Atheist Anne Rice’s Surprising Discovery
Bestselling Author Anne Rice:
Noted for the painstaking research behind her historical fiction, an atheist of 36 years makes a surprising discovery when she turns her attention to the mystery of the historical Jesus
Excerpt from Author’s Note in Christ The Lord Out Of Egypt
©2006 Anne O’Brien Rice. Used by permission.
Every novel I’ve ever written since 1974 involved historical research. It’s been my delight that no matter how many supernatural elements were involved in the story, and no matter how imaginative the plot and characters, the background would be thoroughly historically accurate. And over the years, I’ve become known for that accuracy.
If one of my novels is set in Venice in the eighteenth century, one can be certain that the details as to the opera, the dress, the milieu, the values of the people- all of this is correct.
Without ever planning it, I’ve moved slowly backwards in history, from the nineteenth century, where I felt at home in my first two novels, to the first century, where I sought the answers to enormous questions that became an obsession with me that simply couldn’t be ignored.
Ultimately, the figure of Jesus Christ was at the heart of this obsession. More generally, it was the birth of Christianity and the fall of the ancient world. I wanted to know desperately what happened in the first century, and why people in general never talked about it.
Understand, I had experienced an old-fashioned, strict Roman Catholic childhood in the 1940’s and 1950’s, in an Irish American parish that would now be called a Catholic ghetto, where we attended daily Mass and Communion in an enormous and magnificently decorated church, which had been built by our forefathers, some with their own hands.
Classes were segregated, boys from girls. We learned catechism and Bible history, and the lives of the saints. Stained-glass windows, the Latin Mass, the detailed answers to complex questions on good and evil – theses things were imprinted on my soul forever, along with a great deal of church history that existed as a great chain of events triumphing over schism and reformation to culminate in the papacy of Pius XII.
I left this church at age eighteen, because I stopped believing it was “the one true church established by Christ to give grace.” No personal event precipitated this loss of faith. It happened on a secular college campus; there was intense sexual pressure; but more than that there was the world itself, without Catholicism, filled with good people and people who read books that were strictly speaking forbidden to me.
I wanted to read Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Camus. I wanted to know why so many seemingly good people didn’t believe in any organized religion yet cared passionately about their behavior and the value of their lives. As the rigid Catholic I was, I had no options for exploration. I broke with the Church. And I broke with my belief in God.
When I married two years later, it was to a passionate atheist, Stan Rice, who not only didn’t believe in God, he felt he had had something akin to a vision which had given him a certainty that God didn’t exist. He was one of the most honorable and conscience-driven people I ever knew. For him and for me, our writing was our lives.
In 1974, I became a published writer. The novel reflected my guilt and my misery in being cut off from God and from salvation; my being lost in a world without light. It was set in the nineteenth century, a context I’d researched heavily in trying to answer questions about New Orleans, where I was born and no longer lived.
After that, I wrote many novels without my being aware that they reflected my quest for meaning in a world without God. As I said before, I was working my way backwards in history, answering questions for myself about whole historical developments—why certain revolutions happened, why Queen Elizabeth I was the way she was, who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays (this I never used in a novel), what the Italian Renaissance really was, and what the Black Death had been like before it. And how feudalism had come about.
In the 1990’s, living in New Orleans again, living among adults who were churchgoers and believers, flexible Catholics of some sophistication, I no doubt imbibed some influence from them.
But I also inevitably plunged into researching the first century because I wanted to know about Ancient Rome. I had novels to write with Roman characters. Just maybe, I might discover something I’d wanted to know all my life and never had known:
How did Christianity actually “happen”? Why did Rome actually fall? To me these were the ultimate questions and always had been. They had to do with who we were today.
I remember in the 1960’s, being at a party in a lovely house in San Francisco, given in honor or a famous poet. A European scholar was there, I found myself alone with him, seated on a couch. I asked him, “Why did Rome fall?” For the next two hours he explained it to me.
I couldn’t absorb most of what he said. But I never forgot what I did understand—about all the grain for the city having to come from Egypt, and the land around the city being taken up with villas, and the crowds being fed the dole.
It was a wonderful evening, but I didn’t leave with a feeling that I had the true grasp of what had happened.
Catholic Church history had given me an awareness of our cultural heritage, although it was presented to me early and quite without context. And I wanted to know the context, why things were the way they were.
When I was a little child, maybe eleven or younger, I was lying on my mother’s bed, reading or trying to read one of her books. I read a sentence that said the Protestant Reformation split Europe culturally in half. I thought that was absurd and I asked her, was this true? She said it was. I never forgot that. All my life I wanted to know what that meant.
In 1993, I dug into this early period, and of course went earlier, into the history of Sumer and Babylon and the whole Middle East, and back to Egypt, which I’d studied in college, and I struggled with it all. I read specialized archaeological texts like detective novels searching for patterns, enthralled with the Gilgamesh story, and details such as the masonry tools which the ancient kings (statues) held in their hands.
I stumbled upon a mystery without a solution, a mystery so immense that I gave up trying to find an explanation because the whole mystery defied belief. The mystery was the survival of the Jews.
As I sat on the floor of my office surrounded by books about Sumer, Egypt, Rome, etc., and some skeptical material about Jesus that had come into my hands, I couldn’t understand how these people had endured as the great people who they were.
It was the mystery that drew me back to God. It set into motion the idea that there may in fact be God. And when that happened there grew in me for whatever reason an immense desire to return to the banquet table. In 1998 I went back to the Catholic Church.
But even then I had not closed in on the question of Jesus Christ and Christianity. I did read the Bible in a state of utter amazement at its variety, its poetry, its startling portraits of women, its inclusion of bizarre and often bloody and violent details. When I was depressed, which was often, someone read the Bible to me, often literary translations of the New Testament—that is, translations by Richmond Lattimore that are wondrously literal and beautiful and revealing and that open the text anew.
In 2002 I put aside everything else and decided to focus entirely on answering the questions that had dogged me all my life. The decision came in July of that year. I had been reading the Bible constantly, reading parts of it out loud to my sister, and poring over the Old Testament, and I decided that I would give myself utterly to the task of trying to understand Jesus himself and how Christianity emerged.
I wanted to write the life of Jesus Christ. I had known that years ago. But now I was ready. I was ready to do violence to my career. I wanted to write the book in the first person. Nothing else mattered. I consecrated the book to Christ.
I consecrated myself and my work to Christ. I didn’t know exactly how I was going to do it.
Even then I did not know what my character of Jesus would be like.
I had taken in a lot of fashionable notions about Jesus—that he’d been oversold, that the Gospels were “late” documents, that we really didn’t know anything about him, that violence and quarreling marked the movement of Christianity from its start. I’d acquired many books on Jesus, and the filled the shelves of my office.
But the true investigation began in July of 2002.
In August, I went to my beach apartment, to write the book. Such naiveté. I had no idea I was entering a field of research where no one agreed on anything—whether we are talking about the size of Nazareth, the economic level of Jesus’ family, the Jewish attitudes of Galileans in general, the reason Jesus rose to fame, the reason he was executed, or why his followers went out into the world.
Vast Landscape of Jesus Scholarship
As to the size of the field, it was virtually without end. New Testament scholarship included books of every conceivable kind from skeptical books that sought to disprove Jesus had any real value to theology or an enduring church, to books that conscientiously met every objection of the skeptics with footnotes halfway up the page.
Bibliographies were endless. Disputes sometimes produced rancor.
And the primary source material for the first century was a matter of continuous controversy in which the Gospels were called secondary sources by some, and primary sources by others, and the history of Josephus and the works of Philo were subject to exhaustive examination and contentions as to their relevance or validity or whether they had any truth.
Then there was the question of the Rabbis. Could the Mishnah, the Tosefta, and the Talmuds be trusted to give an accurate picture of the first century? Did they actually mention Jesus? And if not, so what, because they didn’t mention Herod, who built the Temple, either.
Oh, what lay in store.
But let me backtrack. In 1999, I had received in the mail from my editor and longtime mentor a copy of Paula Fredriksen’s Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. I had read a substantial part of this book in which Fredriksen re-created beautifully the Jewish milieu in which the boy Jesus might have lived in Nazareth and in which he might have gone to the Temple for Passover along with his family.
Fredriksen made the point strongly that Jesus was a Jew. And that this had to be addressed when one wrote about him or thought about him, or so it seems to me.
Now six years later, I have produced a book which is obviously inspired by that scene which Fredriksen wrote, and I can only offer my humble thanks to her and acknowledge her influence.
Of course my beliefs are the polar opposite of Fredriksen’s as the book Christ the Lord reveals. But it was Fredriksen who steered me in the right direction as to exploring Jesus as a Jew, and there my serious research of him began.
Health Crisis
But to return to the year 2002. As I began my serious work, a call came from my husband. He was experiencing the first symptoms of a brain tumor from which he died in less than four months.
We had been married for forty-one years. After my return to the Church, he had consented to marry me in the great old church of my childhood with a priest who was my cousin saying the words. This was a marvelous concession coming from a committed atheist. But out of love for me, my husband did it. Forty-one years. And he was gone.
Was I given the gift of purpose before this tragedy so that it would sustain me through it? I don’t know. I do know that during his last weeks, my husband when he was conscious became a saint. He expressed love for those around him, understanding of people he hadn’t understood before. He wanted gifts given to those who helped him in his illness.
Before that he had managed, though half paralyzed, to create three amazing paintings. I must not neglect to say that. Then after that period of love and understanding, he slowly lapsed into a coma, and he was gone.
He left more than three hundred paintings, all done in fifteen years, and many books of poetry, most published during the same period, and thousands of unpublished poems. His memorial gallery will soon move from new Orleans to Dallas, Texas, where he was born.
I went on with my quest right through his illness and his death. My books sustained me. I told him about what I was writing. He thought it was wonderful. He gave me glowing praise.
From that time on, December 2002 when he died, until 2005, I have studied the New Testament period, and I continue to study. I read constantly, night and day.
I have covered an enormous amount of skeptical criticism, violent arguments, and I have read voraciously in the primary sources of Philo and Josephus which I deeply enjoy.
Having started with the skeptical critics, those who take their cue from the earliest skeptical New Testament scholars of the Enlightenment, I expected to discover that their arguments would be frighteningly strong, and that Christianity was, at heart, a kind of fraud. I’d have to end up compartmentalizing my mind with faith in one part of it, and truth in another.
And what would I write about my Jesus? I had no idea. But the prospects were interesting. Surely he was a liberal, married, had children, was a homosexual, and who knew what? But I must do my research before I wrote one word.
These skeptical scholars seemed so very sure of themselves. They built their books on certain assertions without even examining these assertions. How could they be wrong?
The Jewish scholars presented their case with such care. Certainly Jesus was simply and observant Jew or a Hasid who got crucified. End of story.
