Would you include some examples? Others of different beliefs are entitled to believe whateverthey wish. If you compare the testimonies of born from above Christians with any other faith group, I think you’ll find substantial differences. Of course, anyone can make any claim she wishes. Compare them. Millions and millions and millions have shouted from their rooftops that He rose from the dead and lives inside them, forgiving them, loving them, as GOD. See what others proclaim about whomever and compare. Bart Ehrman’s life changed radically when he was born from above. He found a new hero. Discovered that love was all that. A new connection to the universe unlike anything he knew. His words. He doesn’t deny what Christ did for him and in him. Does he? It is the amount of evil in the world that he decided to turn away.
I hope I’m not taunting anyone. I apologize if I am or if I come across as if I am. I cannot imagine how someone could place those words in his mouth. They are out of this world things to say. If anyone knows of anyone comparable in word or deed, say so! I want to know.
If those are the words Christ spoke, in Jn 13-17, it means a great deal. It means the world. It affirms our devotion is worthwhile but also that FOR EVERYONE, He is trustworthy.
No one loses the war for “Christianity” faster than those who publicly defend all the evil that has been done in the name of Christianity - atrocities draped in Bible, flag, and religion (including Christianity) that later Christians then double down on either defending or denying. The world sees this. And it takes note. Religious people do evil things, Ralphie. Deal with it. Or keep your head in the sand if you can’t. But when so-called “Christianity” is used to promote partisanship, defend evil and the actions of evil-doers, then the battle is already lost, because such “Christianity” has already been conquered. The only thing left of it is a rotting husk that needs to die. Individuals can try to desperately deny this all they want, but the world that lives in reality has not lost its sense of smell.
I have asked repeatedly for evidence that Christians sponsored a holocaust. The closest anyone came was through referring to a book. The author of the book, Matfield, I think, D L Mayfield, proved vast numbers of German Christians were responsible for mass murder of Jews because 40 percent polled in Germany before the holocaust stated they were Lutheran and over half were Catholic, or vice versa.
Bonhoeffer separated from the Lutheran Nazi church to make the “Confessing Church,” which was persecuted by Nazi Christians. It’s sad, but we can all misappropriate Christianity and any other religion for evil purposes (hard to believe as Jesus was a Jew!)
“How Jesus became a Nazi: Christian Theologians in the Third Reich”
When I was a kid, my mom would sing the beautiful song, “There’s Something About That Name.” Mark Lawry popped that bubble eloquently when he remarked, “Someone named Jesus stole my bicycle!” It seems to be a Westernized hallowing of some things we didn’t understand.
Reportedly, Hillel and, I think, Shammai were influential in Jesus’ day. Jesus rejected the idea that someone could divorce his wife for minimal things (Shammai, I believe), but said that the whole of the Law was based on the Golden Rule. Pete Enns writes about that in “Inspiration and Incarnation,” as I recall. There are other allusions.
It no longer bothers me that Jesus’ name is, and was, not unique; and Jesus used others’ thoughts to carry His message as well. Paul addressed the Greeks in their territory as worshiping the “unknown God,” and incorporated Greek sayings into his messages. To the Greeks he was a Greek, and the Jews, a Jew; this is probably the way that God came as Jesus. I’d like to hear what you think.
Maybe I’m not understanding the point. I appreciate your thoughts.
Thanks.
I’m not sure of the question; if the question is whether Christians have done terrible things, Ku Klux Klan, as well as my own history (not of racism, but being unkind to my sibs and my parents; being selfish to others) has happened in history. I’m diverting from the OP. Maybe we can PM. I’m sorry. Thanks.
You’re giving yourself a very easy no-true-Christian out. You are basically defining who is included by who passes your test. Not too surprising it’s a hundred percent the way you’re going about it. Another easy out is only counting what they do after they stop sinning.
