not a theist

This is so unscholarly of him. There are good Catholic Bible scholars who still remain in good standing with the church (e.g. John Meier) but your taeacher is obviously not one of them.

You ought to ask him how one could ever verify that the Holy Spirit co-authored the gospels. This is a faith statement he is making and has no place in academia.

[ April 17, 2002: Message edited by: not a theist ]</p>

Kosh

You'd think the old H.S. could have got all the
details straight between the 3 synoptics....

Amos

The evidence of this is that academic reading can't comprehend a word of it. A Shakespeare critic once confessed that Shakespeare must have been smarter than she was because she had studied him for foury years and still did not understand a word he wrote. This same is true with the gospels and if faith has no place in Universities religious studies do not belong there either.

spin

not a theist:
---------------
You ought to ask him how one could ever verify that the Holy Spirit co-authored the gospels. This is a faith statement he is making and has no place in academia.
---------------

Amos:
---------------
The evidence of this is that academic reading can't comprehend a word of it. A Shakespeare critic once confessed that Shakespeare must have been smarter than she was because she had studied him for foury years and still did not understand a word he wrote. This same is true with the gospels and if faith has no place in Universities religious studies do not belong there either.
---------------

People have been complaining that they don't understand you, Amos, ever since I arrived, so I guess one could include the same logic, but it is false, as apparently are your conclusions.

Faith has a place everyhwere at every time of the waking day. I have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow. I have faith that what people write has some relation to what I understand. I have at least limited faith in my own perceptions. Everyone, everywhere works on faith.

The important thing I think is to eliminate extraneous faith, as with pagan religions such as catholicism or christianity.

leonarde

Posted by Pantera: In my opinion no: the apostles were clearly on the pharisee side of the
Sadducee/Pharisee split: they believed (in principle) in an afterlife. Jesus' condemnations
of the Pharisees had primarily to do with:
1)their being wrapped up in the EXTERNALS of piousness.
2)the belief by many that they were "better" than
other (I thank thee oh Lord that I am not a sinner
like so-and-so).
3)the refusal to help their fellow man if it involved breaking the Sabbath.
4)putting heavy (religious) burdens on others but
being unwilling to help with the load.
5)substituting man-made laws for those received
directly from God.

If you follow the speech made by Paul in front of
a (Jewish) audience and a Roman governor (Felix?)
you see that Paul plays off this Sadducee vs Pharisee division and identifies himself with the
latter. This is probably not merely a strategem:
the early Jewish Church thought of itself as a sect or offshoot of Pharisaic Judaism....
Cheers!

Amos

The important thing I think is to eliminate extraneous faith, as with pagan religions such as catholicism or christianity.[/QB][/QUOTE]

You are wrong, Christianity is not a faith but condition of being as denoted by the suffix -ity. Now you are left with only one faith and that is what you call pagan but nevertheless created Christendom.

ju'iblex

pish tosh. next you'll be telling me its not a religion either.

edoggsmooth

davidH quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Yes our church is founded by a traitor," and then moved on. I was left wondering how anyone could buy that. Peter sells out Jesus and then when Jesus is gone, he becomes the head human.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Well, if you read on about Jesus after he rose again - things do start to become clearer.

Read John 21 v 15 - onwards

You will see that Jesus asks Peter 3 times whether he loves him.- Peter responds each time that he does love the Lord.

---------------------------------

Thanks, David. I didn't know that Peter was forgiven in John's Gospel.

Now wouldn't that be a better response to a student who wanted to know about Peter's status?

-ed

lpetrich

I think that it is a mistake to call Peter a traitor here; he seems to me to have been very cowardly.

Also, JC being deserted by all his followers when he was arrested and put on trial is rather out-of-character for such movements; a more usual thing would be for some die-hards to stick with him to the bitter end.

Amos

How can it be a religion if there are no churches in the New jerusalem? Doesn't the gospel clearly state that "son of man has no place to lie his head?"

Now of course, if you are an imposter, or even a "final imposter" (Mt.27;64c), anything can become a religion. Understand here that religion is a means to the end and if Christian-ity is the end of religion it better be the end of religion or something has gone wrong.