I read and I read and I read. Sometimes I thought I was walking through the valley of the shadow of Death, as I read. But I went on, ready to risk everything. I had to know who Jesus was—that is, if anyone knew, I had to know what that person knew.
Now, I couldn’t read the ancient languages, but as a scholar I can certainly follow the logic of an argument; I can check the footnotes, and the bibliographical references; I can go to the biblical text in English. I can check all the translations I have and I have every one of which I know from Wycliffe to Lamsa, including the New Annotated Oxford Bible and the old English King James which I love.
I have the old Catholic translation, and every literary translation I can find. I have offbeat translations scholars don’t mention, such as that by Barnstone and Schonfield. I acquired every single translation for the light it might shed on an obscure line.
What gradually came clear to me was that many of the skeptical arguments—arguments that insisted most of the Gospels were suspect, for instance, or written too late to be eyewitness accounts—lacked coherence. They were not elegant. Arguments about Jesus himself were full of conjecture. Some books were no more than assumptions piled upon assumptions. Absurd conclusions were reached on the basis of little or no data at all.
In sum, the whole case for the nondivine Jesus who stumbled into Jerusalem and somehow got crucified by nobody and had nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and would be horrified by it if hew knew about it—that the whole picture which has floated in the liberal circles I frequented as an atheist for thirty years—that case was not made. Not only was it not made. I discovered in this field some of the worst and most biased scholarship I’d ever read.
I saw almost no skeptical scholarship that was convincing, and the Gospels, shredded by critics, lost all intensity when reconstructed by various theorists. They were in no way compelling when treated as composites and records of later ”communities.”
I was unconvinced by the wild postulations of those who claimed to be children of the Enlightenment. And I had also sensed something else. Many of these scholars, scholars who apparently devoted their life to New Testament scholarship, disliked Jesus Christ. Some pitied him as a hopeless failure. Others sneered at him, and some felt an outright contempt. This came between the lines of the books. This emerged in the personality of the texts.
I’d never come across this kind of emotion in any other field of research, at least not to this extent. It was puzzling.
The people who go into Elizabethan studies don’t set out to prove that Queen Elizabeth I was a fool. They don’t personally dislike her. They don’t make snickering remarks about her, or spend their careers trying to pick apart her historical reputation.
They approach her in other ways. They don’t even apply this sort of dislike or suspicion or contempt to other Elizabethan figures. If they do, the person is usually not the focus of the study. Occasionally a scholar studies a villain, yes. But even then, the author generally ends up arguing for the good points of a villain or for his or her place in history, or for some mitigating circumstance, that redeems the study itself.
People studying disasters in history may be highly critical of the rulers or the milieu at the time, yes. But in general scholars don’t spend their lives in the company of historical figures whom they openly despise.
But there are New Testament scholars who detest and despise Jesus Christ. Of course, we all benefit from freedom in the academic community; we benefit from the enormous size of biblical studies today and the great range of contributions that are being made. I’m not arguing for censorship. But maybe I’m arguing for sensitivity—on the part of those who read these books. Maybe I’m arguing for a little wariness when it comes to the field in general. What looks like solid ground might not be solid ground at all.
Another point bothered me a great deal.
All these skeptics insisted that the Gospels were late documents, that the prophecies in them had been written after the Fall of Jerusalem. But the more I read about the Fall of Jerusalem, the more I couldn’t understand this.
The Fall of Jerusalem was horrific, and involved an enormous and cataclysmic war, a war that went on and on for years in Palestine, followed by other revolts and persecutions, and punitive laws. As I read about this in the pages of S.G.F. Brandon, and in Josephus, I found myself amazed by the details of this appalling disaster in which the greatest Temple of the ancient world was forever destroyed.
I had never truly confronted these events before, never tried to comprehend them. And now I found it absolutely impossible that the Gospel writers could not have included the Fall of the Temple in their work had they written after it as critics insist.
It simply didn’t and doesn’t make sense.
These Gospel writers were in a Judeo-Christian cult. That’s what Christianity was. And the core story of Judaism has to do with redemption from Egypt, and redemption from Babylon. And before redemption from Babylon there was a Fall of Jerusalem in which the Jews were taken to Babylon. And here we have this horrible war.
Would Christian writers not have written about it had they seen it? Would they not have seen in the Fall of Jerusalem some echo of the Babylonian conquest? Of course they would have. They were writing for Jews and Gentiles.
The way the skeptics put this issue aside, they simply assumed the Gospels were late documents because of these prophecies in the Gospels. This does not begin to convince.
Before I leave this question of the Jewish War and the Fall of the Temple, let me make this suggestion. When Jewish and Christian scholars begin to take this war seriously, when they begin to really study what happened during the terrible years of the siege of Jerusalem, the destruction of the Temple, and the revolts that continued in Palestine right up through Bar Kokhba, when they focus upon the persecution of Christians in Palestine by Jews; upon the civil war in Rome in the ‘60s which Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., so well describes in his work Before Jerusalem Fell; as well as the persecution of Jews in the Diaspora during this period—in sum, when all of this dark era is brought into the light of examination—Bible studies will change.
Right now, scholars neglect or ignore the realities of this period. To some it seems a two-thousand-year-old embarrassment and I’m not sure I understand why.
But I am convinced that the key to understanding the Gospels is that they were written before all this ever happened. That’s why they were preserved without question though they contradicted one another. They came from a time that was, for later Christians, catastrophically lost forever.
As I continued my quest, I discovered a scholarship quite different from that of the skeptics—that of John A.T. Robinson, in The Priority of John. In reading his descriptions, which took seriously the words of the Gospel itself, I saw what was happening to Jesus in the text of John.
It was a turning point. I was able to enter the Fourth Gospel, and see Jesus alive and moving. And what eventually emerged for me from the Gospels was their unique coherence, their personalities—the inevitable stamp of individual authorship.
Of course John A.T. Robinson made the case for an early date for the Gospels far better that I ever could. He made it brilliantly in 1975, and he took to task the liberal scholars for their assumptions then in Redating the New Testament, but what he said is as true now as it was when he wrote those words.
After Robinson I made many great discoveries, among them Richard Bauckham who in The Gospels for All Christians soundly refutes the idea that isolated communities produced the Gospels and shows what is obvious, that they were written to be circulated and read by all.
The work of Martin Hengel is brilliant in clearing away assumptions, and his achievements are enormous, I continue to study him.
The scholar who has given me perhaps some of my most important insights and who continues to do so through his enormous output is N. T. Wright. N. T. Wright is one of the most brilliant writers I’ve ever read, and his generosity in embracing the skeptics and commenting on their arguments is an inspiration. His faith is immense, and his knowledge vast.
In his book The Resurrection of the Son of God, he answers solidly the question that has haunted me all my life. Christianity achieved what it did, according to N. T. Wright, because Jesus rose from the dead. It was the fact of the resurrection that sent the apostles out into the world with the force necessary to create Christianity. Nothing else would have done it but that.
Wright does a great deal more to put the entire question into historical perspective. How can I do justice to him here? I can only recommend him without reservation, and go on studying him.
Of course my quest is not over. There are thousands of pages of the above-mentioned scholars to be read and reread.
But I see now a great coherence to the life of Christ and the beginning of Christianity that eluded me before, and I see also the subtle transformation of the ancient world because of its economic stagnation and the assault upon it of the values of monotheism, Jewish values melded with Christian value, for which it was not perhaps prepared.
There are also theologians who must be studied, more of Teilhard de Chardin, and Rahner, and St. Augustine.
It was this. The challenge was to write about the Jesus of the Gospels, of course!
Anybody could write about a liberal Jesus, a married Jesus, a gay Jesus, a Jesus who was a rebel. The “Quest for the Historical Jesus” had become a joke because of all the many definitions it had ascribed to Jesus.
The true challenge was to take the Jesus of the Gospels, the Gospels which were becoming ever more coherent to me, the Gospels which appealed to me as elegant first-person witness, dictated to scribes no doubt, but definitely early, the Gospels produced before Jerusalem fell—to take the Jesus of the Gospels, and try to get inside him and imagine what he felt.
Then there were the legends—the Apocrypha—including the tantalizing tales in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas describing a boy Jesus who could strike a child dead, bring another to life, turn clay birds into living creatures, and perform other miracles. I’d stumbled on them very early in my research, in multiple editions, and never forgotten them. And neither had the world. They were fanciful, some of them humorous, extreme to be sure, but they had lived on into the Middle Ages, and beyond. I couldn’t get these legends out of my mind.
Ultimately I chose to embrace this material, to enclose it within the canonical framework as best I could. I felt there was a deep truth in it, and I wanted to preserve that truth as it spoke to me. Of course that is an assumption. But I made it. And perhaps in assuming that Jesus did manifest supernatural powers at an early age I am somehow being true to the declaration of the Council of Chalcedon, that Jesus was God and Man at all times.
I am certainly trying to be true to Paul when he said that Our Lord emptied himself for us, in that my character has emptied himself of his Divine awareness in order to suffer as a human being.
This is a book I offer to all Christian—to the fundamentalists, to the Roman Catholics, to the most liberal Christians in the hope that my embrace of more conservative doctrines will have some coherence for them in the here and now of the book. I offer it to scholars in the hope that they will perhaps enjoy seeing the evidence of the research that’s gone into it, and of course I offer it to those whom I so greatly admire who have been my teachers though I’ve never met them and probably never will.
I offer this book to those who know nothing of Jesus Christ in the hope that you will see him in these pages in some form. I offer this novel with love to my readers who’ve followed me through one strange turn after another in the hope that Jesus will be as real to you as any other character I’ve ever launched into the world we share.
After all, is Christ Our Lord not the ultimate supernatural hero, the ultimate outsider, the ultimate immortal of them all?
As for my son, this novel is dedicated to him. That says it all.
I returned to faith in Christ, and to the Roman Catholic Church on December 6, 1998. It was after a long struggle of many years during which I went from being a committed atheist, grieving for a lost faith which I thought was gone forever, to realizing that I not only believed in Jesus Christ with my whole heart, but that I felt an overwhelming love for Him, and wanted to be united with Him both in private and in public through attendance at church.
The process for me had been gradual and somewhat intellectual. I’d lost faith in atheism. It no longer made sense. I wanted to affirm the presence of God because I felt it. Yet I was tormented by a multitude of theological questions and social issues that I couldn’t resolve. No matter how strongly I believed in God I still considered myself a conscientious humanist.
How, I asked myself, could I express the love for God that I felt by becoming a member of a community of believers when I didn’t know what I thought about the literal truth of Adam or Eve or Original Sin?
How could I join with fellow believers who thought my gay son was going to Hell? How could I become connected with Christians who held that there was no evidence for Darwinian evolution, or that women should not have control over their own bodies? How could I affirm my belief in a faith that was itself so characterized by argument and strife?
Well, what happened to me on that Sunday that I returned to faith was this: I received a glimpse into what I can only call the Infinite Mercy of God. It worked something like this. I realized that none of my theological or social questions really made any difference. I didn’t have to know the answers to these questions precisely because God did.
