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To: AppyPappy
Dear AppyPappy,

Just for you, I'll repeat it only once more. You are now misquoting Scriptures. It isn't "must be the husband of one wife", but "must be the husband of but one wife".

As the overwhelming majority of Christians believe this to be an upper limit on the number of wives (whether in total or concurrently - depends on who you ask), and not a requirement to be married, your assertion that your interpretation is correct is not only, at this point, unsupported, but also largely unbelieved by professed Christians throughout the world.

A bare assertion isn't even an argument. And even if you were able to muster an argument for your assertion, you still haven't told me the source of your peculiar authority to interpret Scripture.

Thanks for all your efforts,

sitetest

55 posted on 06/14/2002 7:24:28 PM PDT by sitetest
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To: sitetest
I found this from "Celibacy in the Early Church," by Stefan Heid (Ignatius Press; the original German edition was published in 1997). Following is an extended excerpt from Chapter 1:

The broad outline of the last fifty years of celibacy scholarship shows that something has occurred that not infrequently causes misunderstandings in historical research: a one-sided formulation of the question has produced one-sided answers. Scholars took the present discipline of celibacy in the Roman Catholic Church as their point of departure and searched for a pattern of clerics in the unmarried state in the first centuries. This, however, they did not find -- at any rate, not for all clerics. The question that they should have asked is whether the early Church perhaps knew a different discipline of continence. This was the approach of the older German scholarship in the nineteenth century. But that was though to have been refuted scientifically, and so these contributions were consigned to oblivion. Actually, if this deficit has not become evident already, it ought to when on looks at the Church's legislation. That is to say, according to canon law an exclusively unmarried clergy, as we know it today, existed at all only after the Council of Trent (1521-1545). Even the above-mentioned Second Lateran Council, which is repeatedly cited as the beginning of the history of celibacy, did not intend to exclude married men from holy orders; it merely declared marriages contracted after the reception of orders to be invalid (canon 7). [Emphasis added.]

As I thought, mandatory celibacy has an even shorter history than many here believe.

61 posted on 06/14/2002 7:54:30 PM PDT by sinkspur
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