Posted on 11/24/2009 4:10:44 PM PST by NYer
Statistics released Nov. 24 by the FBI show hate crimes against religious groups increased by 9% from 2007 to 2008.
USA Today reported that in 2008, there 1,519 incidents against people based on their religion, the statistics show.
The figures reveal that while anti-Jewish attacks made up the highest percentage of the attacks (17%), there was an increase in hate crimes against Catholics — 75, up from 61 in 2007.
Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, said the increase may be due to the Church becoming more vocal on life issues such as abortion and homosexual unions.
As the Catholic bishops take a stronger stance, he said, it filters down to the laity, and as more traditional Catholics become more vocal, they become targets for those who disagree with them.
“Unfortunately, it spills over into violence,” he said, adding that it’s just going to get worse before it gets better.
“I’ve never seen our country so culturally divided and so polarized,” he said. “These issues are not going away.”
I believe it is more a matter of custom and history. “Author” didn’t mean what it does today. People didn’t write books, affix their name and claim authorship, and there was less “ownership” of the same as well as people recording what others had said without claiming authorship or ghost writing credit, etc. It was quite a different world.
Our concepts of this is a relatively recent occurrence as is our creation of writing “history” or “journalism”.
We have no evidence of what was written. The vast majority of people were illiterate; the educated Jews had no particular reason to write anything about Jesus except to possibly mention him as a false messiah. The traditions were almost exclusively oral. We have Paul's letters and then the rest of the NT written perhaps starting 15-20 years after Jesus Ascended. The point is that most of the new Christians were convinced that Jesus would come again in their lifetimes and didn't bother with writings (those who could) until it became apparent that the second coming would be at some point far in the future.
That could be why we have so many “partial” manuscripts and why the originals disappeared after so much use and travel most any kind of scroll or papyrus would have long dissolved.
For the first number of years, that was all there was.
I also said that the persons that wrote the documents we have that are called Holy Scripture, were inspired by the Holy Spirit to record them and that they did so with the intent for them to be preserved.
We believe that many people were inspired to write; that emphaticall does not mean that God wrote them. Let us go to Luke 1:
1 Since many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the events that have been fulfilled among us, 2 just as those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning and ministers of the word have handed them down to us, 3 I too have decided, after investigating everything accurately anew, to write it down in an orderly sequence for you, most excellent Theophilus
There were many Gospels and many people inspired to write. Only four Gospels and the rest of what we refer to as the NT now made it into Scripture. The rest of them were rejected, including such as the Gospel of Peter, the Acts of Peter and Paul, the Shepherd of Hermas etc, some of which made it right up to the final cut.
The oral re-telling, probably was written down by many as even the lowly fishermen that Jesus chose became literate in time. :o)
Correct. Eventually the illerate fisherman Simon became the writer Peter.
That could be why we have so many “partial” manuscripts and why the originals disappeared after so much use and travel most any kind of scroll or papyrus would have long dissolved.
Let us not forget that there were many versions of the same writings which differed from each other either inadvertently, or deliberately.
That is not entirely true D-fendr. We have plenty of Jewish, Christian, Gnostic and other writings where the author identifies himself by name. Whether the author really was the person identified (autography) or not (pseudoepigraphy) or whether the name was invented (pseudonymous) is another issue.
Let me just say that pseudoepigraphy is quite common in ancient manuscripts and is the major reasoning for re-examning many traditionally held beliefs, with potentially unforeseeable if not disastrous consequences.
Consider for a moment the Book of Hebrews, which the the Western Church resisted almost as much as the Eastern Church resisted the the Book of Revelation. The only reason the book of Hebrews made it into the canon was the mistaken and falsely traditional belief that it was written by Apostle Paul!
Most Christians, of course, never get to know this and presume that the Bible was always the way it is now and that everything in it is authenticated by the Holy Spirit. Does "ignorance is bliss" somehow get any more blatant – and disappointing at the same time?
Although the author does not claim to be Paul, and is therefore not technically a pseudoepigraphical source, it was assumed to be his. And, despite the fact to the contrary, it is retained in the Bible as an inspired work although it is doubtful that it would have been had it not been assumed to be apostolic in origin.
We also have the examples of Revelation, of 1, 2, 3 John and 1 and 2 Peter, as true psuedoepigraphical sources which are retained as inspired simply because the Church decided they were written by the Apostles.
Append this to the anonymous Gospels, and what do you have left of the whole New Testament that's not somewhat doubtful? Not much. Jude, James, and seven out of 13 Pauline Epistles.