He was the God who made the Universe in which I existed. That meant he had made the Big Bang, He had made DNA, He had made the Black Holes in space, and the wind and the rains and the individual snowflakes that fall from the sky. He had done all that. So surely He could do virtually anything and He could solve virtually everything.
And how could I possibly know what He knew? And why should I remain apart from Him because I could not grasp all that He could grasp? What came over me then was an infinite trust, trust in His power and His love, I didn’t have to worry about the ultimate fate of my good atheistic friends, gay or straight, because He knew all about them, and He was holding them in His hands.
I didn’t have to quake alone in terror at the thought of those who die untimely deaths from illness, or the countless millions destroyed in the horrors of war. He knew all about them. He had always been holding them in His hands.
He and only He knew the full story of every person who’d ever lived or would live; He and He alone knew what person was given what choice, what chance, what opportunity, what amount of time, to come to Him and by what path.
That I couldn’t possibly know all was as clear to me as my awareness that He did.
Now this was not totally understandable to me in words at that time. I couldn’t have explained it in this way then. But it is essentially what happened: faith became absolutely real to me; and its implications became real. I found myself in a realm in which the beauty I saw around me was intimately connected in every way with the justice, the wisdom, the mercy and the love of God.
Did this mean that I thought doctrine and principles didn’t matter? No. Did it mean I thought everything was relative? Certainly not. Did it mean I did not continue to ponder a multitude of ideas? God forbid. What it did mean was that I put myself in the hands of God entirely and that my faith would light the pages I read in the Book of Life from then on.
Now why did this happen to me? Why did this love and trust fill my heart at that particular moment in time? The honest answer is: I don’t know. Had I prayed for faith? Yes. Had I searched for it? Yes. But faith is a gift, and it was a gift I received on that day.
Over the next few years, my conviction and my awareness of God’s love deepened; and no matter what crisis or dilemma I confronted, that trust in the power of the Lord remained.
In the summer of 2002, as I’ve explained above, I consecrated my work to Christ, but I really didn’t make good on my promise to work only for Him until December of that year. From that time on, I have been committed to writing the life of Our Lord in fictional form.
At the time that I began this work, I had no idea that my life would be transformed by this task, that the anxiety I took for granted as part of life before 2002 would almost entirely disappear. In fact, had anyone told me this was going to happen, I wouldn’t have believed such a thing. But my life has been completely changed.
Now what happened in 2002 was this: I was praying, I was talking to the Lord, I was discussing my writing with Him, and what came over me was the awareness that if I believed in Him as completely as I said I did, I ought to write entirely for Him. Anything I could do ought to be for Him. I told Him so. I set out to put this into practice.
As I said, I didn’t succeed to full commitment until December of that year. But the day when I told the Lord I’d write for Him, and Him only, I now see as the most important single day of my entire life. Truly not the simplest things have been the same since. I am united in mind and body as never before. In fact it seems that every aspect of my life has been brought into a coherence that I’d never expected to see.
My early religious education, my long quest, my many experiences both dramatic and trivial, my losses, my developing writing skills, my research skills—all are united now in one single goal. There is a feeling in me at times that nothing, no matter how small, that I experienced has been lost. And of course I wonder if it isn’t this way with every human being; it’s just that most of us can’t see it most of the time.
There is much more I can say about my journey to conversion but I think this gives the emotional picture which is lacking above.
Finally, allow me to say this about the crafting of a novel about Our Lord.
As Christians, I feel most of us in the creative community must seek to be more than scribes. If Diarmaid MacColloch is right in his immense history, The Reformation, we had plenty of Christian scribes on the eve of that enormous and painful upheaval.
But it was the printing press that enabled the great thinkers of that time, both Reformer and Catholic, to transform our “assumptions about knowledge and originality of thought.” I suggest now that we must seize the revolutionary media of our age in the way that those earlier Christian and Catholics seized the printed book. We must truly use the realistic novel, the television drama, and the motion picture to tell the Christian story anew.
It is our obligation to tell that story over and over and to use the best means that we have.
In that spirit this novel was written—with the hope of exploring and celebrating the mystery of the Hypostatic Union as well as the mystery of the Incarnation—in a wholly fresh way.
But we, O Lord, behold we are Thy little flock; possess us as Thine, stretch thy wings over us, and let us fly under them. Be thou our glory.
-St. Augustine
–
July 12, 2006
Go here to learn more about Anne’s book “Christ The Lord Out Of Egypt”
Anne Rice recommends the following books and scholarly works on the question of Jesus:
On the Historical Jesus and the Gospels:
David Alan Black’s simple and straightforward Why Four Gospels
Jean Carmignac’s The Birth of the Synoptic Gospels
The First Edition of the New Testament by David Trobisch
Craig S. Keener’s truly magnificent A Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew
Redating Matthew, Mark and Luke by John Wenham
I’m also profoundly grateful for the writings of Fr. Benedict Groeschel CFR, J. Augustine Di Noia OP, Gerald O’Collins SJ, and the works of the great theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar
Larry Hurtado’s Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity
Craig L. Blomberg’s The Historical Reliability of John’s Gospel
On apocryphal writings and artistic representations of Jesus in the early church:
The Apocryphal Jesus: Legends of the Early Church by J. K. Elliot
Art & the Christian Apocrypha by David R. Cartlidge and J. Keith Elliot
The Apocryphal Gospels of Mary in Anglo-Saxon England by Mary Clayton
The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre
Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary 800-1200 by Rachel Fulton
The Golden Legend, published as Legenda Sanctorum in 1260
1-Page Summary: What We Know About Jesus and the Resurrection
Immaneul, Thanks for your comments, though you are mistaken regarding the sacrifice of the Mass, which is the ‘apex’ on which Catholicism rotates daily, and its ‘sacerdotal’ priestcraft, which has no New Testament warrant at all, as there is NO office or function of a ‘sacrificing’ priesthood whatsoever in the NT at all.
The priestcraft in Catholicism was invented hundreds of years after the birth of the NT Church, violating the NT offices and functions of Ephseians 4: 11, “And He Himself (Jesus) gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for (what?) the equipping of the saints for the work (of what?) ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.”
The Creed of pope Pius IV, which is one of the official creeds of the Roman Church, says: “I profess that in the Mass is offered to God a true, proper, and propitiatory sacrifice ( that is, a sacrifice which satisfies the justice of God and so offsets the penality for sins) for the living and the dead; and that in the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist there is truly, really, and substantially, the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ; and that there is a conversion of the whole substance of the bread into the body, and of the whole substance of the wine into the blood, which the Catholic Church calls Transubstantiation.
The Council of Trent declared: “The sacrifice [in the Mass] is identical with the sacrifice of the Cross, inasmuch as Jesus Christ is a priest and victim both. The only difference lies in the manner of offering, which is bloody upon the cross and bloodless on our altars. (Roman Catholicism, Loraine Boettner, pp. 168,169)
This entire, sacerdotal, priestcraft reinactment by Catholicism, is totally unwarranted in the NT, where we see in the Epistle to the Hebrews that the OT priesthood, having seved no purpose to redeem man, was ABOLISHED, and Jesus made no provision at all, for His apostles and ministers to continue any kind of sacrifice at all.
Let us hear from God’s Word in the New Testament, specifically from the Epistle to the Hebrews, why there is NO requirement for any further ‘sacrifice’ of the so-called Mass,
“We have been sanctified though the OFFERING of the body of Jesus Christ ONCE FOR ALL. And every priest indeed (Catholicism) standeth day by day ministering and offering oftentimes the same sacrifice (the Mass) which can NEVER take away sins; but when He (Jesus) had offered ONE SACRIFICE for SIN FOR EVER, sat down on the right hand of God, henceforth expecting till His enemies be made a footstool of His feet” (Heb. 10:10) emphasis added.
It is therefore emphatic, that the New Testament, announces the termination of ALL sacrifices, declaring that Jesus Christ ALONE is our true sacrifice, and that He offered Himself, “ONCE FOR ALL,’ thus forever ending all other sacrifices, period!
As Boettner so correctly wrote:
“It staggers the imagination to realize that a merely human pantomime so absurd and so condratictory to Holy Scripture could be accepted and slavishly attented day after day and week after week by thinking men and women. Since the New Testament gives NO instructions AT ALL about the continuation of the Old Testament sacrifices, it was necessary for the Roman priesthood to INVENT a new kind of sacrifice. This they did by making a frivolous distinction between the “bloody” sacrifice of christ on the cross, and the “unbloody” sacrifice which they pretend to offer in the mass. A priest, of course must have a sacrifice, for this is the distinguishing mark of a priest, ( which does NOT exist in the NT).
I do not say this with any delight at all, but the sacrifice of the Mass, in Catholicism, priestcraft and all, is strikingly akin to ‘Witchcraft’ as a number of former witchcraft priest have confirmed!
Carlos, Carlos …
You complicate and run circles around something so, so simple:
“And taking bread, he gave thanks, and brake; and gave to them, saying: This is my body, which is given for you. DO THIS FOR A COMMEMORATION OF ME.” – Luke 22:19 [D-R] (Emphasis added)
God bless.
Carlos, Carlos…
AMEN & AMEN
The problem is not priesthood or sacredotalism because every baptized truly committed Christian is initiated into a royal priesthood for the covenant worship of God and winning the world into this true worship. he problem is more with replacing a COMMEMORATION with a TRANS-SUBSTANTITION
The commemoration is acted out via transubstantiation, only due to a strict adherence to the actual words of Christ.
“… This is my body, which is given for you. …”
– Luke 22:19
“Then Jesus said to them: Amen, amen I say unto you: Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath everlasting life: and I will raise him up in the last day.”
– John 6:54-55
“For my flesh is meat indeed: and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, abideth in me, and I in him.” – John 6:56
The son of God does not leave room open for misunderstanding, my friend.
True, but none of these verses said or insinuated we Trans-substantiate these into His body and blood. Nor did He or His Apostles ever said or implied He or they did trans-substantiate these into His body and blood. Also no such types were in the OT Prophets/Priests. It’s enough to stop where the Scriptures stop: Remember or commemorate. Trans-substantiation makes commemoration unnecessary.
Enough to stop where the scriptures stopped? If you are implying Sola Scriptura, I would stop you right there. But anyways …
Is it not enough to observe how the early Christians, directly after Christ and into the present day, believed in the true presence of Christ in the Eucharist and in the priestly act of transubstantiation?
Is it not enough to observe the complimentary writings of early Christians–such as the Didache–which clearly demonstrate this?
To suggest a “stopping point” in understanding the teachings of Christ is to suggest ignoring readily available historical writings, teachings and documents, observed by the early Church, and yet claiming to have the fullness of truth.
Why should we assume the early Church, directly following Christ, should not have a better idea of what Christ taught and meant than the modern Protestant perception?
