So does Daniel. The term itself was messianic, but not necessarily predicitng Christ. Those who want to see Christ in it see Christ. Those who don't, don't. Obviously, many early Christians did, but then again early Christianity was not unified any more than it is today. There was a "core" of orthodox Christians surrounded by various sects and cults, and there was fierce competition between them. They all used scriptures in a futile attempt to "prove" each other wrong.
Evidence of heresies is known from +Ignatius' epistles c. 105, AD and from +Irenaeus' life-defining struggle against them in the latter half of the 2nd century.
The term itself, the Son of Man, the Son of God, and the Elect One, in Judaism is never associated with God. Jewish messiah is human, form the the tribe of Judah, of davidic genealogy, a favorite of God, but not divine. The terms listed above are standard Old Testament terminology used for angels and kings.
By the 2nd century, there were some 200 manuscripts of every kind circulating the area, all of them pretending to be of "apostolic" or some prophetic origin. None of them had a seal of authenticity or copyright, including the Gospels.
That various local churches read many, if not most, of them at one time or another is only proves that, if the Spirit does lead, He does not lead individuals but the whole Church.
The "core" of the Church never gave in to heresy although at times orthodoxy was a distinct minority. Arguing that just because some (not all), even if most, used 1 Enoch as scriptural, doesn't make it scripture. When the Church as a whole decided on the Christian canon, 1 Enoch was not one of them. But 1 Enoch was no singled out.
The Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermes are found in the oldest complete Chritsian Bible, Codex Sinaiticus, so there is no reason to believe that similar books were not read everywhere else under the same bishop.
The Church is where the bishop is (eucharistically), but no bishop is the Church! The entire canonization of the Christian Bible shows that, on the individual level, there was no Spiritual guidance. Books were "horse traded" as Forest Keeper says (i.e. Hebrews and Revelation) as a matter of compromise which hardly smacks of divine infallibility.
Yet all major Christian sects and even cults accept the canonization decided by the Church, even though they deny the authority of the same!
When the Church canonized the Cristian Bible, it may or may not have done sone under the guidence of the Spirit. Those who accept it as an infallible collection of "true" books assume it was, but there is no proof of this at all since the canon was neither complete nor universalliy accepted by the Church, and has sincde the official cnaonization undergone further changes and rejections of individual parts.
Your own site shows that the Galasian list of canonized books includes only one letter to Corinthians! Obviously, 2 Corinthians was not part of the canon by the 6th century!
The (third) Council of Carthage that canonized the Bible lists only 13 epsitles of Paul. Somone, at a later date (had to be after the 6th century, considering the date of the Galasian Decree), added a footnote to the Carthagenian Council saying that there were 14 epsitles of Paul!. Hmmmmm.
What most people do not want to see or hear is that the Bible is a travesty of human manipulation and bickering and fraud, full of editing and transcribing errors, and personal whims.
This must be devastating to most people discover (I know if twas for me) and their firts reaction (quite understably), when faced with this truth, is denial and outrage. But the ulitmate test of our faith is in dealing with this reality, and remembering that it is not the bible that gives us faith!
As far as you revealing the date of Decretum Galesianum, which I find curious as to the timing, my argument was about the so-called Damascine list, which is a fraud and which is included in the Galasian Decree as genuine. The Damascene list could not have been attributed to Damascus I, the Boshop of Rome, in 366 AD, as you alleged in your previous post. So, since there is no credibility whatsoever to the list itself or to anything in that document.
But I find it curious, if not surprising, that you would roam such sites, as the Gnostic Tertullian.org, to use as a genuine source of reliable information. It's quite telling.
As Mad Dawg observed, burning books is deplorable by our modern standards, and so is burning people at stake, and so is slavery. But perceptions change all the time and applying the same standards to the ancients as we do to ourselves today is naïve at best, if not outright ridiculous, or dead wrong.
The bigotry of the early Church vis-a-vis the Jews is glaring, and what Martin Luther had to say about them is unthinkable. In those days, however, it was "politically correct."