We must be able to identify who’s who though, don’t we? David Koresh and Jim Jones aren’t exactly Mother Teresa and Francis of Asissi. The next time 5 minutes passes and I don’t sin and I’m not asleep, I’ll let you know.
At the same time, please, Christians can’t and don’t go around gassing and shooting millions of innocent people. Christ makes a distinction between his followers and his fakers. “Beat it. Never knew ya.” “Yea but Lord, we healed guys, cast out demons, paraded and strutted our stuff raking in millions all in your name.” “Nah, never knew ya. Later.” Apparently a bunch He rejects put on a pretty good show. Only those who do His will make it. Loving Him like crazy and one another in the same way He loves us.
I mentioned David and you literally did not address that example and then are demanding incredibly detailed and specific proofs with a No True Scotsman backdrop. Apply that same measure to your own arguments.
I am not your enemy. I want everyone to come to a saving faith through Grace in Jesus Christ. However, I do not defend the broken history of my community of faith. If true believers are only the ones who every single second love God and follow Him then there are none. I have misconceptions and failures in my self and every confidence in Him who died for me and His grace being sufficient.
It is astounding to me that this is worth discussion. that speakers, and authors, write differently depending on their audience is so obvious, self-evident, and ubiquitous as to be not worthy of discussion. That anyone wants to seriously claim it as “conjecture” strikes me as bordering on desperation.
Lewis’s Narnia chronicles read remakredly and obviously differently, and use different vocabulary, than his adult science fiction, which is different from his nonfiction writings and articles. The Hobbit has myriad various obvious literary and vocabulary differences from The Lord of the Rings. I had professors speak and use language in private that they wouldn’t dare use in the classroom, and i’ve read their academic literature that used specialized vocabulary that they would not use in lay settings. Not to mention that people write and use different vocabulary on the internet when they believe their words to be anonymous than when they publish a formal article with their name attached. And i know i speak differently with my professional friends and colleagues than i do to masses, and written communication I receive from them is so obviously different than what they would write to laity or the uninitiated, i could give hundreds of examples, including that they use vocabulary that they know i’ll understand but that they would never use (not without significant explanation) to a large lay audience.
to claim that it is “conjecture” that people speak or write differently to different audiences is laughable.
And yes, back some years ago when there was doubt that Lewis had written “The Dark Tower”, it was subjected to statistical computational analysis that suggested the work consistent with being a forgery, only for that to be shown erroneous, as (unsurprisingly) the analysis did not take into account some very significant differences of genre.
But let’s be clear… if you really want to claim that it is “conjecture” that “Paul could have written very differently to his educated friends Titus and Timothy than he did to the masses”, then I submit that it is equally conjecture that Paul would not have written differently to his educated and like-minded friends as he did to the masses.
my “conjecture” at least has the benefit of being supported by innumerable examples and obvious common sense. The “conjecture” that Paul would have written to professional colleagues and friends in a style near-indistinguishable from to the churches at large - let’s be clear - is a “conjecture” that flies in the face of common sense and common experience.
Like the typical conservative, you misconstrue arguments and attack non-existent caricatures of your own devising.
It is conjecture that he did author the Pastorals and wrote differently. As far as I can tell, it is factual that he could have written differently from letter to letter in many regards depending on their context, purpose, audience, time of composition and whatever other reason said other fancied. The context of my post makes that clear. I even went on to address your argument. I also quoted people and mentioned that different circumstances can lead to different writing styles.
You have explained zero of the evidence scholars bring forth, some of which flies directly in the face of your different writing style theory.
Your different writing style theory does a poor job explaining all the other problems with Pauline authorship as well.
You have elected to not present any evidence whatsoever for Pauline authorship. That alone is to concede the issue to any objective observer.
You don’t get to just assume a self-attestation in a Christian work from roughly two millennia ago is accurate. Not when forgeries and false ascriptions are a dime a dozen.