Evan Smith says, “The commemoration is acted out via transubstantiation, only due to a strict adherence to the actual words of Christ.”
“This is my body, which is given for you…” (Luke 22:19).
Also in Matt 26: 26, “This is my body”
As E.W. Bullinger so correctly wrote on this most misundetstood metaphor.
“Few passages have been more perverted than these simple words. Rome has insisted on the literal or the figurative sense of words just as it suits her own purposes, and not at all according to the laws of philology and the true science of language.”
“Hence the Latin idiom ‘agere paenitentiam,’ REPENT, has been rendered literally in all her versions from the Vulgate, in various languages, ‘do penance’ except when God said to REPENT! Rome dared not translate ‘agere paenitentiam’ literally in these cases, which proves her design in thus systematically perverting the Word of God, and the false doctrine is thus forced into the words under a show of semblance of literal translation. So the Metaphor, “This is my body,” has been forced to teach false doctrine by being translated literally.”
Let us continue to hear Bullinger as he demonstrates the linguistic dishonesty of Catholicism:
“No perversion of language has been fraught with greater calamity to the human race. Tens of thousands have suffered martyrdom at the hands of Rome (Catholicism) rather than believe the ‘blasphemous fable’ forced into these words. The exquisite tortures of the Iniquisition were invented to coerce the conscience of men and complel them to accept this lie!”
“The whole figure, in a metaphor, lies as we have said, in the verb substantive “IS”; and not in either of the two nouns; and it is a remarkable fact that, when the pronoun is used instead of one of the nouns (as it is here), and the two nouns are of different genders, the pronoun is always made to agree in gender with the noun to which the meaning is carried across, and not with the noun from which it is carried, and to which it properly belongs. This at once shows us that a figure (of speech) is employed; when a pronoun, which ought, according to the laws of language, to agree in gender with its own noun, is changed, and made to agree with the noun which, by Metaphor, REPRESENTS it.”
It is like when Paul said in I Cor. 12: 27, “Ye ARE the body of Christ.” Surely, Paul did not mean this literally, because here is a Metaphor, ‘Ye ARE…’
As Bullinger then goes on to explain:
“So in the very words that follow “this IS (i.e., represents or signifies) My body,” we have an undoubted Metaphor. “He took the cup…saying…this is my blood.” Here, thus, we have a ‘pair’ of metaphors. In the former one, ‘this’ refers to ‘bread’, and it is claimed that ‘IS’ means ‘changed into’ the ‘body’ of Christ. in the latter, ‘this’ refers to ‘the cup,’ but it is NOT claimed that the cup is changed into ‘blood.’ At least, we have never heard that such a claim has been put forward. The difference of treatment which the same figure( of speech) meets with in these two verses is proof that the former is wrong.”
“In I Cor. 11: 25 we read “this cup IS the new covenant,” Will Romanists, in and out the Church of England, tell us how this “cup” becomes transubstantiated into a ‘covenant.’?”
“Is it not clear that the figure (of speech) in the words “This is my body,” is FORCED into a literal statement with the set purpose and design of making it teach and support erroneous doctrine?|
I Cor. 10:6, “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not (i.e., does it not REPRESENT) the communion of the blood of Christ.” through which all blessing comes to us?”
“The bread which we break, is it not (i.e., does it not REPRESENT) the communion of the body of Christ?” i.e., does it not signify the fellowship of all the members of Christ’s mystical body, who being many, ARE one body ( I Cor. 12:12)? “For we being many ARE one bread, and one body,” as I Cor 10: 17 declares.(Figures of Speech Used in the Bible, pp. 738, 739, 741) emphasis added.
This is NO sacerdotal, sacrificing priesthood, by office nor function, mentioned ANYWHERE in the New Testament.
There is NO hint at any transubstantiation, of the ‘communion’ instituted by our Lord Jesus Christ, as Bullinger so clearly brought out, the verb ‘IS’ means linguistically, i.e., REPRESENTS, SIGNIFIES, my body, nothing more, nothing less.
The specific offices of the New Teatament ministries are clearly and emphatically listed in Ephesians 4:11.
“And He (Jesus) Himself gave some (priests, NO! NO! NO!) to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers.” NO office or function of any sacerdotal priesthood is mentioned at all.
Again, we read in God’s Word, the Bible, “We have been sanctified through the OFFERING of the body of Christ (How many times?) ONCE FOR ALL.” (Heb. 10:10)
Therefore, there is NO further offering, as the Catholic, false, erroneous priesthood, do daily, in the Mass.
Any continuing priesthood, as heretically exist in Catholicism, and any so-called “unbloody reptition of the mass” which professes to offer the same sacrifice that Christ offered ONCE FOR ALL on Calvary, is in reality merely a sham and a recudescence of Judaism with the Christian Church.
The abolition of the priestly caste which through the old dispensation stood between God and man was dramatically illustrated at the very moment that christ died on the cross, when He cried. “IT IS FINISHED.”
This is precisely why there is NO further sacerdotal, sacrificing, mediating priesthood within the New Testament ministries, period!
Roman Catholicism is WRONG, deadly WRONG, and have patched up the veil, that was torn assunder, in two by the Almighty hand of God, when Jesus said, “IT IS FINISHED” by deceitfully instituting this terrible erroneous ‘priestcraft’ between Catholics and God, denying the laity direct access to God through the ONLY Mediator, the LORD JESUS CHRIST!
Carlos, I would also please ask you to explain these verses which complement my understanding of the previous verse:
“The Jews therefore strove among themselves, saying: How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
– John 6:52
Evidently, the Jews surrounded Jesus understood what he said a very specific, non-symbolic way. So, as they express this, and as Jesus hears them express this, what does Jesus say in response?
“Then Jesus said to them: Amen, amen I say unto you: Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath everlasting life: and I will raise him up in the last day.”
– John 6:53-54
Jesus affirms what he said prior, implying apparently that they did not misunderstand his “symbolism,” for there was no symbolism.
Jesus is not finished…
“For my flesh is meat indeed: and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, abideth in me, and I in him.”
– John 6:55-56
Why is Jesus reiterating this in numerous ways if not for clarification, in the face of people who are apparently distraught in the literal meaning?
If Jesus was being symbolic, and the Jews were taking it literally, would he not have corrected their misunderstanding? And yet he does just the opposite: he further clarifies his teaching, which is literal.
Of course, the Jews did not understand quite right. While Jesus was referring to his body in the Eucharist, in a spiritually infused–body, blood soul and divinity–sacrament, the Jews assumed Jesus was referring to his body in a carnal matter, as if they were to consume him right then and there..
“Many therefore of his disciples, hearing it, said: This saying is hard, and who can hear it?”
– John 6:60
And so Jesus continues:
“But Jesus, knowing in himself, that his disciples murmured at this, said to them: Doth this scandalize you? If then you shall see the Son of man ascend up where he was before? It is the spirit that quickeneth: the flesh profiteth nothing. The words that I have spoken to you, are spirit and life.”
– John 6:61-63
At the time of his ascension, all would be made clear. It would correct the carnal assumption the Jews had. Of course, Jesus was referring to a future event, and so, for many, they still would not accept this.
I know this teaching of the Church is hard for many, but I believe I have demonstrated satisfactorily that the teaching has Biblical basis–and further historical basis when early Christian writings such as the Didache are referenced.
I may have done a poor job of explaining, but there are many Biblical scholars who could give a better account than I. Scott Hahn, for instance, is fantastic.
Back to the Bible verse, what happened when Jesus reaffirmed his teaching of literal body and blood, despite the many in the crown who were distraught with his teaching and not convinced of his divinity, as his resurrection and ascension had not yet come to pass?
“After this many of his disciples went back; and walked no more with him.”
– John 6:66
Hi Evan, thanks for your questions re John 6: 53-54; 55-56, as it relates to the RC Sacrifice of the Mass; I understand exactly what you are asking, you are obviously a Roman Catholic, as such I also appreciate how you were taught, and why you believe in the ‘literal’ interpretation of John 6; 53-54; 55-66, as a Catholic.
First, let us remember that there is NO such office or function of any sacerdotal, sacremental Priesthood, mentioned anywhere in the New Testament, as I’ve clearly pointed out in previous comments.
Paul, Peter, nor any of the other apostles, never referred to themselves as ‘Priest’ further, Paul in I Corinthians 11: 23-26, in just four verses, outlines the whole simple service, where Jesus, said that we should commemorate His death until He returns, using bread and wine as symbols of His body and blood, nothing more or less, which is well explained by Bullinger, as I quited from earlier, that the verb substantive ‘IS’ means, represents ‘My body and blood’ is was never meant to become what the Church of Rome has magnified into the glaring, elaborate, showy pageantry, and drama of the mass, as performed by any sacerdotal priestcraft, which has no N.T. warrant whatsoever.
Now, regarding the verses you highlighted, from John chapter 6, verses 53-54 and 55-56, “Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life, and I will raise him up at the day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.”
Now, Jesus just made repeated reference to ‘eating’ His flesh, and ‘drinking His blood, in order to have eternal life, and Catholicism takes this literally, along with a necessary sacerdotal, funcitioning ‘Priesthood’ in order to call Jesus out of heaven, and place Him, under the doctrine of ‘Substantiation’ into the bread and wine,AND, nowhere in the N.T, does Paul or any of the other apostles, even come close to such a ritualistic cermony, never.
But, in verse 35, 40 and 47 of the same John chapter 6, Jesus states: “I am the bread of life, he that cometh to Me, shall never hunger, and he that believeth on Me shall never thirst” (v. 35) “And this is the will of him that sent Me, that every one which seeth the Son, and believeth on Him may have everlasting life; and I will raise him up at the last day.” (v. 40) “…He that believeth on Me has everlasting life.” (v. 47)
Jesus neve said to go and sacramentalize any one, NO! He said ‘Go into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature….he who BELIEVES and is baptized will be saved: but he who does not believe will be damned.” (Mark 16: 15, 16)
BELIEVING, trusting Jesus by FAITH, after repenting of our sins, is what grants us the Gift of eternal Life, NOT sacramentalism, therefore the words that Jesus used in John 6: 53-56, regarding ‘eating’ His flesh, and ‘drinking’ His blood, has nothing to do with any Sacrifice of the Mass, or any unscriptural N.T. priestcraft, it has to do, with ‘eating’ and ‘drinking’ HIM, from within ones heart and daily life, lived out by FAITH, in Him Only, not any priesthood, or Mass, or praying to Mary, or going to confession, which is then commorated by using the bread and wine as ‘symbols’ representing His body and blood, as Paul simply gave expression to in I Corinthians 11: 23-26, which he had ‘received’ from the Lord Himself by special revelation.
Catholics are under this terrible bondage of the Sacrifice of the Mass, where they are told one has to ‘eat’ the body of Christ, and drink His blood, in order to have the gift of eternal life, NO, NO! this is not biblical theology at all, it is servitude to an utterly unscriptural N.T, false doctrine.
