Yes, children were present in household baptisms. Biblical evidence.

Valletta

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But that is exactly what you did!!!!

FACT is.......There is NO Bible record of INFANT baptisms.
No, it's you who does not accept "household" but instead provide an interpretation meaning "household excluding infants." Jesus wanted the children to come to Him.
 
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concretecamper

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No, it's you who does not accept "household" but instead provide an interpretation meaning "household excluding infants." Jesus wanted the children to come to Him.
you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Shake the dust off your sandels.
 
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bbbbbbb

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Yes, it is my understanding they were included in households.

That is my understanding, as well. It does become a bit problematic if a slave owner commanded his slaves to be baptized even though they were adherents of other religions and not at all inclined toward Christianity. This was the case in some situations in the antebellum American South.
 
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concretecamper

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Mark 16:16
Whoever believes
and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.
thank you for showing us all that according to scripture, belief alone will not save. This is consistent with Church Tradition.
 
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The Liturgist

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In post #142 YOU said which is what I responded to.............

"Deuteronomy 4:2-3 refers to specifically to the Torah. It is not a generalized statement about all of Scripture. If it were, the Jews would never have written any new books for the Old Testament, because the Torah predates the rest both according to tradition and scholarship (although scholarship indicates some parts of the Torah were composed more recently than others, indeed, the presence of Aramaic words in the Torah, even in Genesis, indicates revision happening less than 400 years before the birth of St. John the Baptist).
[/quote]

That is correct, because if Deuteronomy were a generalized statement applying to all Scripture, it would render it a violation of the Torah to include any other books of the Old or New Testaments in the Bible, since these books were written after and not before the Torah.

More specifically, Deuteronomy 4:2-3 is likely a statement reflective of the tensions between the Jews and the Samaritans, who mutually accused each other of having modified the Torah.

Indeed, I suspect that St. Ezra the Priest may have added this directive from an earlier oral tradition after discovering that the Samaritans had modified the Torah and built their own temple following the partition of the Northern Kingdom and quite possibly during the Babylonian Exile. And the Samaritans, who by this late date believed their corrupt Torah to be the correct one, in turn copied this statement into their Torah as a means of ensuring its integrity, only since they had no other scripture aside from an alternate version of Joshua, they simply decided that their book of Joshua was a historical narrative and not Sacred Scripture. Note that this is educated speculation on my part, based on the fact that the Samaritans have a Torah that contains obvious and intentional differences from the Jewish Torah, and the words and actions of our Lord, God and Savior, the Incarnate Word of God, Jesus Christ, indicate the Samaritan Torah is corrupt.

My advise is that you be more careful as to what you SAY then you will not feel bad when anyone points out what YOU DID SAY!

I was careful with what I said; I did not say what you accuse me of saying.

You SAID that the law of the 1st reading is not applicable to ALL SCRIPTURE.

I never said anything remotely like that. Nothing of the sort. I did not claim the Torah was not in effect, that we should ignore it, or make any comment about the applicability of its moral code.

Is 2 Timothy 2:16 true or false?
"All Scripture is inspired by God and beneficial for teaching, for rebuke, for correction, for training in righteousness; "

Is Deuteronomy included in ALL Scripture???????

In this rhetorical question, you expose the fundamental logical flaw of your argument. If Deuteronomy 4:2-3 applies to all Scripture, and not just to the five books of the Torah specifically, one would have to say that 2 Timothy 2:16 was false, because its existence adds to the Torah. This is why every theologian of every legitimate Christian denomination, from Charles Spurgeon to St. Irenaeus of Lyons, understands Deuteronomy 4:2-3 to refer specifically to the five books of the Torah, because if it didn’t, the other books could not exist! The historians who wrote Joshua, Judges, the Books of Kings, the Chronicles, etc, and King David and the other Psalmists, the Prophets, the Evangelists, and the Holy Apostles would have violated Deuteronomy the moment the first letter was inscribed!

Apparently the Samaritans do interpret Deuteronomy 4:2-3 in a manner different from Jews and Christians, because they have no scripture other than the Pentateuch. But since Jews and Christians have other books in our Bible, Deuteronomy 4:2-3 clearly does not mean what you think it means, because there is no reasonable way to say that it applies to all Scripture, not just the Torah, while permitting the existence of any Scripture other than the Torah, except to say that Deuteronomy was written after every other book in the Bible, including the New Testament, which we know is not true.