So, your indignation at book burning might as well extend to all the evils done by human beings all the way up to the present, including our own "potiically correct" standards.
My objection to all of you Bible quoters is that faith is yours and yours only. It is your reality, whether it is real or not in the absolute sense. If you find "proof" or profit in the Bible, so be it, but do not push your faith on anyone, as faith is neither provable nor disprovable.
It is how you live and what you do that tells more about your faith than all the words we have poured out in these forums. So, please do not inundate me with bible quotes unles absolutely necessary. It turns me off because, no matter how you look at it, in the end it is still a human choice. The first thing to relaize, when eschewing all traditions of men, is to start wiht your own.
But truly, I will not respond to "strawmen." I never raised issue with the canon or the canonization process or with Tertullian.
My point was an academic one - whenever the Catholic/Orthodox Church claims that everyone everywhere believed thus and so, that claim is empty because of their own actions (or inactions) in eliminating from the historical record the documents which evidence beliefs the earliest Christians held but that the powers that be in the Church did not hold.
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law. - Galatians 5:22-23
I am the vine, ye [are] the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing. – John 15:5
And my speech and my preaching [was] not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. – I Corinthians 2:1-5
But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God. – I Cor 1:24
My response to anyone making such requests is “no dice.” My words are moot and thus, spare – the words of God are powerful and effective. Those of us who love God have a duty to convey them. The sower sows even though the words of God do not always fall on fertile ground (Parable of the Sower, Matthew 13.)
For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper [in the thing] whereto I sent it. - Isaiah 55:10-11
So when they had dined, Jesus saith to Simon Peter, Simon, [son] of Jonas, lovest thou me more than these? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love thee. He saith unto him, Feed my lambs. He saith to him again the second time, Simon, [son] of Jonas, lovest thou me? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love thee. He saith unto him, Feed my sheep. He saith unto him the third time, Simon, [son] of Jonas, lovest thou me? Peter was grieved because he said unto him the third time, Lovest thou me? And he said unto him, Lord, thou knowest all things; thou knowest that I love thee. Jesus saith unto him, Feed my sheep. Verily, verily, I say unto thee, When thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry [thee] whither thou wouldest not. This spake he, signifying by what death he should glorify God. And when he had spoken this, he saith unto him, Follow me. – John 21:15-19
Kosta, may we never forget your post. It is Eastern Orthodoxy in a nutshell.
It's sad that the centuries long antagonism between the East and Latin churches seems to be converging in the mysticism that riddled the early church. The great contradiction, of course, is that you toss out the charge of "gnosticism" with every post, while it's the Eastern church that encouraged gnosticism and entombed it within its doctrines and liturgy.
Here's an excellent synopsis by Douglas Wilson regarding our different starting points...
Some years ago some colleagues and I had occasion to criticize various aspects of the Eastern Orthodox Church in print. Aside from all the expected disagreements, and the back and forthing that goes on after such things, a remarkable thing became apparent to us in the exchanges that we had. The Eastern Orthodox do not really know how to argue. And this is said, not as an insult, but simply as an observation. Given the profound differences between East and West, I am not even sure they would take this as a slighting comment. I would not be surprised if they took the western zeal for argumentation as a central part of our problem. By way of contrast, historic Protestants have deep and abiding differences with the Roman Catholic Church which cannot be papered over with ecumenical position papers. But the disagreements that remain between Rome and Geneva still show that the participants on both sides of the debate retain something in common. They are both heirs of the western mind; they both share a common approach to argument. He would be a foolhardy man who maintained that a Jesuit did not know how to argue a theological point. This is not the case at all with the Eastern Orthodox. In order to argue anything, a man has to be able to say this, not that, here, not there, A, not not A. In short, he has to be able to make distinctions. So argumentation depends entirely on this, and distinctions in their turn depend on having an ultimate ground for making distinctions. In the historic Protestant view, the ultimate and greatest distinction that must be maintained at all times is the distinction between the Creator and the creature. This divide is an ontological chasm, which keeps clear the utter and complete differences between necessary and contingent, infinite and finite, Maker and made. This ultimate distinction provides