Posted on 04/07/2006 6:38:55 AM PDT by presidio9
There was a funny interview yesterday with a "Church spokesman." The reporter breathlessly asked if the Church was "suppressing" the Gnostic "gospels" out of "fear" that they would "undermine" the faith. The priest answered: "Not really. You can buy them in any Catholic bookstore."
heh heh heh
Absolutely. The evidence against their 1st century provenance is extremely tenuous, consisting of quibbles over vocabulary, the perceived "tone" of the letter and circular reasoning - i.e. "They must have been written later because my preconceived timeline of Paul's career excludes them from being written earlier, and my timeline of Paul's career is based on my assumptions about the dating of the Pauline corpus."
The historical argument that the community addressed is too "organized" to be a 1st century community is easily refuted, as I pointed out earlier.
This does not support your accusation of "gross exaggeration."
I think you are referring to Ms. Rice's current bestseller, "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt." Ms. Rice has undergone a profound conversion experience, returning to the Catholic faith of her youth. Her Afterward in the novel chronicles her journey to Christ. It's quite inspiring.
No contemporary scholar is closer to the situation than Irenaeus was.
No, real but inaccurate. Just more gnostic BS.
There is no indication it existed "well before" - since we know from external sources that many of Irenaeus' criticisms in the Adversus Haereses were directed at newly-minted groups as well as older ones.
For all we know the Cainites were just as likely the hot new cult on the scene.
While we are on the subject of "fake but accurate" Bill Berkett has a bull for sale.
We're looking for one, my husband came across this on the interent. Bill Burkett in Baird TX. Didn't want to take the chance that he had forged the register papers.
Add Acts and Luke to that list, which you have no good reason not to, and you have roughly 88% of the NT right there.
Dontcha know that any book that sells 40 million copies turns into non-fiction ?
Perception is 90% of reality...
BUMP
bttt
Is this the Gospel where Jesus warns against global warming, and denounces Bush?
The case for dating any document later than 100 AD is predicated on debates over vocabulary, the exactly nuanced meaning of words in certain contexts, etc.
There is not one piece of hard evidence to the contrary.
It's written in proportional Coptic - they didn't have the ability to do that back then!
Sounds like something Judas would say.
"Nobody believes that the disciple Matthew wrote the gospel of his name, either." ~ Dog Gone
Being dubious about the "written directly" claims is one thing, but when some of them question the "authorship" of the canonical gospels, that's where they go off the deep end.
"With these general considerations http://www.tektonics.org/ntdocdef/gospdefhub.html , we now offer these mini-essays on each Gospel."
Matthew http://www.tektonics.org/ntdocdef/mattdef.html
Mark http://www.tektonics.org/ntdocdef/markdef.html
Luke http://www.tektonics.org/ntdocdef/lukedef.html
John http://www.tektonics.org/ntdocdef/johndef.html
I agree, that this truly is a tempest in a teapot. There have always been gnostic gospels and I've been amazed at recently so many fiction writer have been doing mysteries that "seek to twist and claify Christian values". The Da Vinci Code--everyone knows is fiction, but what does it do to belief systems. Dave Barry's The Third Secret does a smiliar thing that attacks the Catholic Church's belief that priests cannot marry. I just call tomes like these Today's Gnostics. I read some of these gnostic texts years ago. My favorite one to snicker about was the one where it was purported Judas and Jesus played together as children in Egypt. There's also a Gnostic gospel devoted to Mary Magdalene. Take it with a grain of salt.
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