At least 100 times we read that FAITH in Christ is the means by which a sinner is declared forgiven and gladly received by the Almighty. When Jesus died on the cross, one of His last words was ‘tetelestai’ translated, “IT IS FINISHED” (John 19: 30) There is NO need for human intermediaries such as priest nor any rituals. The miracle of the New Birth happens directly at the moment of ‘Saving Faith’ dozens of such stories are found on the pages of the New testament; whether it is Lydia the seller of purple, “whose heart the Lord opened,: or the Ethiopian eunuch, or the thief on the cross, those who BELIEVED were Saved directly in response to the gift of FAITH.
This is cemented in the book of Hebrews in the New Testament, where we read, “We have been sanctified,” he said, “through the offering of the BODY of Jesus Christ ONCE FOR ALL.” “For by ONE offering He hath perfected for ever, them that are sanctified.” (Hebrews 10: 10-14) The New Testament, therefore, announces the termination of ALL sacrifices, declaring that Jesus Christ ALONE is our true sacrifice, and that He offered Himself “ONCE FOR ALL” thus forever ending all other sacrifices.
Evan, there is NO such thing even remotely resembling anything such as the ritualistic ceremony of the ‘Mass’ as conducted by this priestcraft, whose origins are rooted in ancient Babylonian paganism, and reinstituted hundreds of years after the Apostolic era of the N.T.
I really appreciate the dependancy Catholics have on their priest, and the pain many Catholics have gone through in being extricated from this unscriptural bondage.
Evan, further to my comment yesterday, let us look at the analogous expression, i.e., ‘…that footballer EATS and DRINKS football…” metaphorically, he is so consummed by the sport, that the metaphors of ‘eating’ and ‘drinking’ are use to convey how much of his life he puts into training, etc, for football, BUT, this does not mean, he ‘literally’ eats the turf or the grass or the football, this is what Jesus meant when He said, ‘Unless you eat the body of the Son of man, and drink His blood, you have no life in you…”
To ‘eat’ the body of Christ, and to drink His blood, means to be consummed with HIM, as one’s Saviour and Lord, daily, in devotion to Him, in prayer, study of His Word, the Bible, lived out in every aspect of one’s life, in praise and worship, etc, etc, through the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, as Paul, Peter et al were, THEN we come to the Lord’s supper, as He instituted, reverently commorating HIS atoning death for our SINS, by breaking bread, representing His body, and drinking wine, representative of His blood, that was shed for the forgivess of our sins, having already being ‘Saved’ ‘Justified’ ONCE, at the New Birth, being Born Again, from above.
Secondly, we cannot DO any outward act, ritual, or ceremony, as Catholics do in the ‘Mass’ to earn the gift of eternal life, as we are emphatically told in His Word:
“For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is a gift of God, NOT of WORKS, (i.e., sacramentalism, doing good works, etc, NO! why not?) lest anyone should boast.” (Eph. 2: 8,9) emphasis added.
Think it through Evan, not from Catholic dogma, but from the very Word of God, the Bible!
Dear Carlos,
I believe sacerdotal priesthood was not abolished, nor unwarranted in the new testament period, nor was it an invention by the Roman Catholics. There is such a thing as reading between the lines. During the last supper, a supper exclusive to Jesus and the 12, (not even the mother was invited), Jesus perpetuated priesthood by performing the offering of the bread and wine, which only priests of the old testament are authorized to do. When Jesus ordered the apostles to “do it in memory of me” referring to the bread and wine which he said was his body and blood, he as the high priest, made of his apostles priests like him. This explains also why the mass is a non bloody sacrifice because the body and the blood of Jesus are in the form of bread and wine.
Hope this explains.
constantino
Dear Constantino, Read the above, I sincerely trust that your spiritual eyes will be opened to the absolute TRUTH, of God’s Word, the Bible, for there is NO reading into anything that is NOT explicitely stated in His Word, this is a deadly, dangerous thing to do, which Catholicism is notoreous for doing!
Hello friends,
Sub: The love of Jesus.
Jesus did not consider man to be born in sin, having natural sinful tendencies, and dependent on an external God to redeem him. “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God and that the spirit of God dwelleth in you.’ (1 Cor. 3:16). Evil has its roots in ignorance of our real nature and ignorance of the working of the Law of Justice.Thinking ourselves to be separate from others, we act selfishly for our own happiness unmindful of the law of harmony and mutual cooperation; thinking that we can get away from the consequencies of our evil deeds, by repentance, prayers, confessions. Just as one cannot escape from death, one cannot escape from the consequencies of evil deeds. Therefore, instead of condemning the evil-doer, he teaches us how to overcome the evil tendencies in us and establish ourselves in good.
Jesus asks us to respond immediately to an impulse to do good and restrain evil thoughts, because if we are slow in responding to noble impulses, we are more likely to delight in evil. Every aspiration of the soul for spiritual things, every resolve of man to lead a purer life, every helping outstretched hand to a weaker brother, every desire for the truth, all hungering and thirsting after righteousness—these and like yearnings and strivings of the soul have first of all come from the Divine within. These are gifts from the higher nature to the lower. From the spiritual to the human, seen in those humane attributes, or qualities, or virtues such as love, joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness, goodness, meekness and temperance. Since most of us cannot become spiritually perfect overnight, we have to strive after “ordinary manifestations of the spirit”.
When an impulse to do good arises in our heart, we must hasten to act, otherwise, our calculating and reasoning mind is likely to talk us out of it. If we feel like helping the needy person, we must do so without delay, otherwise we are very likely to come up with convincing reason as to why we cannot or must not help. By not responding, we subject ourselves to the “blunting” process by which our sensitivity gets blunted or dulled. The first time we come across a starving man, a man suffering from terminal disease, a distressed person, our heart goes out to him and we want to be of help in some way. We, as it were, feel the pain of another by spontaneous sympathy. Such natural responses, unless nurtuted, tend to get atrophied. It is the Voice of Christos within, who gets crucified whenever we turn a deaf ear to it. It is the voice of our conscience, which becomes feeble, if unheard. Gradually, we become more and more self-centred and begin to live in our cocoon, unconcerned about the sorrows of other people. This is particularly so at the present stage of our development when Spirit has not yet mastered the animal within.
Humanity sins, sorrows, suffers and dies a thousand deaths; because of what? Just IGNORANCE. They do not know that happiness is an outcome of good deeds, and suffering results from evil. Hence they resort to unfair and unlawful means to obtain their happiness. It seems to work well for a while until, at last, their evil deeds ripen. When they do, he knows that the Law works. The Law of Justice works in fair and unerring manner, bringing to us the exact consequences of our actions.
Pootna Spotty, says:
“Jesus did not consider man to be born in in sin, having sinful tendencies, and dependant on an external God to redeem him.”
Pootna, my friend, you are way of base in this statement of yours, as it is utterly false and terribly unscriptural; let us hear from God’s Word, the Holy Scriptures, the Bible, regarding the sinful, inherent, condition of all mankind:
“For ALL have SINNED and fall short of the glory of God, being justified (forgiven, if they repent) freely by His grace through the REDEMPTION that is in Christ Jesus. Whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over (the what?) SINS that were previously committed.” ( Rom. 3:23-25) emphasis added.
Again we read in God’s Word:
“But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still SINNERS, Christ died for us.” ( Rom. 5:8)
Death in Adam, Life in Christ.
“Therefore, just as through one man (Adam) SIN entered the world, and death through SIN, and thus death spread to ALL men, because all SINNED.” ( Rom. 5:12) emphasis added.
“There is NO man that sinneth not.” ( I Kings 8:46)
“Scripture hath concluded ALL under SIN.” ( Gal. 3:22).
(Read also Psalm 14: 1-4; Jeremiah 17:9; Mark 7:21-23; Matt. 15: 18-20; Isaiah 1:5-6; Psalm 51:5; Job 14:4; Ephesians 2:1-5; I John 1: 8-10; Romans 6:17; 7:14; I John 3: 8-10; John 8:44).
Adam sold his unborn generations into slavery in Satan’s kingdom of darkness (SIN) and ALL became children of the devil. They all came under the curse of the law ( Galatians 3:10). Though all SIN is primarily against God ( Psa 51:4) Adam also sinned against the entire human race. His breaking the law brought ALL of mankind under the warth of God, because we ALL are SINNERS. ( Romans 4:15)
Man became a SINNER both in original and actual sin. Original SIN is inherited from Adam. Actual sin is that which man commits. Because man is sinful in nature, he is also sinful in acts. He does what he does because of WHAT HE IS, a sinner by nature; he is not a sinner because he sins, NO! but SINS because he is A SINNER. (Foundations of Christian Doctrine, p. 149)
Also, your quotation of I cor. 3:16, is taken entirely out of context, and misinterpreted completely to support your untenable unscriptural premise, as this text is speaking to Christians, “Do you not know that you (Christians, the local church, the individual Christian’s body) are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you.”
This most certainly does NOT apply to the unsaved, nor mankind in general, but, ONLY to those who are redeemed, Justified in Christ Jesus, the true body of Christ.
Also, no man can be Justified, declsared not guilty, by doing good works of any kind, this is declared over and over again in Scripture.
“But we are ALL like unclean thing; And ALL our righteousness are like FILTHY RAGS…” ( Isa. 64: 6)
“For by grace you have been saved through FAITH, and that not of yourselves, (Why not? because) it IS THE GIFT OF GOD, NOT of WORKS, lest anyone should boast.” (Eph. 2:8-9) emphasis added.
Good post, Carlos.
Perry,
Happy to see your reply.What is interesting to me is that you have replied at all.
Now about the documents you quoted in support of your contention that no serious alteration has taken place except very minor ones, are not in public domain and I have to accept your word for it. As a scholar I accept your assertion.
However I would like you to see the references I am giving below. I place them without comment as I have read none of the above authors in original.I have however seen a comparative chart in Wikipedia and I have found out that these books probably exist and I also assume that these people are really scholars.
I happen to be in a serious research on the activities of St. Thomas who established a Christian community in India at a time when Christianity was not accepted by the Roman empire the powerful organ that held sway over Europe and much of Asia at Jesus time and later. My interest unfortunately is purely scholastic.I have found that those who did not accept uniformity in what Jesus is thought to have said has been placed outside scholarly debate. A typical example is the Gospel of Thomas variously mentioned as Gnostic, Apocryphal etc.If Biblical accounts are to be taken as truth then Thomas appears to have been closest to Jesus and the only one who was allowed to examine the marks of crucification.I as a scholar would like to think that this shows a certain closeness that other disciples may not have enjoyed.I concede that this is a debatable point.But it cannot be ignored.
My point is and will continue to be that faith is personal and no written text can influence beyond certain point. Ann’s conversion is typically an act of faith true for herself. But that does not necessarily point towards any unchallengeable truth that influenced her decision. I had in my earlier blog stated that what is planted in a tender mind stays there for the whole of one’s life.The trouble with many faiths( Christianity is no exception )is that there are certain immutable concepts and ideas that has to be followed as guiding principles of life.There is no scope for debate and scholarship.