I offered a detailed post. You latched onto one point and argued against something I never even meant and ignored all the rest. I guess desperate times call for desperate measures. I reject your patent nonsense. Until you become God and gain omniscience I can’t just assume whatever assumption you are parading without real evidence is true.
You started a thread because you wanted to discuss and bring light to an issue you studied a lot. Why not offer something of substance instead of empty rhetoric? One of the key points from Sparks is conservatives misrepresent critical arguments all the time. You are not proving him wrong.
Good question. Some very recent advances in natural language processing have brought remarkable abilities in working with shorter texts. I do not know whether this capability would extend to the pastoral epistles, though.
And appreciated, but your quote of Dr. Perrin simply demonstrates the very same problems i described above…
Vocabulary. Of course one’s vocabulary will be different when talking to friends and likeminded colleagues than with potentially hostile masses. I read another scholar somewhere that that Paul doesn’t reference the “cross” in the pastorals while he often does in his other letters.
How exactly is this possibly relevant? Paul would be expected to waste time and ink explaining the cross and other similar concepts to colleagues he knew were already so adept in understanding that concept that he had sent them out to preach it?
False and Erroneous, again, seems again to me a narrative oblivious to or unconcerned with actual facts. The terms can be found used quite equivalently:
Phil. 4:8 ¶ Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just [δίκαια], whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things
1Th. 2:10 You are witnesses, and so is God, of how holy, righteous [δικαίως] and blameless we were among you who believed.
1Tim. 1:9 We also know that law is made not for the righteous [δικαίῳ] but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious; for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers,
False and erroneous. undisputed Paul similarly used it in that way, as discussed above.
And this is the blindness that really takes the cake. Because, of course, we would totally expect Paul to write to his likeminded colleagues, the men he mentored, discipled, and appointed to carry on his own ministry… and write to them with dramatic arguments and emotional outbursts, introducing devil’s advocate arguments.
Right.
The idea that he would have written to his personal friends and colleagues, that he already knew were in essential agreement with his positions… with fewer “dramatic arguments” that when he was writing to people who had expressed opposition to him…??
Ridiculous conjecture on my part, i’m sure.
Which is only interring in the supposition that second century Christian writers would not have been informed or influenced by Paul’s theology.
There isn’t so much an argument here as an assertion, but usually this is based around the claim about the pastorals discussing structured hierarchy in the church, such as elders and deacons. which we know weren’t in Paul’s authentic letters.
Except that they were.
There are lots of words or phrasesi use in correspondence to my theological colleagues that you will never find in my public bible studies or messages. “supralapsarian,” “propitiation”, “eschaton”, “cultic”, “synchronism”… and i could go on for numerous pages. any questions?
yes. yes it does.
yes it does. there are plenty of proper formal english rules that i follow when i’m writing for publication, or to large mass emails even, that i don’t worry about when i’m writing to friends.
One time a dear friend and professional pastor that knew my education colleague emailed me while i was underway on a submarine and told me he hoped i was enjoying my time in “sheol.” Do you really think he would have said the same to a mass audience of submariners, or perhaps he chose that word as he knew i would understand it and he knew we had a common vocabulary?
Sure it can be thus explained, and Kummel’s claim otherwise falls very flat to someone like me that gives it a moment’s thought . How many evangelical church gatherings of leaders could i find on youtube right now that go into great detail about the dangers of various ideologies (such as the great dangers of Darwinism), … but who don’t regard the prattle of Darwinists to be worth offering a detailed rebuttal, and who assume that their generally like-minded and homogeneous colleagues know what should be said to refute such, but who still seem to find the need to address and warns and emphasize the dangers of said false teaching.
