This was Paul in a letter that was widely circulated outside of Rome. If you are rejecting the letters of Paul, which are the oldest manuscripts known, as falsifications by “Rome” then you really have no basis for accepting any of the NT as being a genuine record of what happened despite what you may feel about it.
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I don’t accept Paul because there is too much that smacks of corruption. For starters he was imprisoned several times by the Romans when he got into some sort of trouble, e.g., with Jews wanting to take him down. The Romans imprisoned him in a palace or other grand buildings. He was able to continue his “work”, write to whomever he wanted AND have his letters delivered for him. He was able to receive guests and mail and even gifts… In Rome he was imprisoned in the Emperor’s place at one time and another time at a very fancy address where his rent was paid for him. Now, how many prisoners do you know that have had these luxuries given to them by the people who imprison them?
However for me the biggie is the deaths of Ananias and his wife Saphira. That had to have had the Romans’ involvement and that could not have happened without Paul.
Paul, as a lot of evidence shows, was an agent of the Romans, sent to Greece in particular, to brain wash the Greeks with things like “love your enemies”, “do good to those that harm you” and “forgive your enemies”. It was done in preparation for the Romans to go to Judea and destroy it, commit near genocide and destroy the temple.
There is evidence to consider some of the NT. The things that I accept out of the NT are things that Jesus had said, which no doubt survived because they were not understood by the Romans AND they did not appear threatening.
And there are other things too. The three wise men from the East. Joseph, Jesus’s father if you don’t accept the virgin birth, was of Parthian royalty!
I don’t throw away a book in its entirety just because I have found some parts are suspect or obviously corrupted.
Read some history.
First Council of Nicaea | Description, History, Significance, & Facts | Britannica
You only need to use Google or Bing these days and the history is at your fingertips.
Yeah … and there was an earlier dude you may have heard of, that even got publicly executed as a criminal! Must have been a lot of untrustworthy figures to deal with the the empire. Good thing they were on top of that, right? Can’t let any of those corruptions take hold!
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Oh boy! Now we can get smarted up!
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How do you know Jesus actually said it? How do you know what exactly the Romans did and did not understand? Perhaps the sayings were nonthreatening because they had been changed to be more to their liking. Sorry but once you start down this path there is no end.
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I don’t think you are understanding why the temple was destroyed. Rome could have done that ANYTIME they wanted to. It happened over a Jewish taxation revolt that snowballed into full blown war.
My understanding is that the love your enemies lines in Matthew and Luke (Sermon on Mount / Plain) come from the sayings source Q, not Paul.
I do agree that the narration of Paul’s imprisonment in Acts does strain credibility. We must remember that Luke-Acts is as much theological as it is historical. We see this from the inception of Acts with the exclusive focus on Jerusalem.
Vinnie
I don’t agree with this. If we are discussing the age of the earth and you post textbook analysis and scholarly, scientific treatises on radiometric dating, and I quote Ken Ham or the “scientists” at Answers in Genesis, we don’t have just different collections of arguments. There are fringe scholars and mainstream scholars more in line with what you find consistently across academia. Pitre is not mainstream academia in his views which does posit anonymous composition. There are books with small bibliographies and a few notes and books where notes and references constitute almost half the book. I enjoy the latter.
Brant Pitre’s work is not on equal footing with the sources I use from what I have read thus far. And I acquire the references on key issues and read them and look at other issues personally. I have two of Gathercole’s articles (Pitre references him) and read both.
You know how many conservative Christians (usually superficially and uncritically) claim critical scholars are influenced by anti-miracle bias? Guess what bias all these evangelical leaning and conservative Catholic scholars have? They comb through history with theological antivirus software running in the background. They start with the assumption they should be demonstrating in their work. It all ends up being circular in the end. Yet they do know how to be critical and imaginative. Of course that usually only occurs with ideas they don’t want to believe.
Pitre’s Gospel title argument is patent nonsense and I did my best to expose it above. It is most certainly not a main stream view. Not all sources are equal, not all personal libraries are equal and not all readers assess the evidence equally and fairly. This is NT studies, where many people think their whole faith and worldview is on the line. That doesn’t lead to objective scholarship anymore than “assuming it’s all made up because it has many miracles” does.