One should be able to believe what is practical and possible.
I would go back to my research on St. Thomas. I find that he had no access to a Bible except a Jewish one and what he preached may have been a reflection of the times the faith that existed in CE 52-72 the period of his stay in India. However when the Portuguese came to India they found reasons to contradict and discredit most of the things Thomas seems to have preached and encouraged his followers to practice.Today the community he established does not follow what he would have taught his followers.I cite this as another example of a quest for uniformity in faith from which this debate started when I mentioned that Marc and Luke were not present while Jesus preached. There is belief that Marc was Peter’s scribe. Could very well be true. No challenge there.
Is it not possible in Ann’s assertion that the gospels were written before the fall of Jerusalem and therefore no challenge about their authenticity. I suggest two possibilities.
One. Marc and the other gospel writers were not aware of it and may not have thought the event to be of significance. After all they were not politicians.
Two.They were writing about the Jesus they knew and not about the developments in Jewish history.
These are possibilities worthy of scholarly consideration I believe.
I leave you with the references I mentioned earlier.
1. B.H.Throkmortan Gospel Parallels
2.R.W.Fink The Five Gospels.
3.E.B Nicholson The Gospel according to Hebrews.
4.J.R Edwards Hebrew Gospel and Development of the synoptic tradition.
Regards
George.
Pune
India
27.12.2010.
I simply challenge you to read Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in their entirety. Follow the story and absorb the contents. Develop a feel for the authors’ style and the perspective each brings.
Then read Thomas. Make note of what it says, what it claims and what is assumed.
Compare Thomas to the four gospels.
Let me know what your impressions are.
Dear Anne,
You may be the answer to my search for a Writer, who may partner with me to write a Fictional Novel based on my Soul Theory – http://soultheory.blog.co.uk/
To better understand the Soul Theory it is highly recommended to read the following first 4 Chapters of The Soul Theory Blog:
1. Creation http://soultheory.blog.co.uk/2007/02/07/creation~1700939
2. MAN AS A HUMAN BEING – Part I http://soultheory.blog.co.uk/2007/02/09/man_as_a_human_being~1712876
3. The Law of Revision http://soultheory.blog.co.uk/2007/02/12/the_law_of_revision~1729737
4. MAN AS A HUMAN BEING – Part II http://soultheory.blog.co.uk/2007/03/30/man_as_a_human_being_part_ii~2005765
Other Soul Theory Chapters that you may also consider reading are:
5. Human Intelligence http://soultheory.blog.co.uk/2007/04/14/human_intelligence~2091546
6. Is The World Still Perfect? http://soultheory.blog.co.uk/2007/04/24/is_the_world_still_perfect~2152637
7. Do we have a Free Will? http://soultheory.blog.co.uk/2007/05/27/do_we_have_a_free_will~2343890
8. Homosexuality http://soultheory.blog.co.uk/2007/06/08/homosexuality~2419650
9. Slavery to Illegal Immigrants http://soultheory.blog.co.uk/2007/06/18/slavery_to_illegal_immigrants~2477783
10. Re-Birth of the Soul-Driver http://soultheory.blog.co.uk/2007/07/08/the_birth_of_a_soul_driver~2594071
11. Religion http://soultheory.blog.co.uk/2007/07/23/religion~2684575
12. Poverty – The Soul Theory View http://soultheory.blog.co.uk/2007/08/05/poverty_the_soul_theory_view~2760629
13. Life – Abortion – Stem Cells http://soultheory.blog.co.uk/2007/09/09/life_abortion_stem_cells~2952929
14. Corruption http://soultheory.blog.co.uk/2008/01/01/corrupton_the_soul_theory_view~3516025
15. Sleep vs. Death http://soultheory.blog.co.uk/2008/10/13/sleep-vs-death-4866750
16. Forgiveness http://soultheory.blog.co.uk/2008/12/15/forgiveness-5228354
17. Judgement Day http://soultheory.blog.co.uk/2009/01/11/judgement-day-5358129
18. Genetics & Hereditary http://soultheory.blog.co.uk/2009/08/10/genetics-hereditary-6689953
19 .Life as a School http://soultheory.blog.co.uk/2009/08/24/life-as-a-school-6811419
20 Life as a Prison http://soultheory.blog.co.uk/2009/12/13/life-as-a-prison-7565728/
21 Plants as Living Organisms http://soultheory.blog.co.uk/2010/05/24/plants-as-living-organisms-8658554/
22. Is God in Control? http://soultheory.blog.co.uk/2010/06/05/is-god-in-control-8738727/
Kindly let me know if you will accept to partner with me as a Writer to write a Fictional Novel based on The Soul Theory.
Thanks / Best Regards
Best Regards
Sam Eshun
Is it true that praying to Mary who gave virgin birth to Jesus gets one nowhere spritually? Is it also true that a statue of Mary is an idol – a false idol that Catholics pray to?
“Is it true that praying to Mary who gave virgin birth to Jesus gets one nowhere [spiritually].” – Richard
If you are seeking the Catholic Church’s perspective, then you could not be further from the truth. The Church teaches that Mary’s intercession through her prayers are immeasurably powerful. If you knew someone in this life as religiously devoted and holy as Mary, I doubt you would cease to ask for her prayers often. It should be no different with her being in Heaven.
“Is it also true that a statue of Mary is an idol – a false idol that Catholics pray to?” – Richard
Nope.
Any statues or other graphical representations of Jesus, Mary or the other saints are just that–graphical representations. They are used to assist in a mental visualization to stimulate prayer–which is obviously directed to God–alongside the prayers of the saints for whose prayers we ask.
Think of it like this. When a friend or a lover is far away, and you look at their picture as you talk on the phone, how much admiration and love do you have for the picture? Would I be correct in saying the person would be offended if you lovingly looked at the picture or kept it with you? Would you be fine with never seeing or talking to the person again if you were allowed to keep the picture as a substitute?
It is no different for statues or idols. They exist solely to stimulate prayer, to remind us of God, Jesus, Heaven and holy conceptions.
To recite verses from the bible to justify one’s point of opinion is a massive mistake. The Bible is much to saturated with direct contradictions.
The main concern I have with Christianity does not revolve around Christ at all…..it has everthing to do with the wicked way Christianity has been used right from the start and still up to now to manipulate people via its structure. It is horrific to see this still happening.
Hundreds of thousand of people have lost their lives at the hands of so-calles christians in the name of Christ…..and neither God nor Christ advocates this.
Millions of Dollars are taken from people in the name of Christ.
The Gospel industry is a multy million dollar industry….and Christ specifically said not to turn his “house” into a business.
Christians…as they find themselves within their massive structures and franchises commit despicable deeds.
I walked away from Christianity for ever as i am 100% convinced that Chridt shames Himself at what people are doing in his name…..he must be so sad!!!
As for God and Christ…..God the Ultimate Creator and Christ the Ultimate Deity…..there is no place for this man invested creature called Satan just to scare people further into the “Turn-or Burn” theology.
So Mote it Be
Of all the thousands of un-scriptural things ascribed to Mary, by the Catholic church, none of which the humble handmaiden of the Lord, has had anything to do with, nor the Eternal Godhead, the most outrageous, blasphemous ones, are from “The Glories of Mary” by St. Alphonsus de Liguori. The writings in this book, revered by Catholics, have ‘apotheoized’ Mary, elevating her to divine status, deification.
let us hear a few of these most blasphemous statements:
“Thou art the Mother of God, and ALL-POWERFUL to save sinners, and with God thou needest no other recommendation for thou art the Mother of true life.” (p.155)
“For thy protection is Omnipotent, O Mary,’ says Cosmos of Jerusalem, ‘Yes, Mary is Omnipotent.” ( Ibid., p.155)
“At the command of Mary, All obey, EVEN GOD.” (Ibid., p.155).
Catholicism has mingled and mixed all of these utterly un-scriptural, blasphemous, idolatrous claims regarding Mary, with the absolute ‘Truth claim’ of God’s Word, the Holy Scriptures, which vehemently and contemptuously violate God’s Word.
Unfortunately and sadly, the Jesus of Catholicism is ANOTHER (heteron) Jesus; the gospel of Catholicism, is ANOTHER (heteron) gospel; and the spirit of Catholicism is ANOTHER (heteron) spirit!
Veneration of Mary is informed by the lie that the people go to heaven after they die.However the bible teaches that all dead people are in thier graves waiting for the resurection. some to evelasting life and some to shame and everlasting damnation. Mary like all other faithful servants of God will be resurected then.The bible is also clear on who interceeds for us and who to address ourselves to in moments of worship and adoration.We do not needs idols to represent or remind us about God, for we have the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit.Any other form of worship is veiled paganism
Eunice, You are sadly mistaken about the ‘dead’ and the Resurrection, thinking as you do, it is called “soul sleep” the erroneous doctrine of conditional immortality, and its nnecessary corollary, annihilation, held to by the SDA, JWs et al, not biblical at all, why not?
Well, the ‘gift’ of Eternal Life is bestowed on the soul/spirit of man, at the moment of ‘spiritual’ regeneration, being ‘Born again’ Justified; however, the gift of ‘immortality’ relates to the ‘Resurrection’ when the sound principles of Biblical hermeneutics, contextual analysis, and liguistic exegesis, are correctly used and applied, this can be seen from Scripture, that ‘eternal life’ is vastly different from ‘immortality’ as immortality IS bestowed upon the believer AT the resurrection, wheras, in this life (earthly) he/she already possess ‘eternal life’ a spiritual quality of existence, which will at length be united with the pgysical quality of ‘incorruptibility’ which the Bible speaks of as immortality, and “we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is” ( I Cor. 12: I John 3:2) A study of these words in any Greek lexicon, and their use in the New Testament, will show that ‘immortality’ and ‘eternal life’ are neither identical nor synonymous.
In 2 Timothy 1:10, Paul writes that God’s eternal purpose “is now made manifest by the appearing of our Saviour Jesus Christ, who hath abolihed death, and hath brough (What?) LIFE and IMMORTALITY to light through the gospel.” In this verse “Life” (zoen) and “immortality” (aphtharsian) are clearly distinguished. As mentioned earlier, ‘Life’ is bestowed upon the believer at the moment of regeneration by FAITH in Jesus Christ ( I John 5:11, 12), but, immortality is a future gift, to be betowed upon the believer’s BODY at the second advent of our Lord, or as Paul expressed it, “This corruptible must put on incorruption (aptharsian), and this mortal must put on immortality ( athanasian).
Again in Romans 2:7, the Apostle clearly distinguishes between ‘eternal life” as a conscious quality of spiritual existence, bestowed upon the believer as a gift; and ‘immortality,’ which, in this connection in the New Testament refers to the ‘resurrection’ bodies of the saints or to the nature of God Himself. Therefore, God’s Word clearly indicates the difference between “life” as spiritual existence, and ‘immortality’, incorruptibility in a body like that of our risen Lord.
