question on Paul's letters...

[OnederWoman]

OK... another board I have a Jewish/agnostic guy asking me the following... I have no idea what to tell him... so, if anyone is willing and has a comment... please feel free... THANKS
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quote:

Hopefully someone can clear some things up for me, since this is a spinoff of the baptism of the dead thread.

Someone else brought up, and most bible commentaries I saw on 1 corinthians 15:29 (mormon support for the baptism of the dead) wasn't an introduction to the idea of baptizing the dead. Paul didn't say, here's a new idea, for the people that are dead baptize by following this procedure. But rather he was saying that hey you guys are practicing this and it goes against the belief that Jesus was actually resurrected. But my question is if Paul didn't introduce baptism for the dead, who did?

On a different note I found several passages 2 Corinthians 11:4-9 and 1 Galatians 1:6-12 where Paul warns the church followers not to follow other gospels and in Galatians he says he received his gospel from Jesus himself which would say that Paul didn't know about the gospels (which would be the case if they were written 20 years later). But he was warning not to follow these other gospels, so who was teaching these gospels and what were they?

:end quote

 

[A. believer]

OK... another board I have a Jewish/agnostic guy asking me the following... I have no idea what to tell him... so, if anyone is willing and has a comment... please feel free... THANKS
------------------------------------------------------------------
quote:

Hopefully someone can clear some things up for me, since this is a spinoff of the baptism of the dead thread.

Someone else brought up, and most bible commentaries I saw on 1 corinthians 15:29 (mormon support for the baptism of the dead) wasn't an introduction to the idea of baptizing the dead. Paul didn't say, here's a new idea, for the people that are dead baptize by following this procedure. But rather he was saying that hey you guys are practicing this and it goes against the belief that Jesus was actually resurrected. But my question is if Paul didn't introduce baptism for the dead, who did?

On a different note I found several passages 2 Corinthians 11:4-9 and 1 Galatians 1:6-12 where Paul warns the church followers not to follow other gospels and in Galatians he says he received his gospel from Jesus himself which would say that Paul didn't know about the gospels (which would be the case if they were written 20 years later). But he was warning not to follow these other gospels, so who was teaching these gospels and what were they?

:end quote

I don't know who introduced the practice--in fact, I don't believe it's even clear exactly what Paul meant by baptizing for the dead, but Paul's argument is not that baptism for the dead goes against the resurrection. On the contrary, he's saying that people baptize for the dead because of the hope of the resurrection. He doesn't seem to be either condemning or condoning the practice in that statement. He's only making the point about the reality of the resurrection.

In Galatians, the other gospel that's specifically addressed in that epistle is the gospel of the Judaizers who were trying to compel Gentile believers to be circumcised. Since Christianity was still considered a sect of Judaism, the unconverted Jews allowed it to be practiced as long as the followers were circumcised, but they would persecute Christian teachers who taught Gentiles Christians not to be circumcised. The Judaizers, according to Paul, wanted to avoid persecution from the Jewish authorities, so they compromised the true gospel by telling the Galatian Christians to be circumcised. Circumcision, Paul argues, was the sign of the Old Covenant, and those who practiced it after the institution of the New Covenant were binding themselves to the Old Covenant law. Paul was telling them that the two couldn't be mixed, and if they were circumcised that Christ's atonement for sin profited them nothing.