Posted on 05/09/2006 11:22:42 AM PDT by Conservative Coulter Fan
It is fiction indeed, but do you know how many people are believing this garbage????
I have never heard of anyone or read any writing that would substantuate your false claim. If you have a valid source for this statement please provide it. If not, then please admit that this is just your own uninformed opinion.
I don't believe Mark was a direct eyewitness. Wasn't he brought into the Church by Peter?
Yet his Gospel was said to have been written between 55 and 70 A.D.
None of the gospels mentions the destruction of the temple and the Romans destroying Jerusalem in A.D. 70. That was a pretty big deal. This suggests that the Gospels were all finished before 70 A.D.
Probably the same number who believe Michael Moore's "Farenheit 911".
Mark was an eye witness. The Last Supper is believed to have been held at his home. Also notice Mark 14:51-52.
Many Bible secholors believe that Judas first brought the soldiers who arrested Jesus in the garden to Mark's house. That would be very logical since that was the last place where Judas had known Jesus was. That being the case, it is further believed that young Mark, probably a teenager at the time, ran in his bedclothes to warn Jesus. Many believe that he is the young man who ran from the Garden naked. Only Mark records this. Mark was also probably one of the ones who witnessed the resurrected Christ.
Wasn't he brought into the Church by Peter?
No. Read Acts 12:12 When Peter was released from jail he went to Mark' house. In Acts 12:25 we find Mark and Barnabas as companions of Paul when he returned to Antioch from Jerusalem.
Read Acts 15:37-40. Here we see a dispute between Paul and Barnabas over Mark. Mark had started out with them on the first missionary journey but had not finished the journey. Now Barnabas wants to take him again on the second missionary journey but Paul says no. This resulted in Paul and Barnabus going on separate journeys, Mark going with Barnabas.
Read Col. 4:10. Here we find that Mark was with Paul when Paul wrote Colossians. They had evidently reconciled by that time.
Read II Tim. 4:11. This was written just before Paul's death. Notice that he ask Timothy to bring Mark with him when he comes to Paul in Rome because by this time Mark had grown into a strong advocate for the church and Paul considered him useful for the ministry.
The Scriptures associate Mark with Paul rather than Peter. Mark was without a doubt an eyewitness to many of the things he would later write about in his Gospel and a companion of Paul.
I hope you find this useful.
Then why does Brown make this claim at the book's beginning... “all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate”.
This is why there is an outcry.
Brown is a despicable liar and a coward.
When called on his "accurate" secret rituals and documents, he and his apologists throw up their arms and say "it's fiction.....it's fiction........"
He can't have it both ways.
This is like all the liberals who swore that the "Passion of the Christ" was going to cause Christians to beat and kill Jewish peoples in retaliation.... When all is said and done, it'll be just a footnote in Pop Culture.
I think your bible ignorance is showing. What about John's Gospel or the Apocalypse or 1st and 2nd Peter, The Epistle of Jude or 1st 2nd or 3rd John? They all knew Our Lord quite well. Not to mention the conversation that Paul had with Him on the road to Damascus.
Sorry, Eastbound. We all understand that the Gospel of Thomas wasn't calling for sex-change (er, sex-mutilation) surgery. The point was that women should stop being like women: if you read it, they were to become sexless. The gnostic gospels, far from preaching female empowerment, preached that feminity was evil.
How that plays out in the 'real world' insofar as role-playing is concerned, it makes sense that the male is pre-dominately masculine in appearance and activities, and the female is predominantly feminine in appearance and activities.
I say, predominantly, for if we are created in the image and likeness of God, after the manner of Adam, who had both the masculine and feminine aspects, it would seem logical and normal for the man to act more masculine and the woman to act more feminine for there to be an attraction -- and a basis for a union, each complimenting the other.
I don't know what gnostics think or what they understand. Never studied them in depth.
I think it more advantageous, at least for me, to look at things beyond their face value or what they appear to be. I began thinking like that when I started studying the meanings of the parables of Jesus. In fact, I've found some of the parables to have different meanings when re-examined from another perspective, or state of need.
Some folks apparently don't go that far and attribute their beliefs to the natural interpretation and stop there. Don't have the ear to hear what is really being said and settle for corn on the cob rather than what the kernels represent.
OK. Just that in the case of the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, that was NOT what was meant.
""The Gospel of Thomas declares that a woman cannot be saved unless God first changes her into a man (the very last verse of Thomas, 114)."
When a woman (or a man, for mankind is the feminine aspect or spirit) is saved, that is when the transformation starts and the feminine prepares to becomes one with the masculine. That's what the marriage is. A twaining of your mind and the mind of Christ and we become bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, in a spiritual sense. Your will is sublimated to the will of God, as Christ sublimated his will to the will of the Father when he said, 'Not my will, but thine be done.'
Now, in that He is now the eternal mediator between man and God, it is for us as individuals to sublimated our will to the will of Christ, (our husband, if you will) who is the express image of the Father within us, for Christ dwells within us and we in Him. Ideally, in conscious internal dialogue.
So I see no problem with the Thomas statement, though I wouldn't take it to mean a natural happening, for what profit has the flesh? The statement could serve as a metaphor for the wedding between Christ and His church, a confirmation of the inner process of re-uniting with God and realizing our salvation on an individual basis.
Sorry, but you're simply reading into it what isn't there. This is not anything like St. Paul ("There shall be neither... woman nor man"); there is no reciprocality indicated. Nor did the gnostics believe there should be. Besides, the bride does NOT prepare for the groom by becoming groom-like; in fact, preparing for the groom is done by bringing forth the fullness of femininity; so reading it as a preparation for the wedding feast is precisely backwards.
Further, the gnostics wholeheartedly, passionately, and fundamentally rejected the wedding element of the Christian faith. The early Christians saw marriage as a foretaste of the ecstatic union, Mary and Joseph experiencing the presence of Christ so closely that they had no need for the shadow of it that is sexuality; the Gnostics went in the opposite direction: to see sexuality as a curse created by the conquering of dirt over spirit, and religious sexuality as an abomination, seeing the "sacrament of marriage" as being of the same cloth as temple prostitutes.
So, yes, they did see "unsexing" as a preparation for their union with God, but that was because their god hated marriage and sexuality. Our God created sexuality as a way of permitting us to experience the bond between love and creation.
One last point, more of a pop-culture reference: The cosmology / "religion" professed by the vampries in Buffy the Vampire Slayer is actually quite similar to gnosticism, minus the ascetic elements. Why? The gnostic view is that the experience of a spiritual longing was an evil created by the Hebrew God, a lesser God who revolted against the Gnostic God, according to them. Vampires were, then, humans without the Yahvistic spark of spiritual longing, experiencing only "pure" animal longings. (The Gnostics did, hwoever, believe that there was no chance at going to the pre-edenic "natural" state, and sought, therefore to go to purity in the opposite direction: pure spirit.) Also, The Gnostic cosmology created a perfect viewpoint of Satan's arrogance: that it was God who messed everything else, and that he was the true god.
(Of course, what more perfect expression of the Vampires' spirituality than to profess a "gospel of Judas"?)
Exactly! Thanks.
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