They are also other text in the NT, that clearly show that upon physical death, the spirit/soul of man, if ‘Saved’ go straight to Heaven, awaiting the glorious day of resurrection, when the ‘spirit/soul’ will be reunited with the BODY, at the resurrection, when the gift of ‘immortality’ will then be bestowed.
Hey Carlos,
I think in your pedantic efforts to prove yourself right (scripturally and theologically) – and everyone who disagrees with you as wrong, you overlook the truth. The truth is in the spirit, not in the literal words. There is a very valid reason why Catholics pray to saints and Mary – they represent archetypal aspects of God – who is beyond definition. (“Definition” meaning the opposite if infinite). To our human minds we are so used to breaking down ideas and conceptualizing that often time the best we can do is look beyond literal interpretations to the spirit and symbolic meaning of everything that is good and whole (or Holy – if you prefer). Carl Jung recognized this and supported the Catholic position of addressing these numerous aspects of God.
To judge Catholicism – or any other religions – based on your own narrow precepts is practicing the very hypocrisies that Jesus accused the pharisees of.
Why don’t you tone it down a bit? Maybe re-think your position with a bit of humility?
Hi Bernard,
“Truth is in the spirit not in the literal words.”
You obviously fail to understand the ‘Word’ of God, contained in the Scriptures, the Bibe, which IS the ‘Word’ of God. As Jesus said “…but you seek to kill Me (Why?) because My WORD (the Word of God) has no place in you.”
Almighty God communicated His ‘Word’ to us through the medium of language (words)and “He who is of God hears God’s WORDS; therfore you do not hear, (why not?) because you are not of God” (John 8:47) emphasis added. Again let us hear Jesus: “If you abide in My WORD, you are My disciples indeed, And you shall KNOW the TRUTH, and the TRUTH shall make you free” (Jn. 8:31,32) emphasis added. Just as the legalistic Jews did, so did Roman Catholicism, ‘Ye leave the commandment of God, And hold fast the traditions of men…ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your tradition…making void the WORD of God by your tradition” (Mark 7: 8,9, 13).
This is precisely why we are warned from God’s WORD(s) “Ye shall NOT add unto the word which I command you neither shall ye deminish aught from it…” (Deut 4:2) Again we read: “Every word of God is pure, do NOT add to His WORDS (Scripture) lest He rebuke you and you be found a liar” ( Prov. 30: 5,6) So that, “Forever O Lord they WORD is settled in heaven” (Psa. 119:89) “Thou has dealt well with thy servant O Lord according to thy WORD” (v. 65) “Thy WORD is true from the beginning: and every one of thy righteous judgments endureth forever” (v.160) “…but my heart standeth in awe of thy WORD. I rejpice at thy WORD” (vv. 152-161b)
“All (every) Scripture is given by inspiration of God (word’s) and is (what?) profitable for doctrine (teaching) for reproof, for correction (of those in error) for instruction in righteousness. That the man of God may be mature thoroughly furnished unto all good works” ( 2 Tim 3: 16,17) emphasis added.
When ever any one goes outside of God’s divinely, inspired WORD, the Bible, not correctly interpreting His Word, by not unsing the sound principles of biblical hermeneutics, erroneous dogma, teaching always comes in, as Roman Catholicism et al have done, with dangerous ‘spiritualizing’ of the written WORD, literally outside of the grammatical, linguistic context of what God has spoken in His written WORD, the Bible.
This is why Jude gave this most serious imperative exhortation to the Church in the N.T, let us hear from God’s WORD, not spiritualizing into it!
“Beloved, while I was very diligent to write you concerning our common salvation, I found it necessary to write to you exhorting you to CONTEND EARNESTLY for the FAITH which was ONCE for ALL delivered to the saints.” (Jude 3) emphasis added.
“To contend” is from the Greek word ‘epagonzomai’ and means, ‘To contend, carry on a conflict, debate, fight.’ ‘Once for all” is from the Greek word ‘Hapax’ strictly numerical concept…’delivered’ is from the Greek word ‘Paradotheisei’ a technical term when the object is teaching, i.e., such as doctrine, salvation.
You see, ‘FAITH’ as used here by Jude, is not the subjective trust a believer must have, but by grammar and context of the discourse is referring to the ‘Body’ substance, of doctrinal truth taught and believed which was ‘ONCE for all delivered to the saints” as contained in the N.T. documents, which Catholicism et al have terribly disregarded, by adding the spurious so-called sacred traditions, hence all of the false and erroneous teaching ‘dogma’ which then invalidate the absolute truth of God’s WORD, by the traditions of men, like praying to saints, and Mary, etc, which has NO New Testament basis whatsoever, as Jesus IS our Only Mediator between us on earth, and God the Father in heaven, through ONE ‘Spirit’ the Holy spirit, (see John 14:6; I Tim 2:5; and Eph. 2:18) If I’m being pedantic, it is because God’s WORD, the Scripture, the Bible is also pedantic on these strict, doctrinal statements, ‘ONCE for all delivered to the saints..” for which any truly redeemed child of God, must ‘…contend earnestly…” (Jude 3)
It is NOT both/and, that is praying to the departed saints, Mary, NO, NO! It is either/or, that Jesus IS the Only Mediator, through ONE ‘Spirit’ the Holy Spirit, or nothing at all!
BTW, my use of Caps lock, is not intended to be shouting at any one, no, it is simply used for emphasis and augmentation!
Hi Carlos,
You can use anything to rationalize your religious bigotry including the Holy Scriptures – which you obviously do.
The “Word” of GOD is but a quiet peaceful “YES” – no the literal language in a book.
There are many ways you can read the Bible and it really depends on your motivation and intention, because the motivation sets the context for your understanding.
If you really are seeking the truth – and if the truth really does set you free – then limiting yourself to fearful, divisive and dogmatic interpretations of verses in the Bible is obviously never going to work for you.
Hi Bernard,
Sorry, my friend, but your ‘Red-herring’ distraction, will not cut it, you cannot even begin to defend Catholicism’s twisted, perverted, unsound interpretation of God’s Word, but this is to be expected, as Vatican II Documents, article 10, p.177, says:
“Sacred tradition and sacred Scripture form ONE sacred deposit of the Word of God. {And] the task of authentically interpreting the Word of God whether written or handed on, has been intrusted EXCLUSIVELY to the living teaching office of the church (Catholicism!).”
This is the blatant, arrogant utterly unscriptural position of the Papacy; who vitiates the absolute authority of God’s Word, the Bible, by including the terribly spurious, so-called, sacred tradition, on par with God’s Word, which is tantamount to what the pharasaical Jews, also do, for which Jesus rebuked them, “…making VOID the Word of God by your TRADITION…You leave the commandment of God, and hold fast the tradition of men…you reject the commandment of God, that you may keep your tradition? (Mark. 7: 8,9,13).
This adherence to the oral tradition of the Jews, which flew into the face of God’ Word, is such a striking parallelism and analogous to what Roman Catholicism has done with the Word of God, the Scriptures, by her traditions, which then contravene, contradicts, and invalidates the TRUTH of God’s Word.
Evan here is a glimmer of the spurous so-called sacred traditions of Roman Catholicism, and please not the citations are from Catholic Encyclopaedia and Catholic Dictionary.
Forgeries, Fabrications, Falsehoods, Fakes and Frauds: “Substituting of false documents with genuine ones was quite a trade in the Middle Ages” (Cath. Ency., VI, 136)
Apostolic Canons.
On the supposed canons, Lambert writes:
“With reference to one of the most monumental forgeries of that age, Apostolic canons, Catholic Dictionary says: “A tradition (accepted because unexamined) long prevailed that those canons were dictated by the Apostles to St. Clement of Rome who committed them to writings. Accurate research has dispelled this notion.” (pp. 41, 42).
Forgeries began before the ‘Middle Ages.’
‘Writers of the fourth century were prone to describe practices, i.e., The Lenten Fast of forty days, as Apostolic Institutions, which certainly had no claim to be so regarded.” (Cath. Ency., III, 484) “One is forced to admit that gradual corruption of Christianity began very early” (Cath. Ency., XII, 414).
The Bible the only book used by early Church.
“There was NO written liturgy in the first three centuries…(Cath. Dict., 523). “It would of course be a monstrous anachronism were we to ascribe a belief in Papal infallibility to Ante-Nicene fathers” ( Cath. Dict., 694).
Apostolic Church ordinances
This “pseudo apostolic collection” was falsely fabricated ” in the third, or at latest, in the early part of the fourth century” (Cath. Ency., I, 635)
Apostolic constitutions
On this massive fraud, Lambert states: “The mass of forgeries contained in this document has always been used since its creation in the fifth century, and though acknowledged to be simply a monstrous forgery for hundreds of years, it is no less popular and useful to Catholic writers in their efforts to validate Catholic innovations today. As an acknowledgement of its character, Catholic Dictionary says: “They profess to contain the words of the Apostles written down by St. Clement of Rome” (p.43) Again on the same pages Catholic Dictionary says: “Pearson assigns the work as it stands to the middle of the fifth century.”
This is just scratching the surface of the documented evidence from within Catholic Ency, and Dicts confirming the fradulent basis on which much Catholic dogma arose, usurping the absolute authority of God’s Word, the Bible.
Hi Carlos,
I’m tired of arguing with you. You and I will never agree.
I’m so sorry you aren’t open-minded enough to consider another perspective, and that you continue to condemn a religion based on your dogmatic and narrow interpretations of verses in a book which is itself merely a collection of ideas put forth by ancient minds – as inspired as they were at the time.
I truly hope your endeavors will eventually lead you to an experience of the Truth – however, I don’t believe a mind as full of condemnation – as yours obviously is – will get there so long as you continue to cling to the idea that you are right.
Happy journey my friend. Good luck and travel well :)
Hi Bernard,
I truly feel sorry for you, you are so deceived by and with Catholic dogma, an utter maze of false doctrine; and your contempt for the Inspired Word of God, the Bible, you must go and read carefully the Gospel of John, and the book of Romans, and hear the Word of God!
I’m free in Christ Jesus, I KNOW HIM as my personal Saviour and Lord, as our sole Mediator, Advocate and High Priest before the Father in heaven, He Alone gives me the peace, joy and purpose of living daily, and the assurace of Eternal Life hereafter, for as He said:
“I AM the WAY, the TRUTH, and the LIFE, NO one comes to the Father except through Me.” (Jn. 14:6) emphasis added.
The Lord Jesus Christ IS the living, eternal, personification of TRUTH, when you KNOW Him as personal Saviour and Lord, you are cemented in the truth, as there is no other truth, therefore as Jesus said:
“If you abide in My WORD, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall KNOW the TRUTH, and the TRUTH shall make you FREE.” (John 8: 31,32) emphasis added.
