(3/3...whew...this is it for the day!)
To say that the office of apostle did not exist, tells me that your early church organizational chart was missing the most important office.
Well, where is it then? If you recognize that we do indeed have such sources, where is this 'most important office'? If it was ever part of the Church in any place, it would be there in the historical record, just as surely as we know the list of deans of the Catechetical School of Alexandria
dating back to about 180 AD. Point being that the early Church was not as bad at handing things down as the 'great apostasy' theory requires them to be; but I'm sure you'll have some actual evidence of this 'most important office' you have likewise invented.
I'll just wait here for it...
Oh, you have the office of bishop, and you have the office of elder, and you have the office of deacon, and pastor, and priest, but somehow you don't have the office that was most important to Jesus himself, the office of apostle. Go figure?
Again: Prove it. Prove what you say. Don't just say whatever. Where does Jesus say that the "office of apostle" is most important to Him, or even that such an office exists?
Just read your history again, especially your Cyril of Egypt. He controlled the city at the height of its power in the Roman empire.
You've been reading too many Dan Brown books. He was exiled three times from his see by Arians in their false councils. His writings were attacked to the degree that this attack formed the basis for a later council of Chalcedonians (look up the 'three chapters controversy'). It was not a walk on easy street for our father, the Pillar of Faith HH St. Cyril.
He closed Nestorian churches and siezed their sacred vessels.
What Nestorian churches, where? To my understanding, there was a rather insignificant Nestorian presence in Egypt outside of Alexandria (where they did have a presence, but were never very strong, thanks to the consistent opposition they faced from the Orthodox), as Nestorianism flourished elsewhere, having started in Constantinople with Nestorius himself, and spread mostly in Mesopotamia and points further east (that is to say, in the
Persian Empire, not in Egypt, which was on the eastern edge of the
Roman Empire). I think you may be mixing up the Nestorians with some different sect. Heck, the Persian church had already held the Synod of Dadisho' in 424 to declare themselves ecclesiastically independent of the churches within the Byzantine Empire (probably as a political bid to get the Zoroastrian authoritidx to stop arresting their clergy on charges of spying for meeting with bishops who came from the Byzantine Empire, since the Byzantines and the Persians were often at war with one another), which was within the time of HH St. Cyril's service as the Pope of Alexandria (412-444).
He rounded up Jews and threw them into prisons and banned them from the city. He layed out edicts for the citizens to follow. Oh yes, he was at the height of his glory as the secular and spiritual leader of the people.
By this do you have in mind the aftermath of the riots in Alexandria? Because if so, Peter, you should know that the expulsion of Jews was after
the premeditated murder of Christians by a group of Jews in Alexandria outside of the Church of St. Alexander. This is what precipitated the anti-Jewish riots that followed, culminating in the expulsion of the Jews who had originally attacked the Christians outside of the Church.
Fr. John McGuckin explains in his book
St. Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy (p. 12; I don't have a copy, but it is accessible via Google Books):
Socrates [Scholasticus, Hist. Eccl. 7.13, written c. 439 -- dzh.], in this connection, speaks of Cyril instigating a mass expulsion of the Jews from the city, but this is surely an exaggeration. Cyril's administration certainly marks a stage in the increasing Christian domination of fifth century Alexandria but the Jewish presence there would remain strong and influential for a long time to come. The expulsion of Jews he instigated should rather be seen as particularized and related to the incident of the Alexander church murders; an aspect of Cyril's claims to exercise independent juridicial powers in manners related to religion, in the face of Orestes' civil jurisdiction. Far from being the whole Jewish population the exiles probably constituted the group around the Alexander church.
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I certainly don't think a follower of a religion that has things like the Mountain Meadows Massacre in its own history has any room to talk down from a place of moral authority concerning one of the greatest bishops in the history of the Christian Church, who is recognized as such by everyone (except for the Nestorians, for obvious reasons). Yes, he had some Jews who had murdered Christians expelled from the city. Is this wrong? If so, then why do we in secular societies to this day remove murderers from the general population? Is that wrong? Does murder become okay if Jews do it?
He personally is the poster boy for a secular ruling patriarch of the church.
We should hope so, though we give him proper respect for his fight against Nestorius, the remaining Arians, the Jews who saw fit to kill Christians, and the secular authorities, all the while maintaining the pure and holy Christian faith, undefiled by any of the errors of the heretics and blasphemers.
So look no further than Saint Cyril.
For your computer to the throne of God.
You want to talk about a prattler, look no furth than Cyril
Oh really? Which one of his writings do you consider to be prattle? Was it his commentaries? Was it his festal letters?
Is it in fact the case that you haven't a clue what you're talking about, as you've never bothered to actually read a single thing he wrote, and are just slinging mud onto the wall, as you always do?
I trust that everyone here can see the truth, or that those who don't know anything about the man will ask, as it is certainly fit to ask why anyone is held in such high regard by almost all Christianity. (And, to be fair, why the tiny fraction who maintain an unjust hatred of him do so; Nestorius'
Bazar is available for everyone to read online, though I sure as heck won't be linking to it!)
who had his hands in everything both secular and religious.
