Posted on 12/22/2011 1:01:18 PM PST by Cronos
We have understood that at this time Cerinthus, the author of another heresy, made his appearance. Caius, whose words we quoted above, in the Disputation which is ascribed to him, writes as follows concerning this man:From NewAdvent -
But Cerinthus also, by means of revelations which he pretends were written by a great apostle, brings before us marvelous things which he falsely claims were shown him by angels; and he says that after the resurrection the kingdom of Christ will be set up on earth, and that the flesh dwelling in Jerusalem will again be subject to desires and pleasures. And being an enemy of the Scriptures of God, he asserts, with the purpose of deceiving men, that there is to be a period of a thousand years for marriage festivals.
And Dionysius, who was bishop of the parish of Alexandria in our day, in the second book of his work On the Promises, where he says some things concerning the Apocalypse of John which he draws from tradition, mentions this same man in the following words:
But (they say that) Cerinthus, who founded the sect which was called, after him, the Cerinthian, desiring reputable authority for his fiction, prefixed the name. For the doctrine which he taught was this: that the kingdom of Christ will be an earthly one.
And as he was himself devoted to the pleasures of the body and altogether sensual in his nature, he dreamed that that kingdom would consist in those things which he desired, namely, in the delights of the belly and of sexual passion, that is to say, in eating and drinking and marrying, and in festivals and sacrifices and the slaying of victims, under the guise of which he thought he could indulge his appetites with a better grace.
These are the words of Dionysius. But Irenæus, in the first book of his work Against Heresies, gives some more abominable false doctrines of the same man, and in the third book relates a story which deserves to be recorded. He says, on the authority of Polycarp, that the apostle John once entered a bath to bathe; but, learning that Cerinthus was within, he sprang from the place and rushed out of the door, for he could not bear to remain under the same roof with him. And he advised those that were with him to do the same, saying, Let us flee, lest the bath fall; for Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is within.
During the fourth and fifth centuries the tendency to exclude the Apocalypse from the list of sacred books continued to increase in the Syro-Palestinian churches. Eusebius expresses no definite opinion. He contents himself with the statement: "The Apocalypse is by some accepted among the canonical books but by others rejected"
St. Cyril of Jerusalem does not name it among the canonical books (Catechesis IV.33-36); nor does it occur on the list of the Synod of Laodicea, or on that of Gregory of Nazianzus. Perhaps the most telling argument against the apostolic authorship of the book is its omission from the Peshito, the Syrian Vulgate.
Sorry Cronos.
Per Paul, Jesus destroys the beast, the man of sin, the son of perdition with His breath at His second coming.
That hasn’t happened yet.
VERY INTERESTING!!!!!!! THANKS!!!!
To a preterist ... EVERYTHING happened in 70 AD.
Bookmark for further reading. Thank you for posting.
The key to interpreting the book of Apocalypse is Apocalypse 17:8-14
8 “The beast that you saw was, and is not, and is about to come up out of the abyss and [g]go to destruction. And those who dwell on the earth, whose name has not been written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, will wonder when they see the beast, that he was and is not and will come. 9 Here is the mind which has wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman sits, 10 and they are seven kings; five have fallen, one is, the other has not yet come; and when he comes, he must remain a little while. 11 The beast which was and is not, is himself also an eighth and is one of the seven, and he goes to destruction. 12 The ten horns which you saw are ten kings who have not yet received a kingdom, but they receive authority as kings with the beast for one hour. 13 These have one [h]purpose, and they give their power and authority to the beast.the coinage with images was part of this "mark of the beast" and remember that Emperor Caligula
note the 7 heads, the 7 Emperors, out of which 5 "have fallen": Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero
The seventh "is not yet come. But when he does, his reign will remain short" - that is Domitian, who ruled 2 years (the 6th and 7th heads were Vespasian and Titus respectively
The evangelist John has spoken of these two resurrections in the book which is called the Apocalypse, but in such a way that some Christians do not understand the first of the two, and so construe the passage into ridiculous fancies. For the Apostle John says in the foresaid book, And I saw an angel come down from heaven. . . . Blessed and holy is he that has part in the first resurrection: on such the second death has no power; but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with Him a thousand years.Those who, on the strength of this passage, have suspected that the first resurrection is future and bodily, have been moved, among other things, specially by the number of a thousand years, as if it were a fit thing that the saints should thus enjoy a kind of Sabbath-rest during that period, a holy leisure after the labors of the six thousand years since man was created, and was on account of his great sin dismissed from the blessedness of paradise into the woes of this mortal life, so that thus, as it is written, One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day, 2 Peter 3:8 there should follow on the completion of six thousand years, as of six days, a kind of seventh-day Sabbath in the succeeding thousand years; and that it is for this purpose the saints rise, viz., to celebrate this Sabbath. And this opinion would not be objectionable, if it were believed that the joys of the saints in that Sabbath shall be spiritual, and consequent on the presence of God; for I myself, too, once held this opinion.
