclysm, and given the supposition that no maiden in Bethlehem was worthy of being non-physically raped by God, the Nazarene Mary fitted the necessary conditions of the prophesies. So, we must say that God did not have to have any particulart preference for May; rather, God was bound by the truth of the prophesies and the physical and social circumstances of the world. So, the all-knowing God had to pick Mary as the only one that could be the mother of Jesus.

Of course, the prophesy that the end of the world would occur before the then-present generation passes away was false. Hence there was no real fulness of time when Jesus would have to be born. Therefore the Jesus idea that the present Israelitic generation needed salvation is contrived. Jesus simply imagined that he was needed.

Those who, like Paul, saw the suffering of the crucified Jesus-King as an expiation of mankind's original sin, have no problem as to why Jesus should have come then rather than at some other time, have no problem with the fact that the end of world did not occur (since, according to them, the messiahship was not geared to the imminent end of the world but to any-time end of the world ), but they have a problem with the non-making of salvation available to all men. Logically, Jesus should have been born while Adam and Eve were still alive, so that, through him, they could have been saved.

But saved from what? Not from the hell that awaits those who will not be sitting at the right end of the father, but from the consequences of the original sin. The pristine or innocent state of Adam and Eve would have been restored, and the human descendents of Adam and Eve who forfeited immortality could have regained immortality by following Jesus' instructions.

Since baptism in Christ does not in fact restore the paradisiacal condition of the baptized, the Pauline doctrine of salvation is as false as the Jesus apocalyptic doctrine of salvation.

Clouseau

[QUOTE=aa5874;4525142]That doesn't prove that anyone was a Christian.

Prove it.

Clouseau

And after.

The church is always united.

Not so. Worldly people were unable to retain credibility, just as their 'Catholic Church' was unable to contain people with both education and Scripture, so they had to keep inventing denominations that approached more closely what people wanted. It's still going on.

mountainman

In a very physical and totally unambiguous manner a
specific "canon" was bound within the "Constantine
Bible" c.331 CE. This appears as an historic fact.

The question is why didn't one of the earlier "christians"
associate - in one publication - their own "canon" and
the Hebrew Texts. How could they have remained
unrelated by common publication for so long?

mountainman

We have a malevolent despot who calls himself "the 13th Apostle"
summoning attendees to his military supremacy party at Nicaea 325 CE
at which time, by the happiest of happy coincidences, by a recently
invented form of historiography, his minister for official religious
propaganda published an "ecclesiastical" history for the preceding
300 years of "christian history".

I want to know why any of the prenicene christian authors and
publishers, quoted by EUsebius and yourself, perhaps Iraeneus,
did not associate their own version of "christian canon" in a
common physical publication which included the older Hebrew
texts. Why was the "new" and the "old" unassociated by a
common physical publication by anyone? Ireneus? Origen?
ETC? for hundreds of years???

Mr. Logic

Scratch an atheist, find a Catholic.

sorry Clue, but you are one confussed person. You have a problem with Catholics, and yet you defend the book of James <s>

It's thier baby! James was in the doubters list for centuriesl
The RCC is based on the book of James. Ask any Priest if he believes in Grace by faith! They don't believe what James doesn't teach!
If you can get a copy of the debate by the late Dr. Walter Martin, and Father Pacwas though the CRI do so if you want the truth.

F.P's reaction to Paul and grace by faith seemed to go over Martin's head.
Every single time that Martin would quote Paul on grace by faith, F.P. would say "But what does the Brother of Jesus say" or "but what does James the just say"! IOW, he might just as well have said: "Who gives a flying wafer what Paul said, since James says -------"

Yet you can't stand the RCC but love James, their stronghold of carnality (look to the outside)

aa5874

Prove it.

Prove it.

aa5874

That question is very difficult to answer. All that is known is that the collusion of Church and State is a formidable force.

Clouseau

Whoever colludes with the state is not the church, whose purpose is to be separate, which does not compromise with the world.

A faux church can be useful to an unstable or corrupt state, for two reasons- usurpation, and displacement. It lends the power and rectitude of supreme deity to a state's authority, giving a perceived right to legislate to modify social and even personal moral behavior, to censor, to coerce behaviors which it disapproves. This was evidenced in Constantine's claim to be 'the Thirteenth Apostle'; in the formation of the 'Holy Roman Empire'; and in the medieval concept of the divine right of monarchs.

State caricatures of the church, for that is what they must be, are also displacement of the real church, which would threaten a corrupt state if permitted to thrive. This is evidenced in inquisitions, in suppression of vernacular Bibles, in media refusal to even acknowledge a true church, and to use pejoratives of those of its owners' own agents who get closest to representing the real church.

Insofar as states, religious or otherwise, are always, to some degree, dependent on corruption, the church is always under threat- in some regions explicitly, by legislation, in others, more subtly and clandestinely.

Roger Pearse

In what way did they "oppress and suppress" them?

All the best,

Roger Pearse