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To: SoothingDave;The_Reader_David
I think TRD and all rational folks here know you are using the name Constantine in lieu of having an actual argument. You like to try to get my goat, and any old nonsense will do.

I am in partial agreement with you. I do enjoy getting your goat. It is all for your good my son. Don't forget, I am only trying to toughen your hide so, when you grow up, you will be more suited to face the real world.

As for TRD, I don't believe he has any idea why I tweak you on Constantine. He doesn't know that I truly believe your brand of Christianity dates from the time of Constantine.
30,684 posted on 02/27/2002 1:55:43 PM PST by OLD REGGIE
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To: OLD REGGIE
I am quite well aware that some protestants try to find an imaginary "pre-Constantinian" version of Christianity which fits all their preconceived ideas about what the early Church they fancy the reformation (or the founding of their own sect) has restored. I take you to task precisely because as an Orthodox Christian I am quite well aware of what the early Church was like: It was litugical (the first Divine Liturgy, still used among the Orthodox at St. Catherine's Monastery on Mt. Sinai and once annually in Jerusalem was composed by St. James, the Brother of the Lord, first Bishop of Jerusalem--it is longer and more complex than subsequent Christain liturgies East or West). It collected the relics of martyrs for veneration (read the accounts of the martyrdom of St. Polycarp, during the persecutions before Constantine's Edict of Toleration). It was governed by councils of bishops (see Acts 15, and, for example, the condemnation of Paul of Samosata by the Holy Synod of Antioch in 268 for teaching that Jesus became the Son of God by adoption at His baptism). It met in Christian temples whenever the persecutions allowed this (both archeological evidence and historical records). It used icons (on the evidence of wall paintings in Christian catacomb churches). It was organized into diocese parallel to Roman Imperial provinces (yes, before the Peace of Constantine). It had no fixed canon of Holy Scripture: the first list of Christian sacred writings containing exactly the books of the New Testament as received by the Church occurs in a letter of St. Athanasius dating from the 360's--after the Peace of Constantine (as futher evidence the Ethiopian Monophysites have a longer New Testament Canon, including the Shepherd of Hermas, and, I believe, the Epistle of St. Clement).

Unless you have perversely decided to equate the Latin church and the Orthodox (thereby imitating the current Pope of Rome's "two lungs" rhetoric) I see no sense at all in mentioning Constantine. Or are you, perhaps a neo-Arian who resents Constantine's patronage of Nicea?

30,732 posted on 02/27/2002 8:00:41 PM PST by The_Reader_David
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