Vinnie
I agree that it is difficult when we start to discriminate, but we can know if there is something that Jesus would have said as against something that is questionable because we can meditate on it and ask God for guidance. We can arrive at an understanding of its truth.
We also need to take into account the history of the time, the setting in which all these things took place.
Just to take a few examples, the saying:
“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. Matthew 7:7-8 NIV
Is something that Jesus would have or could have said. It takes a certain degree of spirituality to understand its meaning. I doubt that the Romans would even begin to understand it and it wouldn’t have looked like anything threatening to them.
“Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Mathew 6:10 and part of the Lord’s Prayer taught by Jesus. This would have been threatening to the Romans. They kept the words but changed history in this case.’
I doubt that Jesus ever said “Forgive them Lord for they know not what they are doing”, when he was crucified. It suits the Romans, gets them off the hook. So this could have been edited in.
There are also problems with translation.
John 13: 35 By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” The Greek for “one another” does not have the meaning of “all and sundries” but rather the connotation is “those you associate with”. So it does not mean love the criminal just as you love the righteous.
If Rome could have destroyed the temple ANYTIME, then why allow a people, who were seriously defiant to continue in this behavior? Caligula wanted his statue erected in the temple and worships as God. The Jews told him where to put his statue. The Jews were rebelling against Rome for several years, possibly with increasing intensity for 30 years. Why did they not go in there and set them straight earlier. In this post you can see that the Jews were rebellion against Roman oppression . That the World May Know | The Jewish Revolts
An incident could have snowballed it but the Romans still had to get there from Rome. So why not go there when things were not at fever point. It is unlike the Romans not to have crushed the first signs of rebellion. They didn’t. It went on for years. Meanwhile Paul’s ministry started in about 46 AD, only a few years after the Jews were seriously rebelling. I don’t see this as a coincidence.
That was just one example of the experts I accept.
You enjoy the ones you accept and not the ones you don’t. Same would apply to me.
And that isn’t his only argument.
I sense a little bit of mine is better than yours here. My point is simply everyone has their own collection of experts and it isn’t possible to prove that mine is better than yours. It is just something everyone accepts.
So it is something that Jesus might have said?
Sorry but I don’t place a lot of confidence into what you do or don’t doubt. It is basically a matter of interpretation which isn’t inspired but is human and fallible.
Of course, but then you are assuming the Greek is correct in the first place.
What I am trying to say is that we can’t just take the text and believe it is the word of God. You may want to do that but that is your decision. I don’t think it is wise to take any religious work and just assume it is infallible. We are up against our own interpretation, but that is better than taking some church / temple / whatever officials word for it. They are human too. And religion has, from ancient times, been misused by leaders, both political and religious for political reasons, for control of the people.
The NT is based on the Greek, so there again as you point out there is a problem in assuming that the Greek was correct in the first place. Then added to that is translation.
Bottom line, I see reason that the NT (and other religious texts) could have been edited to one extent or another and we can’t “know” what and how much editing there has been. It is a problem.
Why not? That is what it says it is.
It isn’t just any “religious work”. You must not have a very high opinion of the text that purports to teach you how to have eternal life.
So how do you place any trust in it at all?
And I have been told to shut up so I will.
Not going to war and not destroying the Temple was less costly and less deadly than going to war. Are you aware that Rome already owned Palestine and the Jews were under its control? They didn’t need to go to War nor did Rome want it. They wanted the Jews to continue to obey them and pay taxes. Jewish people had very strong convictions and were willing to die for their faith if they thought an outsider was trying to force them to disobey God or do something inappropriate Ron or with regard to the Temple. It’s easier for Rome to let them do their own thing and collect that money as long as they didn’t get out of line. I’m not sure I really understood your question, unless you didn’t realize Jerusalem and Palestine were already under Roman rule in the first century.
Destroying their Temple would lead to total war. Rome knew that. Squashing a limited rebellion by zealots is one thing. Inciting a war with people you are taxing is silly. Rome squashed the rebellions and crucified many insurrectionists.
Vinnie
I don’t have collections of experts. I read experts and analyze their arguments. Authors I do like sometimes make poor arguments. Authors I disagree with a lot on do make good points. It’s why my collection ranges from Earl Doherty and Burton Mack on one end, to Pitre, Bauckham and NT Wright on the other with countless moderate scholars in the middle.