Consequently, there was no justification for accusing me of endorsing murder and other heinous crimes forbidden in the Torah simply because I pointed out that as far as I can ascertain, Deuteronomy 4:2-3 can logically only refer either to the five books of the Torah, or to the section of Deuteronomy that follows, in which the law is recapitulated (this section being the portion of the Law that the King, Judge or Prophet-Ruler would read aloud to the People on the Feast of Tabernacles, before St. Ezra the Priest and St. Nehemiah the Holy Prophet implemented the reading of the entire Torah at the Temple and in the Synagogues, which were implemented by Ezra.

Supposing I am wrong, however, and there is a logical way to apply Deuteronomy to all of Scripture, it still does not justify accusing someone of endorsing the most extreme violations of the Torah imaginable, including murder, because my intent was to ensure that the accurate meaning of the Sacred Scripture was preserved, which is also the intent of Deuteronomy 4:2-3. Our Lord taught us in the Gospel According to Matthew “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you: do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.” And in the Gospel According to Mark, when he proclaims the Summary of the Law, the second commandment is “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”

For reference purposes, here is post 141:

Deuteronomy 4:2-3 refers to specifically to the Torah. It is not a generalized statement about all of Scripture. If it were, the Jews would never have written any new books for the Old Testament, because the Torah predates the rest both according to tradition and scholarship (although scholarship indicates some parts of the Torah were composed more recently than others, indeed, the presence of Aramaic words in the Torah, even in Genesis, indicates revision happening less than 400 years before the birth of St. John the Baptist).

More specifically, Deuteronomy 4:2-3 is likely a statement reflective of the tensions between the Jews and the Samaritans, who mutually accused each other of having modified the Torah. The Jews contended the Samaritans added an eleventh commandment to the Decalogue, commanding worship at Mount Gerizim, and also modified other references to sacred places such as the future site of Jerusalem to refer to Mount Gerizim; conversely the Samaritans accused the Jews of deleting the eleventh commandment and changing the references to Mount Gerizim to instead refer to Jerusalem and other locations.

As to which side was right, our Lord does say “Salvation comes from the Jews,” and that combined with the important events that occurred in Jerusalem under King David and King Solomon, and later under the Holy Prophet Nehemiah and St. Ezra the Priest, and still later during the oppressive reign of Antiochus, and finally, the events in the Gospels and in Acts, including the Last Supper, the Passion and Resurrection of our Lord, the Arrival of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, the martyrdoms of the deacon St. Stephen the Illustrious Protomartyr, and the Holy Apostle St. James the Great, and the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, just to name a few. So obviously the Samaritan Torah was corrupted, probably for purposes of propaganda, since after the Northern and Southern Kingdoms separated, it would have made sense for the corrupt Northern rulers and their Kohanim to relocate the center of worship and sacrifice to some place within their territorial borders.

And indeed a temple was built on Mount Gerizim, later to be destroyed, although to this day the Samaritans celebrate passover by slaughtering a large number of sheep in the area of the ruins atop Mount Gerizim, where many of them live in a tranquil, suburban setting. There is a Samaritan synagogue in Nablus at the base, and another inside Israeli territory. The approximately 800 surviving Samaritans (up from around 120 in the 1900s) have dual Israeli-Jordanian citizenship.

This all being said, as my friend @Valletta said, tampering with the contents of the Books of Scripture is prohibited. Indeed, it is the main problem with Samaritanism. Also, one of the few serious issues I have with Martin Luther is that he interpolated the word “alone” into a sentence in Romans, so it read “by faith alone” rather than “by faith.” Nonetheless on balance I have a positive view of Martin Luther: his defense of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the iconography, the theology of the Cross, and the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary is inspiring. No one but God is truly perfect, not even the saints.

By the way, if anyone is interested, I have an extremely rare English translation of the Defter, the Samaritan prayerbook, which is similar in content to a Jewish Siddur. I might be able to upload it, or alternately I can e-mail it (it is strongly in the public domain).

And here is what I posted in 167:

No its not. You need to reread my post because my thesis is nothing like what you described.

You greatly hurt my feelings by accusing me of “making up a story.”

I never said that nor would I. Nothing in my post declared the moral code of the Torah to be inapplicable. I am profoundly annoyed that you did not bother to read my post and are accusing me of horrible anomialism based on an argument I did not make and would not make.

