Free Republic

Radner is episcopalian. Moss is Catholic. Do you know how to read?

Radner is a conservative Episcopalian. Your prejudice is showing.

She is not saying that that is not martyrdom. She’s saying that some stories portray that as the cause of the execution when other factors were the real cause.

And she’s right, in some cases, that did happen. The issue is whether it happened in most cases or only a few.

Stop shooting from the hip.

You know, this is foolish. She is debunking the first 300 years. Otranto has nothing to do with it.

The reaction here on FR is childish. There’s plenty to criticize in the book. But the ignorance on display here is disgusting.

They always gave everyone a chance to escape death. That was part of the policy. It was far more effective a way to demoralize and defeat Christianity by threatening people into recanting than by actually killing them.

The scene where the martyr is given a half-dozen chances to escape death merely by renouncing Christ is standard. And it makes perfect sense from the standpoint of the persecutor.

It is also true that many early martyr accounts probably contain some exaggeration. But hagiologers for centuries have been able to sift the exaggeration from the historical foundation so a breathless claim that only now do we realize it was all exaggerated is
well
an
exaggeration that has a kernel of truth in it.

If she truly claims only a handful of accounts are reasonably accurate, then that seems exaggerated debunking.

On the other hand,
I would not trust this reporting of what she claims not to be itself exaggerated. Does SHE really say only a handful or is that the breathless exaggeration of this reporter???

I’m tired of everyone exaggerating everything, including conservatives exaggerating the sins of people like Candida Moss. I don’t mind faulting her where faulting is due. But people need to fight fair and I’m not convinced this breathless report of the eeeeeeeeevvvvvvvvvviiiiiiiiiiillllllllll Candida Moss book isn’t just
a
tad
exaggerated.

Yes, that reminds me—Radner’s criticism was not so much that she’s wrong about the first 300 years—a myth about that does exist for a lot of people. Where she’s wrong, he says, is to assume that Christians’s present claims about being persecuted are largely propaganda and exaggeration.

That strikes me as legitimate critique. But debunking does need to be done on the first 300 years. It’s too bad she didn’t leave it at that.

It is true that most people have an exaggerated notion about the first 3 centuries. Persecution was horrific for 75 years from 250-325. Even then there were lulls. Before 250 AD it was sporadic. Christianity was illegal but Christians were not systematically sought out. Before 250, most persecution resulted from mob violence, ginned up animosities in a given city. (That’s the way it will be here too.)

All that is accurate history. Those who had the idea of constant, unrelenting persecution until Constantine the Great do need to have their myth debunked.

That martyr stories get inflated and are used for propaganda is also obvious. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs is Protestant propaganda. The Anabaptists had their Martyrs’ Mirror.

Some reviewers think Moss goes further than debunking the common myth of unrelenting persecution. She may have invented a counter-myth, exaggerating the degree of propagandistic exaggeration by Christians. I haven’t read the book. I don’t think it deserves the kind of breathless condemnation it’s getting from Christian circles but it probably deserves scholarly critique.

Ephraim Radner’s scathing review in First Things raises some serious problems with the book, but he also may indulge in overkill.

No, the wascally wepubwiccans dried it out.

Aliens don’t read random threads (’cept perhaps JRandomFreeper threads). Aliens are verrrrryyy sophisticated and use very sophisticated algorerhythms to decide which threads to read and which to ignore. But you can be sure that aliens read the entire thread once they decide to read any thread. It’s just the way aliens are. Sorta natural law-like, I think.

Well,there you have it. Don’t get much more alien than gremlins.

Yep, you can be sure the aliens are gonna read the whole thread before they post any comments.

This right-minded person disagrees.

Well, there’s scumbag and then there’s stupid scumbag. What I don’t get is how he thinks this helps him? The gays will still hate him because he (for now) opposes gay marriage. And he’s totally destroyed any credibility with conservatives.

Can he really be this stupid?

What shall it profit a man if he should gain the whole world but lose his soul? But for the Beltway (Wales), Paul (Richard), for the Beltway (Wales)????

HT to Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons.

Naw, Obama has more than enough hubris to supply the both of them. Many times over.

You share with the UCC the rejection of ordained priesthood.

Which
is
the
issue
here.

On this issue Protestants defined themselves knowingly and deliberately in the 16thc. All the Protestant Reformers rejected episcopacy, one of the few things they agreed on.

You made your bed, so lie in it.

Since you don’t like and don’t believe in priesthood, kindlly butt out of this discussion.

John 20:21-23.

Are you being sarcastic?

The women were witnesses, martyrs and that role has always been open to women.

Priesthood is derived from the 12 Apostles, period. Plenty of others are witnesses, testes, martyrs, disciples. Even the word “apostle” is sometimes used more widely in the NT.

But the Twelve chosen apostles were a distinct group. Only to them did Jesus give the authority to govern (bind and loose sins, accompanied by ordination in John’s Gospel—he breathed on them and conferred the Holy Spirit explicitly) and preach with apostolic authority.

An honest Protestant will recognize a distinct role for the 12, distinct from other disciples and witnesses. We are all witnesses, we are not all ordained priests. We are all baptismal priests. We are all ministers, witnesses, martyrs, testes, testifiers.

If you don’t accept Catholic and Orthodox teaching on the derivation of bishops and priests from the Twelve, fine. But then you don’t believe in priesthood. Fine.

Preaching with apostolic authority is not the same as giving a testimony or witnessing. Jesus authorized the Twelve to lead His Ecclesia. If you are a Protestant, you derive a general ministry from that. Fine.

But Catholics derive from that the specific episcopacy and priesthood.

At the time of the Reformation all the Protestant Reformers explicitly rejected the concept of priesthood as derived from the Twelve. (Anglicans retained it initially, rejected it in the 1550s, then tried to claim it back in later centuries; too late).

