Queen of heaven
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You claim to have taught the Bible for decades, and yet make ridiculous statements like the above
Actually, you are quite correct. Mary is not placed upon a pedestal in RCC churches. She has her own altar where she (allegedly) receives the veneration and perpetual adoration of her adherents, along with hearing their prayers and interceding for them. Is this not true?
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jamiec
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There is a word in NT Greek for “cousin” - anepsios. It is used once in the NT: G431 - anepsios - Strong's Greek Lexicon (nasb20)
Compare: G4773 - syngenēs - Strong's Greek Lexicon (nasb20)
for syngenḗs meaning “cousin, relative, kinsman”.
The word for “brother” is adelphos: G80 - adelphos - Strong's Greek Lexicon (nasb20)
There is not 1 word used to mean “cousin”, but 2. And adelphos is not one of them.
There is nothing in the Gospels that positively excludes the notion that Jesus had siblings - and a good deal that favours the idea. The only reason to refuse to consider the possibility appears to arise from post-Biblical thinking.
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Valletta
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I don't think he wants to answer those questions. They have put a lot of effort into a false history. Even the order of books they took was from Catholics, and the preface in the original King James which acknowledges Catholics who translated the Bible long before the King James has been removed from newer KJVs.
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Why are you asking me? Why are you ignoring Major1's error in his reference to Mary?
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“Cherry picking” doesn’t mean altering the words. It means only taking quotes that support your position and ignoring everything in the same writing that doesn’t. And there are ample quotes from those sources that don’t support your view on this topic.
But to summarize, to refer to the Eucharist as “spiritual” or “symbolic” in no way proves that these early church fathers did not believe it’s really the flesh and blood of Christ as you seem to want to claim.
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Unfortunately when you enter a thread and drop a post and then when asked about it profess that you should never have posted it so it shouldn’t be discussed, it can seem like you just wanted to get a shot in without having any accountability for what you posted. So in general, if you choose to post something it would be only courteous to respond to inquiries that result from your comment, even if what you posted was off topic.
Given that, I'll give you a chance to respond again.
Luther also questioned the validity of several New Testament books, although he wasn’t successful in having them removed. How do you know he wasn’t right? What is your assurance that the New Testament you have is correct?
Along with that, please explain to me how within Protestantism, how is a belief that God established the Bible-alone as the sole authority compatible with a belief that God didn’t even see fit to provide a legitimate Bible that didn’t contain false books for the first 1500 years of the Church?
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Once again, you ignored the question asked of you. You tend to do that when it clearly shows your position is not supported from Scripture.
You stated “The word used in the Greek New Testament for "brothers" is adelphoi, which means "from the womb" and literally means brothers who are born from the same mother.”
I then simply asked you to name the brothers (plural) of Joseph when in Acts 7:13 we read “And at the second visit Joseph made himself known to his brothers, and Joseph’s family became known to Pharaoh.” The Greek word adelphoi is used here for brothers. A request you ignored, as so many others.
Joseph of course we know had 11 brothers, all sons of Jacob. But only one of them shared a mother with him. Both he and Benjamin were children of Rachel. This passage is referring to all of his brothers that are sons of Jacob, and there are 4 different biological mothers in the group. We see the term adelphoi used for the brothers of Joseph as well in the Greek Old Testament. In Genesis 42:3 we even read that “ten” of Joseph’s brothers (adelphoi) went to Egypt to buy grain. The only one that didn’t accompany them was the one who shared a biological mother with Joseph – Benjamin. None of the others did. But they are still his adelphoi even though they were not born of the same womb. It’s quite evident that your claim that usage of the term adelphoi in Scripture to denote only brothers with the same biological mother is false.
But the story of Joseph and his brothers does open another can of worms doesn’t it? You have stated that Catholic teaching is that these “brothers” of Jesus are really cousins. That is actually not correct. Catholic teaching is that Mary is ever-virgin. The exact identify of these brothers is not formal Catholic teaching but rather falls in the realm of theological opinion.
There is of course another opinion about the identity of these brothers, and you provide insight into that when you cite Matthew 13:55 – "Isn't this the carpenter's son?” From the perspective of those asking the question, Jesus is the biological son of Joseph. And the other theological opinion is that Joseph was a widower when he married Mary, and these are children from a previous marriage, and just like the eleven “brothers” of Joseph, the community would have viewed them as being “brothers” (adelphoi) to Christ This understanding professes that Mary was a consecrated virgin when she married Joseph who agreed to provide for her care.
