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A lot of interesting facts.

Historical ping!

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Obama Says A Baby Is A Punishment

Obama: “If they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.”

Thanks super post! There is a guy whose screen name is “skypilot” and keeps arguing about the validity of Catholicism. I’ll send him this FReeper URL next time he takes issue.

A nice thumbnail sketch, overall. I'm a bit at a loss to figure out why the writing of the New Testament has a window which extends all the way to AD 125, though. According to both tradition and overtly-stated declarations, all of the Gospels were written by the persons whose names they bear, all of the Catholic Epistles were written by the persons whose names they bear, all of the Pauline Epistles were written, naturally, by Saint Paul, Revelation was written by St. John the Apostle, and Hebrews was very probably written by St. Paul and, at any rate, was written in the 1st Century.

Of the human authors involved, Matthew, Mark, Paul, James, Peter, and Jude were clearly long dead before the year AD 100, as they were either Apostles (and therefore born well before AD 15) or known to have associated with an Apostle (eg: St. Mark with St. Peter) from a very early date. Theoretically, St. Luke could have lived into the 2nd Century, but it doesn't matter, since Acts of the Apostles cannot have been written more recently than St. Paul's imprisonment (the outcome of which is not discussed, since it hadn't happened yet!) and it is clear from the context of Acts 1:1 that St. Luke's Gospel was written even earlier.

This leaves St. John. Tradition has his writings being completed no later than AD 100. There is excellent internal evidence that his Apocalypse was written before the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, and his Gospel was written about the same time. It is morally certain that he was dead before AD 110.

So, what's the point to all of this? Well, for decades, we have been barraged with revisionists attempting to assign a late date to the Gospels and other NT writings in order to diminish/eliminate the eye-witness character to the life of Christ and its immediate aftermath. There is no reason whatsoever to give even one inch on the Church's traditional understanding of the dates assigned to each and every one of the NT’s constituent parts! In fact, it's much harder to prove - since the easily utilized dates of death don't apply to the authors - but there is a lot of linguistic and circumstantial evidence that at least two Gospels (Matthew and Mark), as well as several of the Pauline Epistles, were written before the AD 51 date that the author uses.

It could be just extreme caution on the author's part, but I wonder why he uses the NT authorship range of dates that he does. Everything else lines-up well with an orthodox mentality, and people compiling such tables tend to be devoid of Modernist motivations. But it still bothers me. And I feel that it is important to point-out the Church's well-grounded tradition and attendant logical inferences in insisting that the NT canon was complete in its writing absolutely no later than AD 100. The “Jesus Seminar” crowd positively loves to assign dates in the AD 125+ range, for obvious reasons. I beg to differ! So... there you have it, for what it's worth!

Great! thanks,

Bookmarked and put in “favorites”. Too much good info to let slip.

bumpus ad summum

Wonderful. Thank you.