Posted on 08/24/2007 9:45:54 AM PDT by NYer
This is good for comic relief...And since the article starts with a monstrous lie, as in LIE,
Did Our Lord write any part of the New Testament or command His Apostles to do so? Our Lord Himself never wrote a line, nor is there any record that He ordered his Apostles to write, we can safely assume the entire article is nothing but lies thru and thru...
But hey, let's look at your Catholic Bible...The one Jerone wrote...
Rev 14:13 And I heard a voice from heaven, saying to me: Write: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord. From henceforth now, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours. For their works follow them.
Rev 19:9 And he said to me: Write: Blessed are they that are called to the marriage supper of the Lamb. And he saith to me: These words of God are true.
Rev 21:5 And he that sat on the throne, said: Behold, I make all things new. And he said to me: Write. For these words are most faithful and true.
But being caught in a biblical lie has never deterred a Catholic yet, so I suspect this will be no different...
Rev 21:27 And there shall in no wise enter into it any thing that defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination, or maketh a lie: but they which are written in the Lamb's book of life.
This passage is talking about the New Jerusalem in Heaven...If the shoe fits,,,,,
Must be a slow day.
Now about Catholics and the Bible. You might be generally correct and in particular not-so-correct. In the days of Bloody Mary, owning a Bible in the vernacular (Tyndale, maybe) could get you crisped pretty good.
Now that is going a bit far in the interests of biblical grammatical accuracy, don't you think? Later on, the Catholics turned thumbs down on the King James Bible, and King James was plenty Catholic. Until lately, IMHO, the Catholic Church didn't exactly go out of its way to encourage individual Bible reading. Just my impression.
It seems that the plan was that rather than poring over the Good Book for himself, by going to church every Sunday, a Catholic gets the whole Bible read to him. Where I think the American Roman Catholics have fallen down on the job is by going to a more "Protestant" type of service in English. They jumped into a "Low Church" experience without ever considering what the Anglicans had to offer in their liturgy.
This refers to Churches just as the Byzantine Catholics, the Melkites, etc.
That’s worth a bookmark.
King James I was a bitter enemy of Catholicism.
He was the one who Guy Fawkes tried to blow up along with most of Parliament. He finished what Henry Tudor started - the creation of a church carved out of most of the Catholic Church in England.
He also commissioned the KJV of the Bible; there are numerous websites dedicated to the tabulation of the errors, and some that attempt to explain the reasons behind deliberate error.
It was the bishops of the Catholic Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit that sorted out and decided the canon of Sacred Scripture. They contain the entire canonical text identified by Pope Damasus and the Synod of Rome (382) and the local Councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397), contained in St. Jerome's Latin Vulgate translation (420), and decreed infallibly by the Ecumenical Council of Trent (1570). This canonical text contains the same 27 NT Testament books which Protestant versions contain, but 46 Old Testament books, instead of 39. These 7 books, and parts of 2 others, are called Deuterocanonical by Catholics (2nd canon) and Apocrypha (false writings) by Protestants, who dropped them at the time of the Reformation. The Deuterocanonical texts are Tobias (Tobit), Judith, Baruch, Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), Wisdom, First and Second Maccabees and parts of Esther and Daniel. Some Protestant Bibles include the "Apocrypha" as pious reading.
IMHO, the Catholic Church didn't exactly go out of its way to encourage individual Bible reading. Just my impression.
The Catholic Church has never disuaded anyone from reading the Bible. In fact, Catholics hear more Scripture at their Sunday Mass than protestants do at their services. Here is how Dr. Scott Hahn, a former protestant minister, describes his first visit to a Catholic Mass.
"There I stood, a man incognito, a Protestant minister in plainclothes, slipping into the back of a Catholic chapel in Milwaukee to witness my first Mass. Curiosity had driven me there, and I still didn't feel sure that it was healthy curiosity. Studying the writings of the earliest Christians, I'd found countless references to "the liturgy," "the Eucharist," "the sacrifice." For those first Christians, the Bible - the book I loved above all - was incomprehensible apart from the event that today's Catholics called "the Mass."
"I wanted to understand the early Christians; yet I'd had no experience of Liturgy. So I persuaded myself to go and see, as a sort of academic exercise, but vowing all along that I would neither kneel nor take part in idolatry."
