A Common Assumption Among Catholicism & Protestants

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Yes, and I spoke to Pastor about this last night, and he got out the Greek NT; interestingly, the phraise "Father, forgive them for they know not what they are doing" is missing from many early Greek texts; so he told me that most scholars agree that Christ may not even have said those words.

Thank you. I was unaware of this. None of my Bibles which have translators notes mentioned this. I am not sure who the "most scholars" are, but I will look into it.

I just finished an online search of commentaries on these verses and, oddly, none of the commentaries even hint that these verses do not form a part of the original text. This leaves me wondering even more who these "most scholars" are. If you would, I would greatly appreciate it if you could direct me to them.

Thank you.
 
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ChetSinger

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Yes, and I spoke to Pastor about this last night, and he got out the Greek NT; interestingly, the phraise "Father, forgive them for they know not what they are doing" is missing from many early Greek texts; so he told me that most scholars agree that Christ may not even have said those words.
Thanks for this. I had never heard it, so it prompted me to go to the NET bible which is filled with translator's footnotes.

In the NET the verse is enclosed by brackets and accompanied by this footnote:

Many important mss (Ì75 א1 B D* W Θ 070 579 1241 pc sys sa) lack v. 34a. It is included in א*,2 (A) C D2 L Ψ 0250 Ë1,(13) 33 Ï lat syc,p,h. It also fits a major Lukan theme of forgiving the enemies (6:27-36), and it has a parallel in Stephen’s response in Acts 7:60. The lack of parallels in the other Gospels argues also for inclusion here. On the other hand, the fact of the parallel in Acts 7:60 may well have prompted early scribes to insert the saying in Luke’s Gospel alone. Further, there is the great difficulty of explaining why early and diverse witnesses lack the saying. A decision is difficult, but even those who regard the verse as inauthentic literarily often consider it to be authentic historically. For this reason it has been placed in single brackets in the translation.​
 
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MarkRohfrietsch

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Thank you. I was unaware of this. None of my Bibles which have translators notes mentioned this. I am not sure who the "most scholars" are, but I will look into it.

I just finished an online search of commentaries on these verses and, oddly, none of the commentaries even hint that these verses do not form a part of the original text. This leaves me wondering even more who these "most scholars" are. If you would, I would greatly appreciate it if you could direct me to them.

Thank you.
See ChetSinger's post directly below your own. Similar notes; the Greek NT that Pastor used was from the German Bible Society I think. Pretty much identical notes.
 
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bbbbbbb

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Thanks for this. I had never heard it, so it prompted me to go to the NET bible which is filled with translator's footnotes.

In the NET the verse is enclosed by brackets and accompanied by this footnote:

Many important mss (Ì75 א1 B D* W Θ 070 579 1241 pc sys sa) lack v. 34a. It is included in א*,2 (A) C D2 L Ψ 0250 Ë1,(13) 33 Ï lat syc,p,h. It also fits a major Lukan theme of forgiving the enemies (6:27-36), and it has a parallel in Stephen’s response in Acts 7:60. The lack of parallels in the other Gospels argues also for inclusion here. On the other hand, the fact of the parallel in Acts 7:60 may well have prompted early scribes to insert the saying in Luke’s Gospel alone. Further, there is the great difficulty of explaining why early and diverse witnesses lack the saying. A decision is difficult, but even those who regard the verse as inauthentic literarily often consider it to be authentic historically. For this reason it has been placed in single brackets in the translation.​

Thank you.

This reminds me of the much-debated text of John 8:1-11. There are some who hold that Jesus could not have actually done this thing because she had neither repented nor sought salvation nor is there any record of her following this account.
 
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MarkRohfrietsch

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Thank you.

This reminds me of the much-debated text of John 8:1-11. There are some who hold that Jesus could not have actually done this thing because she had neither repented nor sought salvation nor is there any record of her following this account.
However, in verse 11 she says... 11 And she said, No man, Lord.
This acknowledgement of the Lordship of Christ speaks of faith; does it not. As did the good thief at the crucifixion.
 
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Paidiske

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That's packing a lot of meaning onto a common form of polite address for a social superior. She might have meant it in the fullest sense of Lordship, but we can equally read it as something less than that.
 
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MarkRohfrietsch

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That's packing a lot of meaning onto a common form of polite address for a social superior. She might have meant it in the fullest sense of Lordship, but we can equally read it as something less than that.
True that. In this case, the Lord extended mercy and forgiveness; being God and omniscient, He would know if she was penitent or not.
 
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However, in verse 11 she says... 11 And she said, No man, Lord.
This acknowledgement of the Lordship of Christ speaks of faith; does it not. As did the good thief at the crucifixion.