Bernard, you need to get to know Jesus personally, then you’ll know the TRUTH, then He ‘…shall make you free!!!
Carlos
These revelations are really stupendous. The Roman Catholic is the result of dogmatisation of centuries of acculturation of the Church since the Apostles. These dogmatisation of accumulated tradition can easily be taken away by sola scriptura reform.
The problem is that todays counterculture, commercialism, individualism, revisionism, inclusivism, covenantlessness, unisex-genderlessness, etc, have taken a more serious and dangerous tool on the Church. I think we should develop mastery on criticizing the postmodern church and ministries of our day. Otherwise we will be free from ancient errors only to remain trapped by newer and more sinister fallacies.
I believe the church of today is more pervert than the ancient church despite the freedom of expression and access to the Scriptures and other literature. Much of this pervertion is brought into through Scriptural revisions, versions and paraphrases.
Today again these rebellious countercultural trappings are being dogmatised as true interpretations of the Scripture, revelations and leadings by the Holy Spirit.
The middle age church was dark but the postmodern age church is worse. Let us awake to the dangers of our time. What do you think?
Ann,
How can you possibly go back to the practice of Christianity as it is being practiced knowing that it the ultimate system of malipulation of mankind.
Believe in God…He is the untimate power knowledge and creator. Believe in Christ….He is the untimate deity from whom we should take the example on how to live and even how to die.
But as for christianity as it is practiced today…..stay away….it has no good for your soul.
What is practised on earth today has very little if any to do with what God and Christ had in mind.
Religion has gone sadly astray. It was conceived in an unenlightened age where male dominance was prominent. The way to live your life is with love and understanding as any great philosopher (even Christ) would advocate. Mankind has twisted and reformed the great philosophical teachings of religion to suit their own needs. Barbaric laws were introduced to punish man or woman if they sinned. Some are still in practice today where in parts of the world male domination still flourishes. I wonder what would have happened if instead of Christ as the great philosopher, it was Christine. In war the male again dominates with a destructive force that is difficult to control. In many religious stories the females are shown as a destructive element that manipulate and plot to suit their own needs. The mythology of the Garden of Eden where Eve tempts Adam makes all this possible. By the way I am male and when doing research for my books the truth of a complete male dominated society can be clearly seen in the writings of the holy books. It is a truth that sadly manifested two to three centuries ago.
Even love (as with religion) has been twisted to individual taste such that love means anything including unfaithful sex by married people and mercy killing and abortion. Listen anything hat depraved humanity takes up is soon messed up. This is why we need salvation.
God the Father, is NOT Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit is NOT the Father, the Father is NOT Jesus, Jesus is NOT the Father.
“The Scriptures give us the revelation of the eternal Godhead, who has revealed Himself as one God, existing in three Persons, even the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’ DISTINGUISHABLE, but indivisible in essence; co-eternal, co-existent, co-equal in nature, attributes, power and glory. There is but one eternal Godhead, who is one undivided and indivisible essence; and in this one essence there are THREE eternal distinctions, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” (The Foundations Of Christian Doctrine, Chapter 4, The Doctrine of God, p.41)emphasis added.
It is utterly useless to quote from a book about the Bible for subjects which are the Bible. You, Carlos, have quoted “The Foundations of Christian Doctrine” multiple times thus far and I, frankly, dissagree with them. You might as well be reading out of Curious George. Your first quote was on sin about how you believe we are inherantly sinful and are filled with sin from birth. Although I agree with the Bible how we are all sinners and we all fall short from the glory of God, your quote from Curious George is wrong. As is your quote about the “Godhead”. From the same book. Nowhere in the Bible is God divisioned as your quote suggests. Please, if you are going to have Biblical arguments, stick to the Bible. That second hand, personal oppinion stuff can stay on your shelf.
Wayne Jr, You obviously know little or nothing about ‘Systematic Theology’ or ‘Biblical Theology’ both of which are derived from a very careful and systematic study of God’s Word, the Bible.
The quotes I made from “The Foundations of Christian Doctrine’ a thorough and concise work, nowhere violate any of God’s Word, the Bible, but, are a careful, very systematic presentaion of what can be taken from the Bible, which IS NOT a book of systematic theology, as God did not intend it to be, but, rather, gave man the insight and spiritual intelligence, to systematically and coherently pull together many different passages from throughout His Word, to formulate, soundly, cogently, and logically, what is known as Systematic Theology, all derived from HIS WORD, the Bible, nothing more, nothing less!
I had twelve years of Catholic education, entered a Trappist Monastery upon High School graduation and the had to return to the outside world because of ulcers. At age 35 I was introduced to the real Jesus Christ of the Bible and I was “born again”. I think I understand your journey Anne. Has Jesus revealed Himself to you in a personal way and filled you with His peace and joy that passes human understanding?
God bless you for your courageous sharing of your story and may God continue to bless you with continued understanding of His love.
“I’d lost faith in atheism.” I think that says it all. Also kudos to your husband, if all atheists were like him I’d have no problem with atheism. (Actually, I don’t really have a problem with it now, just the fanatics.)
One more thing…I think that at least some of the Jesus Skeptics are proceeding from the preconceived notion that Christianity is a fraud and are seeking to discredit it. I believe you suspected that as well, though I don’t blame you for not saying so explicitly.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…whether or not atheism is a religion, it definitely functions as one for many of its adherents.
Anne Rice has recently renounced being a “Christian” and rejected “Christianity”. This really sheds some light on what she thought Christianity was.
http://www.russellmoore.com/2010/07/30/anne-rice-hasnt-betrayed-you/
I have never read anything by Ann Rand until today, this article. I see a knowledge of God, but no relationship with God. Jesus said “I am the way the truth and the life, no man cometh unto the father but by me” (John 14:6). He also said: John 14:15 “If ye love me, keep my commandments.”
May I suggest reading the scriptures – Matthew – Jesus is presented as King, Mark – He is presented as servant, Luke – presented as man, John – presented as God. They are sufficient of themselves to tell who Jesus is.
Ann Rand never mentions how Jesus (not the RC church), changed her life.
Romans 10:9-10 That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.
I would pray that she comes to Jesus, and unlike the rich man who went away, stay until she knows Him as Lord and Saviour of her life.
Do you think your tryst back to christianity has anything to do with your advanced age and your husbands death? That is how we see it. Trying to buy your way into heaven?
How about studying the history of every religions on earth. How do they come into being? What passages in the Bible that support their being there? What are their Doctrines ? Christ said ” i will build my church “..so true Christian church must bear the name of Christ, who is the owner in the first place. If one religion has no name of Christ in it, THAT IS NOT the TRUE CHRISTIAN Church. That name of the church/religion is one of the several component to consider if a religion is of Christ. The other component – if that so called christian religion teaches what Jesus Himself and the Apostles taught, if otherwise, that is NOT the True Christian Church, like .. Jesus said “..My Father and your Father, My God and your God…” so Jesus is NOT God because He has God He called Father..so if one religion teaches that Jesus is God, that religion IS NOT the True Christian Church..There is only one God , the Father who art in heaven…creator of heaven and earth, the one Who raises Christ from the dead..there are other factors to consider but to know more Pls try to study the religion that started from the “far east” ,”from the ends of the earth”..from the Phils, the Iglesia Ni Cristo, which was re-established on July 27, 1914 ,by the power of the word of God written in the Bible )..thank you.
My friend, how long have you carried with you this easily refutable heresy?
“And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them. Jesus cometh, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said: Peace be to you. Then he saith to Thomas: Put in thy finger hither, and see my hands; and bring hither thy hand, and put it into my side; and be not faithless, but believing. Thomas answered, and said to him: My Lord, and MY GOD. Jesus saith to him: Because thou hast seen me, Thomas, thou hast believed: BLESSED ARE THEY that have not seen, and have believed.” – John 20:26-29 (Emphasis added)
As a result of reading Dr. Michael Beck’s post:
Dear Anne, I love you and so does Jesus. As you most likely know, Christianity is not truely a “religion”. For Saints who trust Jesus and follow HIM, it’s a RELATIONSHIP. I hope more people can reject Christianity as a “religion” and come to a trusting, saving, relationship with Jesus Christ.
Please note, that when I use ‘Caps Lock’ I am not intending to shout are any one, I simply use it for emphasis and augmentation!
Now, back to Catholicism and its use of the seriously flawed, concocted, illogical system, eastern dialectic logic, which has no absolutes, both/and, in order to include what is never, never even hinted at remotely from Scripture, God’s Word, that is that Mary, the humble handmaiden, is now exalted, literally deified to a postion, nowhere mentioned in God’s Word, and the famous theologian of antiquity, Augustine, falls for this un-scriptural dogma, in his previously mentioned prayer to Mary for salvation.
Truth by defintion IS ABSOLUTE, exclusive, therefore, according to the unalterable unchanging ‘ Law of Non-Contradiction’ two competing ‘truth-claims’ cannot be both right at the same time and place. They can be both wrong, but they cannot be both right!
Of course, Catholicism resorts to eastern dialectic logic, ‘both/and’ in order to justify its contention re Mary’s role in the salvation of men, that is both Jesus and Mary are necessary. Yes, they admit that He is sole mediator, according to Scripture, but, then contrary to God’s Word, they interpose Mary as Co-Advocate, Auxiliatrix, Adjutrix, and Medistrix, which has absolutely no Scriptural warrant whatsoever, and is a logical fallacy, as not only from the ‘Law of Non-Contradiction’ is this wrong, but is in diametric opposition to God’s Word, the Scriptures.
Here is where the ‘Law of Non-Contradiction simply cannot be got around, for it will haunt you to the end, and God knew what He was doing when He created these logical principles, which He allowed Aristotle to discover, and it is a ‘thorn’ and will continue to be in the side of eastern dialectic logic, which Catholicism holds on to, in order to justify her ‘both/and-Jesus/Mary’ theology, instead of the absolute ‘TRUTH’ that it is ‘either/or’ that is, The Lord Jesus Christ, is either ALL that the Bible proclaims and declares Him to be, the ONLY SAVIOUR, the ONLY MEDIATOR, the ONLY ADVOCATE, the ONLY HIGH PRIEST, before the Father, because He is Omnipotently, Omnisciently, and Omnipresently God, as the second Person of the Eternal Godhead, OR, HE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING AT ALL!
“Truth by defintion IS ABSOLUTE”
This is a claim that may or may not be true.
“therefore, according to the unalterable unchanging ‘ Law of Non-Contradiction’ two competing ‘truth-claims’ cannot be both right at the same time and place.”
Results of various Quantum Mechanics experiments conducted by Physicists contradict this claim.
“Truth” is a lot more complicated than you seem to think it is. To me, it is much more relative than you are implying here.
the roman catholic church has excommunicated a woman for attempting to become a priest, but has not excommunicated priests for raping children.
this organisation does not give moral guidance, it is morally bankrupt.