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To: kosta50
If you don't believe the accuracy of the Gospels you can't really call yourself an "orthodox" Christian. This is akin to someone who doesn't believe in Newton's laws of gravity calling himself an orthodox physicist. IOW you don't have Christianity 101 which is belief in the word.

The Word is the Word and the Gospel is the Gospel, it's not a "message" or a buffet where we select whatever we like according to our worldly thought processes.

Besides that your worldly argument that there isn't some kind of 2,000 year old document with accounting of Jesus is a waste of time. First the various Gospels ARE documents. Also if there were other benign documents why would they be so preserved when we have very little from that time/area to begin with. We don't even have precious artifacts from the temple.

What I find amazing is that this most studied book in history doesn't have any documentation disproving it.

38 posted on 02/15/2004 8:22:46 AM PST by AAABEST (<a href="http://www.angelqueen.org">Traditional Catholicism is Back and Growing</a>)
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To: AAABEST; kosta50
I think this may help you to understand what Kosta is trying to say.

Additionally I think Kosta is showing our typical eastern approach to Christianity, that of seeing it holistically, as a "whole thing", not as a line here or there, not dissected into pieces and studied as pieces. We are more abstract than concrete, and it always seems to me like western Christians are very concrete.

40 posted on 02/15/2004 8:56:25 AM PST by MarMema
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To: AAABEST; MarMema
Gospel means "Good news," and that's what they are -- a message of hope, a way to our salvation, teachings of our Lord. No Christian can be a Christian and not believe the message contained in the New Testament, that Jesus is God, that He died for our sins, that He rose from the dead, what we should do in order to be saved, how should we pray, etc. There is nothing wrong with questioning in an attempt to know your faith better, always mindful of the fact that inconsitencies do not come from God, but from us.

There are, first of all, dozens of different Bible versions. The Gospels themselves are not the original manuscripts (which doesn't mean they are not true to the original), there are numerical and other inconsistencies, sometimes even contradictions in the Bible, there are additions and deletions, translational errors, you name it, but they don't invalidate or change the message the Bible contains -- our knowledge of God.

Secondly, Orthodoxy is not "orthodoxy" any more than Catholicism is "catholicism." We are both "catholic" and you may be "orthodox" but I am not (Roman) Catholic and you are not (Eastern) Orthodox.

Third, there is nothing disproving the Bible except that there are others who have different "bibles" (Jews, Muslims) who will tell you that we Christians are polytheists and idolaters. There is nothing to disprove; there are historical and mathematical issues one can dissect and often independent historical sources are missing to compare factual claims made in the Bible.

Take, for instance, the OT. The oldest version found is in Greek (Septuagint). It doesn't agree fully with the oldest Hebrew version which is of much more recent date. They both partially agree and partially disagree with the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were written about 150 years after the Greek version. Which one is true? The Orthodox Church uses the Septuagint. The Protestants use the Hebrew (Messoretic Text). The Catholic and Orthodox Bibles have Apocrypha (not the same number but close), the Protestant Bible doesn't. So which one of these man-made version of the "word of God" is the true source? Easy! They all are because they contain the same essential message of God's revelation.

But when you take things word by word, differences, sometimes essential begin to evolve. When the angel announced to Mary (Isa 7:14) that a [ ] will conceive, we (Orthodox and Catholic Christians) and Orthodox Jews interpret that she was a virgin. The Messoretic Text (and the Protestants who use it) claims it was just a woman. Depending then whose "word of God" you take to be genuine, different churches have developed different teaching about Theotokos. Whereas we venerate her as the most Blessed Mother of God, the Protestants -- and their feminine pastors -- treat her as just another "woman."

The physical make-up of the Bible, the sources it uses, and the historical context in which they were put together all play a role in the doctrinal teachings of different churches. The Catholic doctrines of the purgatory and Immaculate Conception come from apocryphal writings (St. Thomas Aquinas, of all the people, did not believe in Immaculate Conception), whereas the Protestants and the Orthodox reject them on different grounds, etc.

Finally, Orthodox vestments are what they were from the beginning. Orthodox priests dress like Jewish priests used to look because that's who the original Christians were and where various forms of worship were handed down to us from. We haven't essentially changed. Everyone else has.

44 posted on 02/15/2004 7:10:34 PM PST by kosta50
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