Jude has its own problems as far as being an apostolic work, and James was not accepted until the 3rd century. After all, James was not an apostle (even though Paul calls him that!), so what would compel the early Church to consider it 'inspired?' And out of 13 Pauline Epistles, the authorship of six is questioned or outright rejected by biblical scholars.
The authorship of the Gospels was accepted on faith as a matter of fact by all Christians until the 19th century, when serious textual analysis and other scientific evidence revealed much of that tradition to be in error.
Most Christians to this date do not know and have never been told that Gospels were written anonymously and that it was the Catholic Church, whose authority many Christians reject, that assigned the authorship to them at the beginning of the 3rd century.
Nevertheless, the factual anonymity of the Gospels is kept hushed as much as possible for obvious reasons, since they are central to Christian scripture and belief, and because it has been accepted blindly by all and continues to be peddled as fact even though it has been exposed as a tradition of men for more than a century now.
This only shows the tenacity of tradition. In fact, even the Protestants in general firmly believe, and Protestant communities continue to teach, that those were the actual authors, even though that belief has now been shown to be groundless, or at least seriously doubtful for quite some time.
Protestants like to say that if something isn't in the Bible it has no authority. Of course, just because something is in the Bible doesn't mean it was in the Bible all along. So, while the Bibles contain the authorship of the Gospels, that is something that wasn't always in those manuscripts, which means that what you are reading as the "word of God" may just be the words of men.
It never occurs to an average believer that someone could have added something into the Bible that wasn't there all along! Actually, the evidence to the contrary is stupendous and overwhelming!
My point is that now that we know the Gospels were originally not identified by the author, it is clear that all Protestant Bibles that have their Gospels identified as "The Gospel according to...[author's name]" are following the tradition of men.
I should have added that to my characterization. I might see, or remember, the history slightly differently. My memory is that putting the name "Joe" to something a writer, say "Fred," was penning was not considered wrong or theft if it was Joe's words that he was recording.
Authorship in general was not what we think of today. A writer could leave the name off or put the name of whose work or teaching he was telling. I believe it was considered worse to put one's own name to it in these cases.
I addition so much of these biblical and other works started as oral histories and we have "as told to as told to as told to" attributions required for complete accuracy.
I believe one of the main things the NT books have going for them in this regard is they are written much closer to the actual events than other writings - relatively of course.
I want to emphasize again that our view of "history" as a field or endeavor of writing is not much known at this time. We have to be somewhat careful reading our assumptions of biography or non-fiction back into these works.
You get a lot wrong from not knowing much about Protestant thought.
“The only reason the book of Hebrews made it into the canon was the mistaken and falsely traditional belief that it was written by Apostle Paul!”
Actually, it was known all along that Paul may not have written it. Many church fathers rejected Paul’s authorship, and Jerome was one. Luther thought it was Apollo, and it was one of several books he thought might not belong in the canon. Calvin rejected Pauline authorship. Others suspect Barnabas.
A dissenting view can be found here:
http://www.studylight.org/com/jfb/view.cgi?book=heb&chapter=000
It was not accepted because Paul wrote it.
“Most Christians to this date do not know and have never been told that Gospels were written anonymously and that it was the Catholic Church, whose authority many Christians reject, that assigned the authorship to them at the beginning of the 3rd century.”
Wrong again.Protestants know full well they are anonymous, and discuss possible authors in commentaries. Many of us have study bibles, with introductions to each book - and those almost always have a few sentences about authorship. The Sunday School curriculum put out via the SBC (but not used by all Baptists, since we are all independent) covers 1-2 books each quarter, and always includes a discussion on who wrote it.
“In fact, even the Protestants in general firmly believe, and Protestant communities continue to teach, that those were the actual authors, even though that belief has now been shown to be groundless, or at least seriously doubtful for quite some time.”
Actually, there are good arguments in their favor, as well as some against. Get a good commentary and read at your leisure.
I’m looking at the intro to Hebrews from the NIV, its says:
“Although the author of Hebrews is unknown, this book was probably written in the late A.D. 60’s...”. It did not stop me from accepting it as part of the Word of God. It’s in there because the Lord WANTED it in there.
Nice try, except those who open the Bible believing every "i" and "t" in it is the pristine "word of God" will also believe the "according to Mark" means that it was truly Mark (for God doesn't lie!), the follower of Peter, who wrote it.