Indeed, it typologically represents the Only Begotten Son and Incarnate Word of God, our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ.

Again, that is completely untrue. Since you didn’t read my argument, I will spell it out one more time, and failing that, perhaps @prodromos or @Ain't Zwinglian might be able to explain it.

The statement in Deuteronomy refers to the five books of the Pentateuch, or Torah. It is a self-referential statement that applies specifically to those five books. It exists so that the oldest, most sacred, and important part od the Old Testament, which represents the basis for all human morality, and also contains the only story of creation in any religion which is not contrary to science, the miraculous Genesis Chapter 1, and it also contains the first prophecies of our Savior, God the Son, and the first evidence of the Holy Spirit, and it contains the first prophecy of the eucharist, and it contains a vital moral and social code including the Noachide Laws, the Decalogue, and a moral code that prohibits homosexuality, incest and inappropriate behavior with animals, which the liberal mainline churches want to pretend doesn’t exist.

It is partially because of attempts to limit the applicability of the Torah, or gloss over the ban on homosexuality because our society has forgotten that homosexuality is a perversion, a dangerous paraphilia linked with child abuse, and ignores the fact that it is comorbid with a number of serious mental and physical illnesses, including HIV, and also is the primary risk factor for the deadly Monkey Pox pandemic sweeping the globe, that this verse exists. It also exists because of attempts to expand the Torah, for example, the Samaritan Torah’s obvious interpolation of a convenient eleventh commandment ordering worship at their holiest site, Mount Gerizim. This was clearly not part of the original, but was added by the Northern Kingdom after it broke away from Judah and Benjamin in the South.

Now that we have established the defensive purpose the verse in question is meant for, that is, to discourage modification of the Torah, we need to establish what it is not meant for:
  1. Everyone agrees the Pentateuch, the five books of the Torah, comprise the oldest part of the Old Testament.
  2. If the verse in Deuteronomy means what you suggest it means, then no other scripture could have been written. Indeed, the Samaritans interpret it the way you do, and as a result their canonical scripture consists only of the five books of the Torah. They have their own version of Joshua, but it is not regarded as sacred scripture but rather as a historical narrative.
  3. Because other scripture has been written and recognized as canonical, and indeed, in Christianity we added an entire New Testament, whose structure in many respects resembles the Old (the Gospels being like the Torah, Acts being like the Historical Books, the Epistles like the Prophets, and Revelation being an Apocalypse, like Daniel, with which it shares common thematic elements), the verse in the Torah does not mean what you think it means.
  4. Therefore, just as the Torah was not violating by adding additional books to the Old Testament, or adding the New Testament, the Torah is not violated by advocating for the baptism of infants; on the contrary, since the Torah specifies that infants be circumcised on the Eighth Day, and since Jesus Christ rose from the dead on the Eighth Day, the Torah combined with the Resurrection and Great Commission at the end of Matthew, and our Lord commanding His Apostles in Mark to “Suffer the little ones to come to me,” provides a compelling scriptural argument for the Baptism of Infants.
That was my argument. Whether you agree or not, nothing in that argument, which I have reduced to a simple four part statement, constitutes a deprecation of the importance of the Torah, a denial of its moral authority, an endorsement of sodomy, murder or other crimes prohibited in the Torah and elsewhere in the Bible, a denial that the Torah is the word of God, or a “made-up story,” a term I felt particularly hurt by, as stated previously.

Forgive me for the agitated tone of this message, but I feel like you either didn’t read my earlier post, or didn’t care what I had to say. I have paid close attention to all of your posts and I beg your forgiveness if I have catastrophically failed in my analysis of any of your replies.
 
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The Liturgist

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That is my understanding, as well. It does become a bit problematic if a slave owner commanded his slaves to be baptized even though they were adherents of other religions and not at all inclined toward Christianity. This was the case in some situations in the antebellum American South.

Forced conversions are generally bad, however, there are cases when some evil Pagan religions were eradicated in a manner like this, for example, it seems reasonable that the Aztecs, Mayans and other Mesoamerican people did not willingly give up the practice of human sacrifice but were forced into it.
 