Those who rejected the idea of priesthood have nothing to say to what qualifies a person as a priest.

And should butt out.

Now, my plan: the states rebel, as states, as state governments and dare the Feds to crush them.

But are ore of a handful of states solid enough (free enough from fifth-column tyrants within) to stand in solidarity against the Federales?

Perhaps. It’s the only plan I see having a chance of success. The country as a whole is debauched to hell.

“This isn’t rocket science. Stand mute, and the monster will eventually eat you. Stand up and fight, and you win your freedom.”

They already ate us.

Civil disobedience against race laws works. Civil disobedience against legally entrenched faceless bureaucratic tyranny? The whole problem is that the power is now entrenched and diffused, hidden behind 2000 and 14,000 page pieces of “legislation” that no one understands but that authorizes tyranny.

Sorry, but marching on Washington and shouting slogans is not a plan.

Get back to me when you have a plan rather than words.

Yeah, I’m a defeatist in your eyes.

Victory requires a plan. I’m all for action and eager for victory.

Courts? There was a time when the courts might have overturned tyrannical legislation. But now we have an Executive Branch that just ignores courts.

There was a time when, if the Media had exposed the abuses of power and the tyranny, it might have inspired electoral shift and real change.

But that’s gone. The Media won’t expose the abuses in the first place but even if they did, the low information but thoroughly debauched populace would yawn.

Face reality. The mob hates your and my guts. The mob is mobilized. The media lives from and for the mob. The number of people who care is now a minority.

Grab pistols and pitchforks and march on Washington? That would confirm the Lie told about us: a bunch of weirdos who want to turn the clock back and can be summarily ignored.

What’s your plan to get around being ignored????

What’s your plan to convert the low information smucks?

What’s your tactical plan to win a guerilla war rather than having the outbreak of violence be used as justification for total suppression of all liberties?????

What’s your plan???????????

Fancy words. Meant figuratively, not literally, I have to assume.

Useless words.

I was asking for a concrete plan which the Great Hero on a White Horse who would be elected might follow.

Literally marching up to some Federal Office shouting “you’re fired” would only deliver the evidence the Tyrants in DC and in the media want in order to complete the process of establishing their tyranny.

How about a real plan?

So, who is Misha? Curious minds wish to know. Don’t keep me in suspense.

Well, we can hope. But let’s be realistic. The entrenched bureaucracy, impermeable to election results, can destroy the work of any Hero on a White Horse who rides in to save us.

The power shifted to the bureaucracy long ago. The bureaucracy has to be neutralized or checked by the Great Conquering Hero.

I hope someone has a plan. I don’t see how it can be done.

He bows down to Moloch.

He misspoke. He meant to say, “May the god Moloch bless you.”

The 9/11 hijackers came from rural and backward segments of the Saudi society?????? Evidence?

And, BTW, it’s hugh.

I think you meant “take this seriesly.”

When Generation Y-ers came of age in the late 1990s, not Generation Xers.

Eggzackly. All (and I mean all) of our pathologies are fundamentally moral pathologies. Libertarian conservatives need to open their eyes. Generation Y came of age when perjury by a president became acceptable, when an entire culture shifted from the assumption that a few jerks would see how much they could get away with but most people wanted to be honest (even if only because being dishonest and a constant liar was looked down upon by society).

Now it is simply assumed that everyone lies all the time about everything and caveat emptor. Indeed, the pendulum has swung even farther: the really skillful liars are celebrated for their really skillful lying. Sure BJCLintoon is a congenital liar, but he’s so skilled at it politically that we have to admire him—that’s what people were saying when the Generatio Xers came of age in the late 1990s.

That’s our problem: fundamental immorality, dishonesty, lack of integrity. No society can flourish under those circumstances

Well, d’oh — the third party’s name would be al-harbi, dontcha think?

You mean like her husband ended up in prison?

Yeah, but he’s a fat sex poodle.

How so? The story’s based on the younger brother telling interrogators about the phone call. I don’t see anything in the story saying that the Feds had independent knowledge of the phone call.

It was a UPS truck that had one 80 lb box containing gunpowder in among all the other stuff that a UPS semi would be carrying.” So Hazmat was called. So the journolists learned about it.

Sheesh. Journolists are so stupid. This was not news but the pantywaists hear “gunpowder”and the world comes to an end.

Hang all journolists.

Well, she got the lack of intellect part right.

But her dad’s not all that bright either.

P.S. Give it up, Vickie Gene. You had your 15 minutes of notoriety. It’s over. You are now almost the most meaningless little pieces of human debris anywhere in the cosmos, second, perhaps, only to the mother of the Boston Massacre lowlifes.

There was a time when Episcopalians, doctrinally wrong though they might be, were perfect models of English social graces and courteoisie.

The utter gall, rudeness, smartassity, classlessness of this piece of excrement that calls himself an Episcopal “bishop” amazes one.

Will the wonders never cease??

Listen to your mother, Jebbie dear.

Yep, the most ancient fertilizer is excrement. You’ll need a back-ground check to take a dump.

Yep, and an ATF permit to wipe your butt.

Nope. They’ll just ban urination.

Too bad no background check is needed before purchasing Harry Reid. He’s been bought so often the whores are beside themselves with jealousy.

“Independency,” you say? Naw, never crossed our minds. Not a chance. Don’t worry your little heads, you Johnbulls. Nothing to see here,fellas. Just us loyal little British subjects here, with our thinking caps on. Move along now.

That’s odd. In Latin amabo means “I shall love.”

Must be a tinfoil reference to Reggie.

Does that work in Spanish too?

Senators who look like movie-morticians are inherently bad.

Too damn harryfied.