us with the basis we need to justify the process of argument, and is an assumption which Protestants and Catholics share. So the point being made here is not that the Eastern Orthodox do not know how to argue because they did not have debating classes in high school or college. Neither is any question being raised about intelligence or education -- the issue rather is the uses to which intelligence and education are put. In the East, careful debate is not valued, and the reason for this is an idea which had a profound consequence. The Eastern Church blurs the ultimate distinction between Creator and creature with their doctrine of theosis, or deification. That doctrine is critiqued elsewhere in this issue, and so it should be sufficient here simply to point out that when the Eastern Orthodox argue for an ontological union between man and God's energies, they are confusing the one thing that must not be confused. We maintain, in contrast, that our union with Christ is a covenantal union, not a union of natures. Blurring distinctions between Creator and creature leads necessarily to blurring distinctions within the Godhead. The doctrine of the Trinity is foundational to all coherent and sustained thought -- and this doctrine of theosis has to threaten the doctrine of the Trinity in its implications. We in the Church cannot be deified without creating an imbalance in the relations or processions of the divine Persons, and without creating troubling questions about the Church as an aspiring fourth Person in the Quaternity. The implications of this line of thought place the Eastern Church at variance, not only with Scripture, but also with the early ecumenical creeds. But there I go, arguing . . . My point here is not to show that they are wrong in their assumption, but rather that the assumption they make is inconsistent with sustained theological argumentation. This in its turn explains a host of consequences -- the Eastern Orthodox Church is still here because of inertia and authority. It is not really a missionary faith; it does not readily go anywhere where argument might be required. Preaching, proselytizing, apologetics, evangelism -- all these are impossible to conceive apart from argument. Those modern evangelicals who are drawn eastward are not drawn by argument; rather they are attracted by antiquity, beauty, and authority, and repelled by the apparent lack of such things in the monkey house that we call contemporary evangelicalism. But if such a pilgrim asks the question, "How do we know this is true?", the answer is entirely out of argument's reach. In the Eastern view, doctrinal truth is established by the uniform consensus of the Church throughout all time. The only problem with this is that history is not yet done. We do not yet know what the Church throughout all ages has said. Suppose we have another twenty-thousand years ahead of us. We see yet another failure to make distinctions. But in seeing this failure, and any others like it, we have to remember the source of it.""Ideas have very pointed consequences, and very particular destinations. One of the best illustrations of this is the profound differences that have developed between the western Church and the eastern Church. Those differences are not merely "doctrinal," but reveal two completely different mindsets, two different paradigms. And all because ideas have consequences.
The more I read about Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, the more I am persuaded that at the heart of the errors contained in these churches is a love of monasticism. These churches prefer and thus venerate the asexual, monastic life to the life of the family. Which is actually a pretty scary point of view.
It encourages secrecy and brotherhood over transparency and liberty and the family structure God has instituted among His children.
It is the love of an icon over and above the love of that which the icon stands for. It is pretense over substance. Illusion over truth. Vapor over substance. It is believing in the "human choice" and not in God's choice. It is being "turned off" to the words of God.
I pray that God will turn you on to His words, Kosta.
"It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." -- John 6:63
But how can that be when the Gospels say:
Luke 24:44 : He said to them, "This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms."
John 5:45-47 : 45 "But do not think I will accuse you before the Father. Your accuser is Moses, on whom your hopes are set. 46 If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. 47 But since you do not believe what he wrote, how are you going to believe what I say?"
You are only speaking of those who didn't know their own faith. True Judaism saw Christ coming.
Books were "horse traded" as Forest Keeper says (i.e. Hebrews and Revelation) as a matter of compromise which hardly smacks of divine infallibility.
Well, I said that in criticism of the idea. :) I don't agree that actually happened by the independent actions of men for a minute. I maintain that God was fully in control of the whole thing.
Yet all major Christian sects and even cults accept the canonization decided by the Church, even though they deny the authority of the same! When the Church canonized the Christian Bible, it may or may not have done so under the guidance of the Spirit.
An example from my last post to you, MD.