Posted on 10/07/2005 8:38:02 AM PDT by Caleb1411
"I don't think so, but then again, I'm not a Christian."
What does being a Christian or not have to do with it?
If God is powerless, he's not God so why bother with religion of ANY sort?
As to your other point, I am pulling the pre-Nicaea documents that refer to the Catholic Church, per your request.
My request of you is that you produce the documents whereby you can establish that the Church prior to Nicaea was NOT the Catholic Church, that the bishops who assembled there were not Catholic bishops.
Indeed, I would ask you to define what "Catholic" means, in the perspective you are using it.
What you have said, in effect, is that there was an original Christian religion, the Ebionites, and that the Catholic Church was made up out of whole-cloth in 325 AD.
I have already referred you to one key document: Bishop Eusebius' "History of the Church", much of which was written long before Nicaea. So, there is your first pre-Nicaean document establishing that the Church already existed, well, besides Paul's letter to Timothy.
LOL! Is this article really true?
Deliberately mistranslating the Bible. That's something else.
It sounds like 4kids got a hold of the bible.
Correct. A translation must faithfully replicate the original language and the author's intent. This pro-queer bit of lunacy is no Bible at all. It is nothing but a modernist abomination.
No, not wrong about Eusebius.
Do yourself a favor, get a copy, and read the historical notes at the front of it.
He began his work on his history of the Church in the 290s, in his mid- to late-20s.
Obviously the final chapters, in which he extols Constantine to high heaven etc. were not completed until Constantine took power. But that the later parts of the history were written after Constantine does change the earlier provenance of the earlier parts.
That there were many Christian sects is indisputably true.
And that the Catholic Church struggled against those other sects, or - if you prefer - was one of many sects and just ended up being the one that won out, is also true. But that particular shoot that became "the Romans" (I would dispute that. The Roman Catholic Church is only the Western, Latin Church. The Eastern Rites of the Catholic Church, such as the Marionites, are very ancient, very Catholic, and not a bit "Roman") was one of them that was there from the beginning.
If you are arguing that the Catholic Church was not really "catholic" (because there were many sects, because persecuted, etc.), and that the assertion that IT was the orthodox branch of Christianity and all others were heresies was its own propaganda - that is a position that can be debated, I think. I think that, once examined, it will prove to have been the BIGGEST of the various sects, but that would not vitiate the basic point that there were other Christian sects going all the way back to the First Century. I won't dispute that, because it's true.
But you seem to be saying that that which became the Catholic Church (as you define it), the root of orthodoxy (as the Catholics would define it) was NOT an original Christian sect, did NOT date from the First Century, and did not always claim that it was the true orthodox and catholic Church. Thus the assertion: "The Catholic Church did not exist until the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD."
To me, that sounds like the Catholic Church was a confection made up out of wholecloth in the early 300s, and that's not the case.
But I suppose we can save that discussion until I have provided you the references.
I can already see where this is going to go, though.
Your absolute assertion "WRONG!" on Eusebius, followed up by the assertion that Eusebius wrote everything in his history post-Nicaea, is going to no doubt be the pattern.
But,you know what? Even if Eusebius wrote every word post-Nicaea (he didn't, but even if he did) - he was still writing about the centuries before. Unless your assertion is that he made everything up, made up all the history, made up all the documents he referred to (many of which we do not have today) - made up everything out of whole cloth, and that this complete novelistic confection was accepted because everyone had massive amnesia and he was able to write history on a blank slate...well...you know that's bunkum.
At this point, there's no point going back and forth on unseen documents. I need to give you the references.
Asking you to prove there was no Catholic Church is not asking you to prove a negative at all. Rather, it is asking you to produce the EQUIVALENT of Eusebius for other Christian sects, the sort of detailed, continuous history that shows that they were there, robust and long-lasting.
To take a different time period, nobody can dispute that there was a Catholic Church in the 1500s. But also nobody can dispute that there was a Lutheran Church, and that there came to be an Anglican Church, because there are extensive documents and histories from all of these religions from that period. The thick documentation tells us that there were several strong traditions.
There's good documentation for a continous Catholic community of believers going back to the time of Christ.
Which demonstrates that, whatever other sects there were or weren't, the Catholic Church was not a confection created after 325 AD.
"A translation must faithfully replicate the original language and the author's intent. This pro-queer bit of lunacy is no Bible at all. It is nothing but a modernist abomination."
And that's tough to do, because of the change of idiom, etc., over the ages, and the inaccessibility of native speakers of ancient Greek or ancient Hebrew. There are Ancient Greek and Hebrew scholars, of course, by they, too, learned these ancient languages as second languages, and don't have (and can't get) the precise cultural reference points to make a translation.
Indeed, one of the reasons why Jerome's Vulgate is such an important piece of work is that he was able to write in Latin and read the Greek within the context of the ancient cultures in which he lived that read, spoke and lived it. So, when there were choices to be made, he was actually a man of that culture, and was able to make a choice based on the internal reference point which only a native speaker, native to the culture can have. There are no native speakers of ancient Greek in the world, but even if there were, there's nobody in the world today that grew up in the Roman Empire, who simply knew directly what the inferences of things were, in that context.
In other words, a translation is but an echo, but the truth is that even if you teach yourself ancient Greek and Hebrew, you're still only getting an echo of the ancient meaning, because a learned language is still not a native language, and the mind might be able to read the ancient words directly in that language, but it still sorts out their meaning through the prism of modern experience.
I should not put too much weight on slight differences in good, scholarly translations. The problem, for example, with the old KJV versus the Douai version isn't that either of them say anything different of substance, only that there are some books not in the KJV that are in the Douai, and the relative literary quality of the KJV is higher than the Douai. Likewise, the modern Catholic NAB is no literary treasure, at all. It is blunt and does not make an effort to be linguistically inspiring (and it ISN'T).
But if you set it alongside an NIV a KJV and a Douai, all four of those things translate it straight. Some are more poetic than others, but they are not shucking and jiving.
By contrast, set the Jehovah's Witnesses' New World Bible alongside them, and you'll read that, in the beginning, the Word was with God and the word was a god, and the Word became flesh.
And that decapitalized word and that article are theological choices, not translation choices.
His followers, the Nestorians, were mainly found in the Middle East (and some Christian groups in the Middle East today derive from them). I doubt anyone in Rome ever encountered any of them, let alone threw them to the lions.
Come to think of it, I think that the Christians ended the arena business and feeding people to the lions and such, because it had been done to them so viciously.
If I remember right, there was some legal persecution (of course: there always is when things change), but the Christians didn't go for the Roman "mass-torture-as-public-entertainment" bit.
No.
I didn't check to see what state you are in, but there is within the PCUSA what is known as the Confessing Church movement. Check out the link below, and maybe there is a member church near you....
The Confessing Church Movement
(I am a member of a Confessing Church within the extremely liberal Presbytery of the Hudson River. It's good to know that not every PCUSA church is a bunch of lib wackos!)
Amen!!
Good one. I waited for a reply from Radioman. And waited. And... The shout of his reply is ... deafening ;-)
Not satire. This so called translation actually exists. The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams did write the forward. Don't know if that constitutes an endorsement or not, but I can't picture writing a forward for a work that I didn't approve of... As far as Campolo, I haven't yet found a link, but he has been getting flakier and flakier as the years go by. Here are some links to comments about this 'translation':
And this from a liberal viewpoint... Nimble Spirit
(I've never run into a liberal Mennonite before..)
Found this reference as to the Canon, worth the read...
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