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My point was that it was in no way implying or stating an official New Testament priesthood had been instituted.

There was hardly an "office" to make something "official, a priesthood or much else. Sometimes you have to DO something before you can sit back and dope out what it was you just did.

(I live in the land of dial-up and I'm making bread as we have the conversation so I probably won't be going to other sites unless it's desperately important.)

But I hope we can all share the humor of each side telling other not to read our prejudices into the translation.

Increasingly I think there is a not only the Nominalist/materialist/empiricist v Realist/idealist (or, better, substantialist)/metaphysical difference between our weltanchauungen but also a difference in the driving metaphors of which we are barely conscious. It's kind of, maybe, sort of related to how the meaning of words like "subjective" kind of flipped about 500 years ago.

(when I talk about this stuff, think of me as a little boy playing with his masters' tools. I'm probably at least as wrong as I am right about some of this stuff.)

Here's a suggestion of what I mean. We have no problem with the idea that our reverential behavior toward Mary and the saints does not detract from our worship of God. It would seem to us that a relevant and operative comparison would be SORT OF like a healthy family where the love of husband and wife is a feature of their love for their children and vice versa. Husband and wife love each other in their children and their children in each other.

But another metaphor, which tends in a kind of Lavoisier direction is that one has only so much love, and whatever love I give to my wife is love my children don't get. AND one has only so much reverence, and the reverence I give to Mary is reverence the Trinity does not get.

And so with priesthood. For you and us Christ is the Great High Priest, the last priest necessary,and what he did "back then" was "once and for all" atonement, etc.

And so, it seems natural to you that there would be no more priestly office and all the rest, for if there were, to you that would necessarily imply that there was something lacking (τὰ ὑστερήματα τῶν θλίψεων τοῦ Χριστοῦ) in what Hebrews and, sometimes it seems,practically everything else tells is superabundantly sufficient.

But to us, the "once for all" is -- through what I glibly call "the magic of eternity" -- right now. And the priest, as we say and your side mocks, is not a priest on his own toot,but by participation in the eternal and sufficient priesthood of Christ. And the "sacrifice of the Mass" is not added (heaven forbid!) to the sacrifice of Christ. For us rather, it IS that sacrifice, SORT OF as though there were a time/space warp right there.

So, if my description of the underlying metaphors and assumptions of those who oppose us is correct, that necessarily sounds ridiculous. And often my trying to state it has met with outraged dismissal, as though it were insulting of me to waste the time of wise people with such piffle.

Now when I say "materialist"or "empiricist"I don't mean to disparage the views as if it were somehow better of me to be something in the area of a "scholastic Realist." I DO, however mean to disparage the views because I think that, while they bring awesome results in the natural sciences, they really do not apply to the things we discuss.

But in any event, it is, I think, this difference of views rather than the parsing of the tense of a Greek word which makes the problem.

/end of obscure rant. I pinged Stfassisi and Quix because I'd be interested in any remark they cared to make (as long as it is in the default font and color ...:-) )