That is one of the aspects of the debate on the passage. As you probably know, the word "Lord" does not necessarily mean the absolute deity. In German, as you know, Lord is translated as "Herr" which is actually a very decent translation. Herr can mean God transcendent but it can also be simply used as a simple polite form of address equivalent to "mister" or "sir". In fact, some English translations do translate the word in this passage as "sir". In that case, her statement is not a profession of faith.

I do not necessarily agree with either argument, so please do not think that I am promoting this view. I merely mention it to show that the passage has become quite contentious.
 
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That's packing a lot of meaning onto a common form of polite address for a social superior. She might have meant it in the fullest sense of Lordship, but we can equally read it as something less than that.
That is one of the aspects of the debate on the passage. As you probably know, the word "Lord" does not necessarily mean the absolute deity. In German, as you know, Lord is translated as "Herr" which is actually a very decent translation. Herr can mean God transcendent but it can also be simply used as a simple polite form of address equivalent to "mister" or "sir". In fact, some English translations do translate the word in this passage as "sir". In that case, her statement is not a profession of faith.

I do not necessarily agree with either argument, so please do not think that I am promoting this view. I merely mention it to show that the passage has become quite contentious.
That is one of the aspects of the debate on the passage. As you probably know, the word "Lord" does not necessarily mean the absolute deity. In German, as you know, Lord is translated as "Herr" which is actually a very decent translation. Herr can mean God transcendent but it can also be simply used as a simple polite form of address equivalent to "mister" or "sir". In fact, some English translations do translate the word in this passage as "sir". In that case, her statement is not a profession of faith.

I do not necessarily agree with either argument, so please do not think that I am promoting this view. I merely mention it to show that the passage has become quite contentious.

I agree with both your and Paidiske; if it was said, in what context? It remains open to interpretation... and the interpretation of others.
 
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The Liturgist

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The Anglican Church allows for other views?

I have encountered many Anglicans who have adopted, like myself, a more Eastern/Oriental Orthodox view of soteriology under the influence of compelling English Orthodox theologians like Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, as well as Anglican divines who have been strongly influenced by the Eastern church. Indeed even Thomas Cranmer was influenced by the Greek Orthodox, insofar as he incorporated prayers taken directly from the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom into the Book of Common Prayer; the famed Prayer of St. Chrysostom from Evensong and Mattins is in fact the Prayer of the Second Antiphon from the Eastern Orthodox Divine Liturgy. And we see more of this influence in the Scottish and other Non Juring Episcopalians, we see it fairly dramatically in John Wesley, we see it with Anglican clergy starting the 18th century being secretly ordained by Greek Orthodox bishops (and also by Syrian bishops, although whether these were Mar Thoma Christians from Malabar, Suroye/Syriac Orthodox, Antiochian Orthodox or Assyrians is not known; however, at present, there is a full West Syriac-rite Orthodox church, the Malankara Independent Syrian Church, which is in communion with the protestant Mar Thoma Syrian Church, which in turn is a member of the Anglican Communion) due to a mistrust of Anglican holy orders contemporaneous with the Anglo Catholic movement.

Then we see the Fellowship of St. Albans and Sergius, the attempt at orchestrating full communion between the Protestant Episcopal Church in the USA and the Russian Orthodox Church, the marriage of Her Majesty Queen 'lso at present there are some exquisite Eastern Orthodox icons in the altar at the Collegiate Church of St. Peter (Westminster Abbey). And we also now have an Eastern Rite Anglican movement and one can find videos on YouTube of the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom being celebrated in Anglican churches by Anglicans.

Also interestingly I have heard that a plurality of Protestant converts to Eastern Orthodoxy came from Anglicanism, either having grown up Anglican or else having swam the across the Thames (or should I say, the Stour) before attempting the Bosphorus (or the Tiber, or in rare cases the Nile, Euphrates or Aras).
 
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The Liturgist

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While he intended that all files be swatted, some flies rejected the swatting. Because the desire to swat all flies is there, it does not automatically make all flies swatted. Thanks for posting this concretecamper. LOL.

Swat all the flies you want, but leave my files alone! Mark be stealin mah megahurtz. ^_^
 
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The Liturgist

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When people are abusive, etc., that is not God. As long as you seek to follow Him, He is there with open arms. We are the creation. He is the Creator. I think the creation rejects the Creator. God does not reject His creation. We make the choices.

Indeed.
 
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Everyone, I hope I responded in some fashion to each reply. If not, let me know. Thanks everyone for helping me out.

This thread is really exceptionally interesting and I regret I was extremely ill for the past two weeks and unable to participate fully.
 
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The Liturgist

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Yes, and I spoke to Pastor about this last night, and he got out the Greek NT; interestingly, the phraise "Father, forgive them for they know not what they are doing" is missing from many early Greek texts; so he told me that most scholars agree that Christ may not even have said those words.