Outside of an Intro to the NT, which should be a neutral survey and intro to most critical issues, you will never find anything fully agreed upon. Even something like Marcan priority has significant detractors despite convincing most of the community.
And I don’t doubt Pitre will have some
decent stuff in the book by the end. The Gospel title argument is weak sauce and has been rightly rejected by the vast majority of critical scholars since we have very few, IF ANY, manuscripts within the first 120 years of our Gospels’s existence with them inside. And in the case of things like Mark, all known editions of Mark did not have them and often the title is at the end, the beginning, the side, both the beginning and end and so on.
Those alleged 5-6,000 Greek manuscripts. I’ll let you in on a secret. The VAST MAJORITY of them are REALLY late. Look up manuscripts to the 5th century only. Maybe ~140, lots of which are fragmentary, none of which may come from the 2nd century. Two lines of a text in the third century does not textually authenticate the “New Testament” as some intellectually dishonest (or just EXTREMELY uninformed) apologists (e.g. Carm) imply. It is a textual witness of those two verses, a fraction of the NT.
Vinnie
The Canonical view of scripture accepts that the editing, as well as the original writing, of scripture was also inspired by God so that the end result was what God intended for His people to live by. Roy
I think it is a bit more complicate. What is to stop us from editing it today and calling it inspired? Do we arbitrarily pick a cutoff? We can just say the textus receptus is the inspired form if we can posit whatever we want. Some of the edits create, rather than solve problems or solve problems. Both of those are troubling for some models of inspiration.
I think a better case can be made for the overall message of the extant form of scripture during the council of Nicea as being inspired over the “autographs” which is a very questionable term for some of these works that may have been published in different versions by the original author and a few of our works have the look of collections of works out together.
I mean if God could inspire Mark, then inspire two other authors to expand and write longer versions of it a decade or two later, there is no reason to suppose he could[n’t] have made it a continued process and have someone else add a new ending to Mark and John. After Marcan priority, the possibilities of God expanding the work seem limitless.
Vinnie
“it” says it is! The text doesn’t say so. People, who wrote the text may have said so. Maybe they were inspired but maybe they were saying so only.
To be granted eternal life, i.e., immortality, one needs to walk the Path of Righteousness and be open and honest where one makes mistakes or does something wrong, have remorse, be willing to make amends without having to be brought kicking and screaming to the negotiation table, and ask for forgiveness. God is Great. God sees what we do and knows what is in our hearts. And if we are worthy God grants us immortality.
All religions of the world all lead to the same place. You can choose what is best for you to be able to worship God and practice righteousness.
I meditate on their meaning and ask for God’s guidance. I don’t trust anything blindly.
Who told you to shut up? Not me. I would advise you to speak freely, speak your mind and investigate, ask questions and never cease until you know the truth that only God can show you. Be blessed.
The Roman general Pompey showed up and conquered Jerusalem in 63 B.C.E .The Jews came under Roman control, but the Romans used local leaders to govern. And the Jews lived in captivity for around 700 odd years. In 636 CE the Romans withdrew from the area, including from Syria and Palestine after they were defeated by forces of the Rashidun Caliphate.
There were three Jewish revolts and rightly so. It is nonsense to say that X invaded your land and all you have to do is shut up and pay taxes. Of course one should be willing to fight for and die for, if need be their faith and freedom.
You don’t seem to appreciate that Jerusalem and the Jewish lands were at the gates of the Roman bread basket, in other words Egypt. In addition Judea /Palestine were a boundary on the Eastern front between Rome and the Persians. So the Romans wanted to crush the Jews into submission to secure the Eastern Front. But to do that they didn’t want to risk their Eastern Provinces. If the Egyptians, Syrians and more particularly the Greeks got involved in defending the Jews, not only to help the Jews but also to free themselves from Roman oppression, then the Romans would have lost the Eastern Provinces.
The Romans had to grin and bear for a time, until they could safely march in there to destroy the temple and massacre the Jews as they did, because they risked losing everything otherwise. Religion was used to subdue the neighboring countries. Thus the ministry, if we are to call it that, of Paul, first in Syria and then in Greece. Only after this happened were the Romans able to go and wage war against the Jews. There were three revolts of the Jews in all. Three wars in real terms. To put this in context, it is a single-minded Chihuahua fighting an aggressive Alsatian. One cannot help but admire the Jews for their courage and tenacity.