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bbbbbbb

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Forced conversions are generally bad, however, there are cases when some evil Pagan religions were eradicated in a manner like this, for example, it seems reasonable that the Aztecs, Mayans and other Mesoamerican people did not willingly give up the practice of human sacrifice but were forced into it.

One of the most sinister results of forced conversion has been syncretism.
 
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Valletta

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Please describe Purgatory and why indulgences are required from the Treasury of the Merits of the Saints.

Thank you.
You're welcome. Here is what the Catechism says on purgatory. Note there is nothing about the "torture" that you posted about.
III. THE FINAL PURIFICATION, OR PURGATORY

1030 All who die in God's grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven.

1031 The Church gives the name Purgatory to this final purification of the elect, which is entirely different from the punishment of the damned.606 The Church formulated her doctrine of faith on Purgatory especially at the Councils of Florence and Trent. The tradition of the Church, by reference to certain texts of Scripture, speaks of a cleansing fire:607
As for certain lesser faults, we must believe that, before the Final Judgment, there is a purifying fire. He who is truth says that whoever utters blasphemy against the Holy Spirit will be pardoned neither in this age nor in the age to come. From this sentence we understand that certain offenses can be forgiven in this age, but certain others in the age to come.608
1032 This teaching is also based on the practice of prayer for the dead, already mentioned in Sacred Scripture: "Therefore [Judas Maccabeus] made atonement for the dead, that they might be delivered from their sin."609 From the beginning the Church has honored the memory of the dead and offered prayers in suffrage for them, above all the Eucharistic sacrifice, so that, thus purified, they may attain the beatific vision of God.610 The Church also commends almsgiving, indulgences, and works of penance undertaken

on behalf of the dead:

Let us help and commemorate them. If Job's sons were purified by their father's sacrifice, why would we doubt that our offerings for the dead bring them some consolation? Let us not hesitate to help those who have died and to offer our prayers for them.611
----------------------------------------------------

As to the "Treasury of the Merits of the Saints" I don't recall hearing that expression before, interesting, I will see what I can find.
 
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bbbbbbb

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You're welcome. Here is what the Catechism says on purgatory. Note there is nothing about the "torture" that you posted about.
III. THE FINAL PURIFICATION, OR PURGATORY

1030 All who die in God's grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven.

1031 The Church gives the name Purgatory to this final purification of the elect, which is entirely different from the punishment of the damned.606 The Church formulated her doctrine of faith on Purgatory especially at the Councils of Florence and Trent. The tradition of the Church, by reference to certain texts of Scripture, speaks of a cleansing fire:607
As for certain lesser faults, we must believe that, before the Final Judgment, there is a purifying fire. He who is truth says that whoever utters blasphemy against the Holy Spirit will be pardoned neither in this age nor in the age to come. From this sentence we understand that certain offenses can be forgiven in this age, but certain others in the age to come.608
1032 This teaching is also based on the practice of prayer for the dead, already mentioned in Sacred Scripture: "Therefore [Judas Maccabeus] made atonement for the dead, that they might be delivered from their sin."609 From the beginning the Church has honored the memory of the dead and offered prayers in suffrage for them, above all the Eucharistic sacrifice, so that, thus purified, they may attain the beatific vision of God.610 The Church also commends almsgiving, indulgences, and works of penance undertaken

on behalf of the dead:

Let us help and commemorate them. If Job's sons were purified by their father's sacrifice, why would we doubt that our offerings for the dead bring them some consolation? Let us not hesitate to help those who have died and to offer our prayers for them.611
----------------------------------------------------

As to the "Treasury of the Merits of the Saints" I don't recall hearing that expression before, interesting, I will see what I can find.

Thanks!

This is what I was thinking of - Treasury of merit - Wikipedia
 
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East Anglican

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Acts 2:38-39
38 Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39 The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call.”
 
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bbbbbbb

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Acts 2:38-39
38 Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39 The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call.”

Acts 2:38-39
38 Peter replied,Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39 The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far offfor all whom the Lord our God will call.”
 
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prodromos

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Acts 2:38-39
38 Peter replied,Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39 The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far offfor all whom the Lord our God will call.”
John the Baptist was called while still in his mother's womb.
 
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Derf

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Acts 2:38-39
38 Peter replied,Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39 The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far offfor all whom the Lord our God will call.”
Yep, the promise is for those who repent. I'm having a hard time with a newborn repenting in any recognizable way and requesting baptism ("and be baptized").
 
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