So you have raised an interesting point in that Universalism, which you correctly identify as unorthodox, because to say all must be saved is a monergistic statement which ignores the point that God, being infinitely loving, cannot and will not force us to love Him, indeed, coerced or forced love is not love, and Metropolitan Kallistos Ware I think makes a compelling point when he says the one thing God cannot do is force us to love Him, is not imposed if we adopt either the Roman Catholic scholastic doctrine of Invincible Ignorance or a less formal model wherein we consider the possibility of people being saved owing to the special mercy of God if they truly desire it and were in a situation where owing to other conditions the normal approach to faith was not entirely accessible to them.

This does not threaten the centrality of faith or justification through faith, because these remain the appointed means for our salvation, when we respond to this faith by joining the church or remaining within the church into which we were baptized and grafted on. Instead, the idea of invincible ignorance, which in modern times we could apply, for example, to the Sentinelese and other uncontacted or uncontactable tribes (which in the case of the Sentinelese, fall into the latter group, because aside from the fact that the Sentinelese will murder people who land on their island, which tragically befell a Christian missionary, owing to their xenophobia, the Indian government will not allow for proper missionary access for fear of pathogens we have the Sentinelese will not, leading to extermination, however, the fact that they will not accommodate missionaries who would be willing to undergo the most rigorous biological screening and containment processes has the effect of denying the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island access to the Gospel under ordinary conditions, since India has basically turned their island into a nightmarish human zoo, in my opinion, precluding contact which could be extremely beneficial, and furthermore, I would argue, by denying, say, an extremely well funded Christian mission with top tier medical personnel and advanced pathologists and immunologists working to ensure the safety of the islanders, and with the missionaries over time working to immunize the Sentinelese against the pathogens that exist in our world, have created a scenario where in the future, someone will inevitably illegally access the island, stay there successfully, and infect the population, who will then die.

This horrible situation however is not beyond the provenance of God’s love, because if we recall what our Lord, Christ Pantocrator, said, “I will have mercy on who I will have mercy,” if we base a doctrine around this concept, such as invincible ignorance, or the Eastern/Oriental Orthodox soteriology which is careful to not exclude special or extraordinary acts of salvation-enabling by our Lord, since we see these in the New Testament, for example, the Good Thief and St. Paul. These special situations do not exclude, in what we see in the Good Thief and in St. Paul, a voluntary faith response.

Now, regarding the specific issue of textual criticism you mention, the specific text I think is not particularly problematic, and I myself am leery of knocking out sections of the New Testament based on the minority, Alexandrian text type, which I think is slightly overrated, in that the Byzantine text we see being used as the basis for the Peshitta, and even the Coptic Bibles. But if we were to do such a thing, there are shakier chapters in the Gospels from a textual criticism perspective, such as the Adultery Pericope and Mark 16:9-16. The former is very important doctrinally; the latter has in recent years been problematic insofar as it is the main prooftext relied on by the eccentric Snake Handling Pentecostals of Appalachia, whose worship I regard as cacodoxy (incorrect worship or glorification of God) per se, in that it is dangerous to the participants, unheard of in the entire history of the church, neither decent nor in order as required by St. Paul, and at the same time, I would lament to note that there are other texts in the canonical Gospels and elsewhere which could be misused by the Snake Handlers.

But I really do appreciate where you are coming from on this point, because universalism is a serious error, and at the same time, I think it is important to understand how doctrines and traditional beliefs such as Invincible Ignorance, or indeed, the Harrowing of Hell, need not be seen as monergistic violations of free will that imply a selective and capricious imposed salvation on some or a universalism on all, which is an even more problematic perspective, insofar as Calvinism is at least scriptural, whereas Universalism has serious problems that most of us can agree comprise general incompatibility with the eschatological declarations of Christ Pantocrator in the New Testament.

However, because Universalism has a particular appeal to some which can be overpowering, based on a sense of horror about the idea of Hell and a failure to understand the true nature of what we might call firery Gehenna or the lake of fire or the wrath of God, an inability to understand how some will reject God, tragically, one will see what I can only characterize as a subversion of traditional doctrines like the Harrowing of Hell, Invincible Ignorance and so on as a “staging ground” of sorts for the universalist project, as well as a conflation of the ancient concept of Apocatastasis, the idea of a restoration of all things, which we see in St. Gregory of Nyssa and in Origen, who was much loved by the Cappadocians, and later, in many Assyrian church fathers, such as the great monastic St. Isaac the Syrian, the last Assyrian saint to also be venerated by Chalcedonians and Oriental Orthodox, and also the author of the Book of the Bee, Mar Solomon of Akhat, the 13th century Bishop of Basra, among other texts.