I took my seat in the shadows, in a pew at the very back of that basement chapel. Before me were a goodly number of worshipers, men and women of all ages. Their genuflections impressed me, as did their apparent concentration in prayer. Then a bell rang, and they all stood as the priest emerged from a door beside the altar.
Unsure of myself, I remained seated. For years, as an evangelical Calvinist, I'd been trained to believe that the Mass was the ultimate sacrilege a human could commit. The Mass, I had been taught, was a ritual that purported to "resacrifice Jesus Christ." So I would remain an observer. I would stay seated, with my Bible open beside me.
As the Mass moved on, however, something hit me. My Bible wasn't just beside me. It was before me - in the words of the Mass! One line was from Isaiah, another from Psalms, another from Paul. The experience was overwhelming. I wanted to stop everything and shout, "Hey, can I explain what's happening from Scripture? This is great!" Still, I maintained my observer status. I remained on the sidelines until I heard the priest pronounce the words of consecration: "This is My body . . . This is the cup of My blood."
Then I felt all my doubt drain away. As I saw the priest raise that white host, I felt a prayer surge from my heart in a whisper: "My Lord and my God. That's really you!"
I was what you might call a basket case from that point. I couldn't imagine a greater excitement than what those words had worked upon me. Yet the experience was intensified just a moment later, when I heard the congregation recite: "Lamb of God . . . Lamb of God . . . Lamb of God," and the priest respond, "This is the Lamb of God . . ." as he raised the host. In less than a minute, the phrase "Lamb of God" had rung out four times. From long years of studying the Bible, I immediately knew where I was. I was in the Book of Revelation, where Jesus is called the Lamb no less than twenty-eight times in twenty-two chapters. I was at the marriage feast that John describes at the end of that very last book of the Bible. I was before the throne of heaven, where Jesus is hailed forever as the Lamb. I wasn't ready for this, though - I was at Mass!
Well, to answer your very first point....
Revelation 1:11
Saying, I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last: and, What thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches which are in Asia; unto Ephesus, and unto Smyrna, and unto Pergamos, and unto Thyatira, and unto Sardis, and unto Philadelphia, and unto Laodicea.
Huh? He was married to a Catholic, but that was as Catholic as he got.
After the Gunpowder Plot, his tolerance noticeably dropped.
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The Apocalypse, or Revelation to John, the last book of the Bible, is one of the most difficult to understand because it abounds in unfamiliar and extravagant symbolism, which at best appears unusual to the modern reader. Symbolic language, however, is one of the chief characteristics of apocalyptic literature, of which this book is an outstanding example. Such literature enjoyed wide popularity in both Jewish and Christian circles from ca. 200 B.C. to A.D. 200.
This book contains an account of visions in symbolic and allegorical language borrowed extensively from the Old Testament, especially Ezekiel, Zechariah, and Daniel. Whether or not these visions were real experiences of the author or simply literary conventions employed by him is an open question.
Again, thank you for the commentary which simply does not apply.
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Oh my! I must go toss my “protestant bible” in the trash this minute! :-) My Bible is just as true as the Catholic one BTW! Bless you anyway!
> Well, to answer your very first point....
I think his point is that Jesus himself personally did not write, nor command his disciples to write, any of the New Testament.
The Revelation of St John was physically written by St John. The verses you cite are self-referential and aren’t much help in disproving his point. St-John-said-Jesus-said-write isn’t quite as convincing an argument as Jesus saying it or writing it Himself personally.
As it happens, I don’t have a problem with the verses you cite being self-referential, because I believe that the New Testament was Inspired. Christ’s ministry only lasted 3.5 years, and it was a very busy 3.5 years, so there would have been little time to do any writing.
The closest that He came to writing was when He traced in the sand, during the matter of the woman taken in Adultry.
My Bible is just as true as the Catholic one.But sadly incomplete and in places rewritten to conform to the passions of the moment.
Thanks Lady, good post!
“(Insert usual long retort before someone who is looking to get offended calls me an anti-Catholic and ignores my arguments)”
There, saved me and the usual three or four Catholics a bunch of time.
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