Calling it the "First" or "A" Gospel would not lead to such erroneous belief. Those Gospel titles are misleading and most Christians have never heard that Gospels are anonymous writings.
For and against what? That they are anonpnymous? There is nothing to discuss—they are anonymous, which means we don't know who wrote them and therefore cannot place a misleading title identifying them as being written by anyone in particular.
If the Gospel titles said "Gospel believed by the early Church to be according to Matthew" or "Gospel allegedly according to Matthew" would do much to dispel false beliefs that most Christians have that those books were really written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
Now, we have know about the anonymity of the Gospels for quite some time (over 100 years) and we continue to name Gospels according to the names picked by the Church 1700 years ago.
And Mark seems to have poor knowledge of the geography of his alleged Palestinian homeland. His works also include a number of latinizations. John's Gospel is too sophisticated theologically and language-wise (better than Paul's who native language was Greek), etc. We have already discussed the issue with Jesus making a pun with the form "from above" which would make sense only in Greek but not in Aramaic.
There is external evidence
What external evidence?
The Hebrews would have not been accepted had they not been assumed to be Pauline. Only apostolic works were accepted. Now that we know it is not Pauline, why is it still in the Bible? Simple: because it would mean the Church was wrong. It would means the theology built on that book is invalid. It would cats doubt on the credibility of the Bible as a pristine "word of God", etc.
The Christians did not go up in arms when they finally admitted that Comma Ioahanneum and the Pericope Adulterae were forgeries. No, they just quietly removed them form subsequent editions while still maintaining that God made sure not an iota has been corrupted, because once you do the unraveling of the Bible myth becomes unstoppable.
And what would all the Bible thumpers do for a living if they couldn't peddle the Bible as the word of God? Flip hamburgers? I can just see Joel osteen and his prima donna "preacher" wife flipping hamburgers...
No one on the Protestant side says "titles traditionally accepted" or "Gospels allegedly according to...". Every Protestant (inlcuidng you) I had the pleasure to discuss anything regarding the Bible with always said "Matthew says this..." or "Mark says that" or "John says..." indicating by their manner of presnetation that there was no doubt in thier mninds who the authors are.
If they don't think it is settled by the authority of the Catholic Church, as oyu cliam they don't, then they sure act as if it were.
The first part is from Deuter 25:4, the second part is found in Luke and appears to be a common expression. We also find in Matthew 10:10 "the worker is worthy of his support" and in one form or another in Leviticus 19:13, and Deut 24:15.
It doesn't mean that Paul is quoting from Luke! It is quite possible that both heard the expression and used it, since Luke was accompanying Paul for a time being. The verse is separated into two sentences by the famous Greek και (and), which separates it from the first part—which is identified as scriptural.
The only "scriptures" Paul and Gospel authors mention is the OT. We also know that Gospels, written after Pauline Epistles, never quote from Paul as scripture.
So Luke was quoted in 1 Timothy as scripture
No he wasn't. The only thing that is quoted in Luke and Timothy is the same popular expression, which appears in one way or another in Matthew as well as in the OT.
That is your belief. You don't know that for sure,m unless you can prove it! What we do know is that it's in the Bible because the Church erroneously believed it was apostolic in origin.
Of course, we can attribute everything to God, including natural disasters, famines, and injustice; who's is going to prove it otherwise. Claiming that it is is no proof. It's a speculation.
Yes, of course. Most history in those days were narratives based on narratives. And we know what happens when we have a group of people and we give the first person a simple fact and let every person pass it on to the next person. By the time you come to the last person the story doesn't even resemble the original.
Why don't you tell us why it was accepted? The Church accepted it on belief that it was Pauline in origin. The criteria for anything to be accepted as "inspired" was that it had to be identifiably apostolic in authorship. There were plenty of anonymous or known forgeries which were rejected.
The text of the canonization of the Christian Bible based on the III African Council in Carthage in 397 AD states somewhat strangely "thirteen Epistles of the Apostle Paul, one epistle of the same [writer] to the Hebrews."
Wrong again.Protestants know full well they are anonymous, and discuss possible authors in commentaries
Well, if they know they are anonymous, then they cannot quote them as being Mark's, Matthews', John's, or Luke's can they? It's deceiving. You may have good arguments for or against, but as long we don't know, it is a lie to present them as if we know the authors. And Christians shouldn't peddle a lie.
1 Corinthians 1:22-25 (New American Standard Bible)
For indeed Jews ask for signs and Greeks search for wisdom;
but we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness,
but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
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