The argument is offered ad nauseam, often by people that either missed, or glossed over, the fact that bishops and deacons are mentioned in Philippians, and intentionally or unwittingly give the impression that “bishops and deacons” are strictly a second century phenomenon. Ehrman, for instance, is typical of the arguments i find…
The one thing Paul does not do is write to the leaders of the church in Corinth and tell them to get their parishioners in order. Why is that? Because there were no leaders of the church in Corinth. There were no bishops or deacons. There were no pastors. There was a group of individuals, each of whom had a gift of the Spirit, in this brief time before the end came. Contrast that with what you have in the Pastorals. Here you do not have individuals endowed by the Spirit working together to form the community. Here you have the pastors Timothy and Titus. You have the church leaders: bishops and deacons. You have hierarchy, structure, organization. That is to say, you have a different historical situation than you had in the days of Paul.
When a critical scholar like Ehrman so constructs his argument, I am left to believe that he is either entirely ignorant of the fact that Bishops and Deacons were a thing in Paul’s lifetime and were referenced by him in an undisputed letter, or, worse, he is aware of it and deceptively crafting his argument to give a false impression. He is making a contrast with what was in Paul’s lifetime (“there were no bishops and deacons”) and what was in the timeframe of the Pastorals ("you have bishops and deacons). either he is astoundingly ignorant, or dishonest. Sparks treatment is similar, but point is, no one I’ve read goes out of their way to acknowledge, “Now, we grant of course that the formal offices of bishop and deacon existed during Paul’s, as he addressed them specifically in Philippians… but here is what is different…” rather, they use language to make it look like bishops and deacons only became a thing after Paul’s lifetime.
And apparently he makes the comparison and all the erudite analysis, again, without recognizing that this would be entirely expected were Paul speaking to colleagues, just as it is exactly what happens when i speak with professional colleagues rather than then masses?
Bottom line remains that I find there is furthering of a narrative, and a willingness to ignore, inimize, or hand wave any facts that do not support that narrative.
No, I disagree with relying exclusively on such methods, especially while simultaneously ignoring the significance or impact of the questions of genre or how an author will write differently to different audiences.
I’d be inclined to give significant weight to such an analysis of chapters/letters of Federalist Papers as they are all near-identical in genre, intent, expected audience, publishing guidelines, etc. Hence any differences observed by such analysis would be unlikely to be able to be attributed to differences in audience, purpose, genre
But compare that to something else… I have little doubt that, if we strictly utilized such techniques, it would show that the author of the Hobbit was not the same author as Fellowship of the Rings, Two Towers, and Return of the King. stylistic analysis would show that the latter three works were similar in sentence length, vocabulary, grammar, tone, use of foreign languages, etc., that the narrator exclusively uses third person, uses an advanced English vocabulary, long sentences, etc… while the former work regularly used shorter sentences, a more limited and more common vocabulary (words like “drat” appear in the former book but in none of the latter three), often would drift into first person or second person and speak directly to the reader, used different words for things when compared to the other three works… etc.
And let’s not even get started on how different Silmarillion is to either of the other aforementioned works.
and if someone relied exclusively on such methods, they would very probably conclude that The Hobbit had a different author as the author of Fellowship of the Ring, Two Towers, and Return of the King. and that conclusion would be utterly ridiculous, and achieved because the researcher ignored what should have been obvious implications of genre/audience.
Similarly, stylistic analysis alone would in all likelihood find significant differences between any of the chronicles of the Chrinicles if Narnia and, say, Lewis’s Mere Christianity.
Similarly, the stylistic analysis that (wrongly) concluded “The Dark Tower” had such different language as was consistent with having a different author than CSLewis did so by comparing that work with the language used in two of the space trilogy books that were radically different in genre (Out of the Silent Planet & Perelandra). The former book is an extremely Dark story taking place in horrible, dystopian alternate reality of earth itself with mutant humans, and where there are five protagonists who are all university professors in regular discussion and dialogue… In The latter two books, there is only one main protagonist who has dialogue only with aliens (with with certain elements of language barrier), or with hostile antagonists from earth… and those two latter works also take place on largely idyllic utopian alien worlds.
What was problematic was relying exclusively on the computational analysis, while ignoring what should have been obvious implications of differing style given the genre to differences.