There is actually nothing in Scripture that contradicts this view. And there is one quite strong indication it is true. When the angel approaches Mary, she and Joseph are betrothed, which is not the same thing as our understanding of engagement. They were legally married; they simply weren’t living together yet and the marriage had not been consummated. This is why Joseph was going to have to divorce her. But when Mary is told by the angel that she was going to conceive and bear a son, she questions the angel about how that was going to happen.
That would not be a normal response. Mary was quite familiar with the stories of other women who had been told by an angel or prophet they would bear a child (Sarah, Hannah, the Shunnamite woman), and none of them ever questioned how it was going to happen. They simply assumed they would conceive a child naturally with their husband. The angel speaks to Mary of a future event; if Mary had been planning in the future to consummate her marriage with Joseph she would have reached the same very normal conclusion that she and Joseph were going to have a son. But instead she questions how this is going to happen, which only makes sense if there were no plans for any children in her future.
I don’t hold to either theory over the other in particular, and in reality they don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
But so far, we’ve shown how the word “adelphoi” in Scripture is used to identify nephews, cousins, and half-brothers who are not born from the same womb. Why you continue to insist the word is limited to the definition you prefer when Scripture contradicts that view, I have no clue.
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I didn’t question her character; she may be extremely moral in her actions for all I know. I do question her scholarship and question why a Christian would want to accept the view of a 21st century professed pagan woman claiming facts from the second century when there is a second century Christian martyr who was actually there and tell us that the exact opposite is the truth.
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Breaking this into multi reponses so it doesn't get unwieldly.
Well of course the Vatican didn’t remove them. They’ve been in the Catholic canon since the 4th century. The Protestants removed them.
I actually do not use the deuterocanonical books when discussing topics with Protestants because I know they are not accepted by them as Scripture. And I have no problem defending Catholic teaching from Scripture without them.
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If it is required for an Old Testament book to have been quoted by Christ or the apostles to be in the Bible, then you need to get rid of a few more. I can get you a list if you need to know which ones to remove.
The original KJV included these books (although they were gathered together into a section labeled apocrypha) and it has eleven New Testament cross-references to these books, and 102 Old Testament ones.
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I often wonder if people ever bother to do their own research..
The logic used here is that Jesus has affirmed that the correct canon of the Old Testament begins with the book of Genesis and ends with 2 Chronicles.
You cite the passage from Luke where Jesus refers to Zechariah and then reference it back to 2 Chronicles 24:20, which is a reference to “Zechari′ah the son of Jehoi′ada the priest” (2 Chronicles 24:20). And conclude that means the correct Old Testament canon should begin with Genesis and end with 2 Chronicles.
However, when you look at the cross-referenced passage in Matthew 23:34-35, Jesus says this “Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, 35 that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of innocent Abel to the blood of Zechari′ah the son of Barachi′ah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar”
Two different Zechariah’s. The one that Christ is specifically referring to in this passage is Zechariah the son of Barachaiah, which is a reference to Zechariah 1:1, not the Zechariah in 2 Chronicles. If you believe that Christ has defined the Old Testament canon with this passage you now have to eliminate from the Old Testament the book of Malachi along with the entire Ketuvim (Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Nehemiah and Chronicles). So it’s pretty clear his intent was not to define the Old Testament canon, implicitly or otherwise.
The reality is there was no consistent accepted Jewish canon at the time of Christ. The Jewish Scriptures can be divided into three main parts – the law, the prophets, and the writings. While the law and the prophets had been fairly well established, the “writings” were less firm at the time of Christ. But while the Pharisees accepted all three, the Samaritans and the Sadducees only accepted the law portion of the Scriptures. Even today there is not total consistency among the Jewish people. For example, The Ethiopian Jews, also known as “Beta Israel” who migrated to Ethiopia approximately 500 years before Christ, have those seven disputed books in their canon of Scripture.
And the 70 Jewish scholars who translated the Scriptures into Greek within 200 years or so before Christ included those books. We also know that Greek translation is the one that the apostles used almost exclusively because they quote verbatim from that translation, as did most of the Jews of the time. Studies by Protestant scholars indicate the Septuagint was used about 10 times more often in citations by the apostles than the Masoretic texts.
Yet the apostles never indicated that the Old Testament Bible they were using contained false books. Why do you suppose that is?
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They also rejected Christ and the New Testament. So we should follow likewise?
“Orcales” is generally viewed to be the prophets or the oral teaching. When St. Paul refers to Scripture, he consistently uses the Greek word graphē to denote the “writings.” (Romans 1:2, Romans 4:3, Romans 9:17, Romans 10:11, Romans 11:2, Romans 15:4, Romans 16:26, 1 Corinthians 15:3, 1 Corinthians 15:3, 1 Corinthians 15:4, Galatians 3:8, Galatians 3:22, Galatians 4:30, 1 Timothy 5:18, 2 Timothy 3:16).