But, as they assert that those who then rise again shall enjoy the leisure of immoderate carnal banquets, furnished with an amount of meat and drink such as not only to shock the feeling of the temperate, but even to surpass the measure of credulity itself, such assertions can be believed only by the carnal. They who do believe them are called by the spiritual Chiliasts, which we may literally reproduce by the name Millenarians. It were a tedious process to refute these opinions point by point: we prefer proceeding to show how that passage of Scripture should be understood.
Peter & Paul were Jewish who followed Messiah in the keeping and teaching of Torah. The doctrine of Christendom rejects Torah.
to be judge of the living and of the dead.and 2 Tim 4:1 I charge thee, before God and Jesus Christ, who shall judge the living and the dead, by his coming, and his kingdom:
Jesus Christ's second coming is to judge the living and the dead, not to have an eartly kingdom -- in fact, Christ is reigning now in heaven -- reference Matt 28:18 "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me" , as Paul said in 1 cor 15:25-26 Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. -- He reigns now
Read 1 Thess 4:16-17
For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.This occurs AT the time of Christ's Second coming, not before -- there is no "Third coming"
funny!
ok, so you say. Paul says in 1 cor about himself "though not being myself under the Law," and later on contradicts the Torah's teaching on circumscision.
What you have outlined is the teachings of the Ebionites who though they accepted Jesus as the Messiah, rejected the teachings of Paul
in fact they rejected Paul as an apostate. They moved to the Hejaz region of Arabia and these are the false teachings that influenced islam.
The Talmud is usually considered part of the Torah, is it not?
Nero was not THE anti-Christ, he was AN anti-Christ. The bible says there are many anti-Christs.
If you believe that Nero was the anti-Christ, and among other things, that most of the end-time scriptures have been fulfilled, you must then believe we are living in the 1000 year reign.
Last time I checked, the world is NOT getting better, sin is rampant, and the polarization between good and evil continue.
Nor has God written Israel out of his plan. They exist in Revelation as does the Church.
I prefer my prophecies to be fulfilled in full, every jot and tittle, thank you.
God is not slack in this manner.
No. The Torah is the Word of God (the Pentateuch). The Talmud is a collection of rabbinical commentary on the Talmud.
Crap.. I mistyped - the Talmud is a collection of rabbinical commentary on the TORAH.
Nero was dead when Revelation was written.
I don’t buy the preterist position and semi-preterism is just a very front loaded version of historiscism. (that is not a criticism of semi-preterism by the way). I do think, however, the preterists make a better case for their position than the dispensationalists do theirs.
I know that the folks who wrote the books clouded meanings to protect themselves from persecution.
However, some of those books read like they were written by the Alex Jones crowd. They dance around the point teasing you...but never really come to the point.
Finally, someone points out that there’s little point for the second half of Revelation if it’s all about stuff that happened 17-27 years prior to the earliest dates John may have written it.
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