As an interesting aside, there is an active Universalist controversy occurring within the Eastern Orthodox church involving a minority opinion led academically by the likes of Dr. David Bentley Hart, who I respect for his brilliant skewering of Richard Dawkins, in his book The Atheist Delusion, but I find myself wishing he had limited himself to external polemics rather than dabbling in the dangerous cobwebs of discarded soteriological models which were eventually set aside by even the Assyrian Church of the East.
 
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This thread is really exceptionally interesting and I regret I was extremely ill for the past two weeks and unable to participate fully.

I am sorry to hear of your illness and pray that you recover fully soon. I had noticed your absence and had wondered about its cause. :crossrc:
 
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The Liturgist

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No. Were they justified while having no faith; I think not. Christ wants all to be saved, truth is, not all want to be saved, nore will they be.

Indeed. I think @bbbbbbb that Christ created the means for them to be saved if they later developed faith, for example, in light of the Resurrection, and I have no doubt that many who were calling for the crucifixion of our Lord, and later were celebrating in sadistic revelry while he was dying on the cross, could still have repented, and pêw, and joined the early Church. It is kind of a myth that the early church was not successful among the Jews; if we look at the ethnic compositon of the various Eastern churches, particularly those in Syria, India, Israel, Jordan, Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, Cyprus, the displaced Christians of the former Ottoman Empire and the 20th century genocides and ethnic cleansing during the Great War and afterwards under the population exchange agreement, etc. and Ethiopia (the Syriac Orthodox, Assyrians, Antiochian Orthodox, Alexandrian Greek Orthodox, Jerusalem Orthodox, Melkite Greek Catholics, the Maronites, the St. Thomas Christians of India, who are descended from converts from both the Malankaran Indians and the Kochin Jews, who were present in Kerala from at least 200 AD, a handful still living in India to this day (and others having made aliyah to Israel or having moved to the UK or elsewhere, such as the noted 20th century hairstylist Vidal Sassoon). If we look at these churches we find many people of partial Jewish ancestry, we find many with significant Jewish ancestry, in the case of Ethiopian Orthodoxy, via the Solomonic dynasty we have basically a nation that mostly converted from Judaism to Christianity.

There is a pernicious modern myth that the Jews rejected Christ wholesale, and this in turn has led to a series of unpleasant eschatological concepts, the worst of which we see integrated into the premillenial dispensationalism of John Nelson Darby, leading to the very unpleasant eschatological model we see in such diverse sources as the writings of Hal Lindsay, the otherwise very respectable King James Version Study Bible, and the dreadful Left Behind series. It is also of course entirely false, the result of the tragic widespread lack of education in Western countries, especially in the secular education system, on history, philosophy, theology, classical studies, and the liberal arts, where severe budget cuts have made, which has intensified the already problematic widespread ignorance of Eastern Christianity, and which has led to a certain sense of an incredulity among some Christians I encounter regarding the Eastern churches and the very brutal sacrifices they continually have to endure in the face of Islamic aggression, persecution and terrorism. So it is extremely important that we dispense with any kind of dichotomy between Jewish converts and gentile converts to Christianity, as St. Paul himself stresses in Galatians 3:28 .

Finally, conversions from Judaism to Christianity never ceased. One of the most important Eastern Christian bishops at the dawn of the Renaissance was a convert to Syriac Orthodoxy from Judaism: the legendary 13th century Syriac Orthodox archbishop Mar Gregorios bar Hebreaus, who was a great philosopher, scholar of divinity and devout monastic, who was beloved even by the Assyrians, whom the Syriac Orthodox on occasion have had tensions with; I have recounted this anecdote before, but I think it is a good anecdote, that when he reposed, he died in an Assyrian village on his way back to the Monastery of St. Matthew in the hills above Mosul, accompanied only by his small staff; the Assyrian Catholicos-Patriarch of the East, who greatly admired Mar Gregorios bar Hebraeus, promptly arrived with 4,000 Assyrian laity to mourn the passing of his friend, colleague and counterpart.

Indeed I think this incident was a seminal moment leading towards the dawn of ecumenical reconciliation between the apostolic churches, where indeed, 800 years later, there are now good relations between the Syriac Orthodox Church, and the Assyrian Church of the East, which have, together with the Antiochian Ortehodox Church, the Ancient Church of the East, and the Syriac and Chaldean Catholic churche, who endured the most extreme persecution during the barbaric reign of the Islamic State.
 
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I am sorry to hear of your illness and pray that you recover fully soon. I had noticed your absence and had wondered about its cause. :crossrc:

Thank you. I am doing much better today! God bless you. :)
 
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