There was no central magisterium for the Jews and as cited above, during the time of the apostles there was no fixed Jewish canon, and the Greek speaking Jews had those books in their canon. The Jewish scholars that Luther turns to are after Christ and the fall of the temple when they eliminate these books from their canon even though they had been used by the majority of the Jewish people for at least the previous two centuries. They had at least one specific motive in rejecting the Greek translation – Isaiah 7:14 is clear in speaking about the Messiah that a virgin would bear a child, which Matthew had cited in his Gospel as evidence for Christ as the Messiah. The Hebrew text doesn’t specify a virgin, but simply a maiden. They wanted to discredit Christ. They also rejected the Christian Gospels and considered them to be spurious. But by all means, let's believe they knew the truth of the Biblical canon.
Luther rejected the decision of the early Christian church that had correctly canonized the New Testament canon and instead aligned himself with Jewish scholars that rejected that Christ had been born of a virgin, risen from the dead and professed that the Gospels were spurious. I guess that makes sense to somebody.
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Funny you should mention the Dead Sea Scrolls. One of Luther’s objections to these books is they weren’t originally written in Hebrew. However, that was proven to be incorrect when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered and two of the books (Tobit and Sirach) were found in Hebrew. The book of Sirach is now considered canonical by the Dead Sea community of Jews.
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If you guys ever want to be taken seriously you need to drop this. It is patently false that the Catholic Church’s use of these books had anything to do with Protestantism. They were in the Septuagint the apostles used. They were included in the Catholic canon at the councils of Hippo and Carthage in the late 4th century at the same time the New Testament canon was finalized, and they were part of the canon from that time forward. For example, check out the original printing of the Gutenberg Bible 100 years before Protestantism and you will see them there. They were not added as a “counter-reaction” to Protestantism; they had been there for more than 1200 years.
Gutenberg Bible: Comparing the Texts
In general church councils “officially” address dogmas not because a new teaching is being defined or a teaching has changed but because something that has been known to be a long standing truth has been challenged. Protestantism removed the books that had been in the Bible for more than a millennium; the Catholic Church responded at the Council of Trent by affirming the canon that had been in use for hundreds of years was correct.
But I will ask you the same questions I asked bbbbbbb. Luther also questioned the validity of several New Testament books, although he wasn’t successful in having them removed. How do you know he wasn’t right? What is your assurance that the New Testament you have is correct?
Along with that, please explain to me how within Protestantism, how is a belief that God established the Bible-alone as the sole authority compatible with a belief that God didn’t even see fit to provide a legitimate Bible that didn’t contain false books for the first 1500 years of the Church?
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The Greek word anepsios is translated in the KJV and others as "nephew" and if you google translate it, it translates it into English as nephew. There's no reason to believe there was a specific word in use in the New Testament that referred to cousin.
syngenḗs is broader and more generic than adelphos. But that doesn't change the fact that we see adelphos used to denote nephews, cousins, and brothers who do not have the same biological mother.
I've said before, you can't prove either way whether or not Mary had other children relying exclusively on Scripture. That's why one of my first tests to see if someone is really sola-Scriptura when they proclaim to be is whether they hold to the truth that from Scripture alone, the question remains unanswered.
But Catholic do not believe in sola-Scriptura, do we? And the Catholic Church most emphatically teaches that Mary is ever-virgin, and there is no evidence that is "post Biblical" thinking.
But I will ask you the questions others have ignored. Why, if Mary intended to have a family with Joseph and the angel told her she going to have a child did she question how that was going to happen? That's a very strange response for a woman who was betrothed and planning to start a family with her husband.
And why if she has this multitude of biological children does Jesus place her in the care of John?
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The Catholic claim of Peter to the papacy has nothing to do with Rome, but the fact that Christ changed his name to "rock," professed that Peter was the rock on which he would build his Church, and gave to Peter exclusively the keys of the kingdom.
St. Irenaeus, who lived approximately 130-202AD was ordained by the Bishop Polycarp, who was ordained by the apostle John. In his book “Against Heresies,” Book 3 Chapter 3 he writes about the succession of bishops throughout the Church, and mentions it would be too tedious to list each bishop and their successors. But he does list the succession from the apostle Peter, the popes. There had been twelves popes since St. Peter. If that seems like a lot, ten of them met their death by martyrdom. Becoming Pope in the first centuries of the Church was most likely a death sentence. So the idea of a line of succession of popes beginning with Peter is well established in the early Church.
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