With a persistent criticism of the secular authorities, yes, and an ironclad conviction that those things which involve the Church --
like its believers being murdered in their churches -- ought to be things which he rules over, as their patriarch. This is not at all strange, and in fact was assumed up until very recently to be how everything would be. Heck, when JFK was elected president back in the
1960s, there were not a few people in the USA who were afraid that he would take his cues from Rome, as a Roman Catholic. This kind of thinking is not so odd, though it certainly wouldn't have a place in a modern, secular, western society like the USA, which Egypt in the fifth century certainly wasn't (and it still isn't today).
This is de facto how it works in modern Egypt, as some latitude in personal status and family law is given for each of the communities recognized in the Egyptian constitution (Christians, Muslims, and Jews), so as long as it is not one of these non-Muslim groups interacting with the Muslim majority, it is handled entirely within the community. This is why the Coptic Orthodox Church can maintain strict law in keeping with our canons against divorce, abortion, and other things that the wider Islamic society is comparatively very lax on. Again, is this bad? Should Christians just adopt whatever the surrounding society has to say on anything, lest we be seen to be "having our hands in everything"? What nonsense.
Also, excuse me, your highness, but do we really need to go into the
actually divided loyalties of Mormon politicians in the USA, a society that is actually secular? Because we have the footage of Mormon politicians like this representative in Oregon (
modern day Oregon, not 5th century Oregon!), placing himself in subjugation to your octogenarian men in suits from Utah, and openly stating that his Mormon religious conviction comes before his commitment to the United States:
There are also matters like the recently declassified Council of Fifty, in which your earliest Mormon leaders attempted to covertly set up a Mormon theocracy.
Careful not to slip on that massive pile of hypocrisy that your religion tried to hide from people for such a long time.
(For interested people,
here is a much longer discussion on the council of fifty notes that were finally made available to the public in 2016. It's about two and a half hours.)
Against other Christians that did not believe exactly as he did. Against pagans, against Jews. Against his own people, when they disobeyed his tedious edicts. He was constantly enflaming situations to be far worse than if he had just left them alone.
Oh blah blah blah. When did you turn into Edward Gibbon?
So yes, secular was in, especially in the time of Cyril, and he took full advantage of it.
Hahaha. Whatever this random jumble of words is supposed to mean. "Secular was in"? Uh, sure. Okay. Sure was. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Reality. As in what actually happened according to the historical record. You know, that thing you don't care about, because it's not full of sexy and exciting intrigues that make the Church look like monsters to intellectual jellyfish such as yourself?
You know, how
Jewish sources say things like this about the Jews of Alexandria (emphasis added):
By the beginning of the Byzantine era, the Jewish population had again increased, but suffered from the persecutions of the Christian Church. In 414, in the days of the patriarch Cyril, the Jews were expelled from the city but appear to have returned after some time since it contained an appreciable Jewish population when it was conquered by the Muslims.
According to Arabic sources, there were about 400,000 Jews in Alexandria at the time of its conquest by the Arabs (642), but 70,000 had left during the siege. These figures are greatly exaggerated, but they indicate that in the seventh century there was still a large Jewish community.
I have, and do. That's how I know you're full of baloney.
It is full of the "game of thrones", and in a true, loving, Christian world that would not be a game Christ's represetatives would be playing.
Just because you love saying a dumb phrase over and over doesn't mean it fits whatever situation you're writing about (and misrepresenting, of course).
Any time you want to actually deal with the fact that
your religion aspired to theocracy in the time of its founder (see again the Council of Fifty notes),
then can we talk about all the time anyone in my Church did something which seemed like it meant that to you. HH St. Cyril is not such a person, beyond taking matters into his own hands when the authorities would not do what is necessary to protect both communities (again, expelling Jewish murderers to put an end to reprisals and counter-reprisals is the right thing to do), which in context can hardly be seen as a power grab, or at least not any more of one than the modern police are supposed to do in Egypt when they hear of threats against churches. "Oh, there goes the Church, involving itself with the state again! Yeahhhh...just nobody look over here where we're
terrorizing travelers we come across,
killing Indians (check out that first quote from John A. Peterson, admitting that there was indiscriminate killing by 'frustrated' Mormon settlers),
marrying little girls, etc.
We suddenly care so much about fifth-century Egyptian Jews, for some reason!
I'm not buying it. I don't think you're honest, responsible with whatever sources you are getting your information from (where are you links, like how I try to link to all of my sources?), or really even all that well-equipped to understand what you're reading in the first place, assuming that they aren't all conspiratorial hack jobs written by Christianity-haters.
You're back on my ignore list, where you probably should have been all along. Life is too short to waste it in discussions that never go anywhere with people who are dishonest and more interested in their prefabricated narrative than with the truth of what actually happened in history, and what it all means.
I hope one day you will wake up from the spiritual slumber and mental slavery that Mormonism has placed you in, Peter. I really do. Even if you still think the Christian religion and Church is bunk, it would be better to leave a lie and search than to remain in a lie and never be freed from it. Christ did not shed His holy blood upon the life-giving cross so that you and 16 million other people could follow a child-defiling con man with delusions of rewriting the Bible and making up an entirely new history (well, as new as something can be that probably cribs a lot of its style from preexisting sources, like
The Late War and other books that predate the BOM) for select Biblical figures, and a cast of Hebrew Indian emigres and others that there is no reason to believe ever existed in the first place. Lord have mercy.