Posted on 04/29/2017 8:02:13 AM PDT by NYer
Deduction from the context, i.e., this is a passage that occurs in the chapters describing his Galilean ministry; and from the fact that Mary was already aware of his supernatural nature in Luke 1 and John 2.
Mary never requested a miracle from Him at the wedding of Cana.
She simply notified Him that they ran out of wine and told the servants to do whatever He told them.
Why would she bother telling him if she didn't know He could solve the problem, and why would He regard her comment as involving him if no request was implied?
Don't you think God will answer Himself as He promised He would?
Do you not trust Him to hold to His word and do as He promised?
I trust God's promises, but I'm not interpreting his promises the way you are. If the above argument were a decisive argument against praying to saints or Mary, it would also be an argument against ever asking another human being to pray for us; yet we see Paul request prayers all the time from the recipients of his letters. Likewise James says, "Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise them up. If they have sinned, they will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective." James links prayer efficacy to the righteousness of the one praying, and to the authority of church leaders in the case of the elders praying over the sick. The saints are more righteous and more authoritative than me, so I welcome their prayers. I also welcome when God answers my prayers that are directed directly to Him, which He often does. But He doesn't promise He's always going to answer every prayer "yes" instantly regardless of conditions. Sometimes God wants us to persist in prayer for prolonged periods ("This kind can come out by nothing but prayer and fasting"--Matthew 17:21), and sometimes He denies our requests. We see Jesus praying all night in Luke 6:12 before choosing his Apostles, which He wouldn't need to do if prayer always required merely making a simple short request. And we see the Father denying Jesus' prayer to take the cup from Him in Luke 22:42. Was God contradicting 1 John 5:15 by denying Jesus' prayer request there? I think not.
Appealing to the Greek doesn’t sort it out any better than reading it in English. He’s talking in the context of his Galilean ministry either way. He didn’t have to “find” his mother.
The fact “know” refers to sexual relations in both Greek and English is not being disputed. The point is that Joseph and Mary were already married at this point and they still didn’t “know” each other sexually; and her expression of surprise at the angel’s announcement that she would become pregnant doesn’t make sense if she and Joseph were planning on “knowing” each other sexually in the future. Were they planning this, she would have instead interpreted Gabriel’s message as meaning she would become pregnant by Joseph the normal way, rather than asking, “How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?”
Still doesn’t support the Catholic claim to apostolic succession.
Yet that isn’t what was recorded....
No, this claim is itself a myth. Mariology had nothing to do with Jerome's rendering of Genesis 3:15:
The Vulgate translation of Genesis 3:15, or what is traditionally called “the protoevangelium” (first Gospel, on account of it being the first “good news” of the Savior to come) is even more clear on the Immaculate Conception. “She shall crush thy head and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel.” Her “heel” would never be under the power of the devil. He would lie in wait for the crushing from the one creature over whom he had no power. The parallelism of the couplet loses its relation of “the woman” and “she” in opposition to “thy head” and the serpent waiting for “her heel” when you translate the Hebrew as masculine in the second part. Saint Jerome had the extant Hebrew and Syrian codices before him as he did his translating in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. He was a master of the inspired languages, Greek and Hebrew, the greatest linguist in the Latin world. He would know, if not from examining the variant codices in existence in his time, then from the rabbis themselves who taught him, that the Hebrew pronoun in this text needed a feminine gender. Although he actually preferred, at first, to give the verse a masculine pronoun, he ended up choosing otherwise because the feminine “she shall crush” was the more common acceptance among the Latin fathers. In the East, Saint Ephrem, the Syrian doctor, who knew Hebrew (his native tongue, Syriac, was very close to Aramaic), also gave the couplet a feminine translation.
There is an exhaustive study by the late scholar, Brother Thomas Mary Sennott, in a book he wrote on this very subject, The Woman of Genesis, in which he proves the case for the better accuracy of the Vulgate translation. . .
To conclude. In the protoevangelium, the Greek Septuagint has autos as the subject for the second couplet, autos is the masculine nominative pronoun “he.” Jerome knew that, but he still rendered the subject feminine by using ipsa in his Latin translation of the Genesis text, basing that choice on the older Latin texts in circulation in the West, or, quite possibly, on what the rabbis of the fourth century told him were the correct vowels belonging to the Hebrew pronoun in question.
The chapter and verse numbers weren’t recorded, either, but I don’t see Sola Scriptura advocates complaining about adding them.
Um, duplicity doesn’t bode well for your reasoning abilities. According to the BIBLE Mary was betrothed to Joseph thus vowed to be his, THEN the Angel appeared to her and she consented to surrogacy of ‘the holy thing’. Gestating a child is a physical behavior. BUT, consenting to surrogacy does not take from Mary a sex cell pledged to Joseph. Catholiciism insists that God took a sex cell from mary to make Jesus’s body and behavior mechanism. Is the god of catholiciism a defrauder, of Joseph? Try to straighten this Gordian catholic knot, without contradicting The Bible.
No, the ancient church historians provide that support. And if the Catholics don’t have apostolic succession, then Protestants don’t, either, so we’re all out of luck.
That really has to be one of the weakest arguments the Catholic can advance on the issue.
Is that a Scott Hahn "apologetic" argument? It sounds like one of his.
But to the point...adding chapters and verses doesn't change the meaning of the text and is not adding anything to the text.
You will find it notes there is no direct Scriptural support for this issue and that the translation of Gen 3:15 by Jerome cannot be defended.
I'll get the exact quote later.
Resorting to insults doesn't bode well for your case. If God did not take a sex cell from Mary, Jesus would not be a descendant of David, would not have a human nature, and could not redeem human nature. But Scripture teaches He has both a human and a divine nature (Romans 1:3-4, etc.). This is precisely why the Council of Ephesus ruled against the Nestorian heresy. Feel free to review the debates that led to that decision if you want to see its basis. The arguments and related Scriptural commentary are laid out at length by St. Augustine in On the Trinity. I do not have more time to debate today; have a nice day, and enjoy the Lord's Day.
Regarding #593, I'm familiar with the CE, as well as strong arguments for the opposite position.
Gotta run; thanks for the discussion; have a blessed day.
You really want somebody to tell you?
How about searching the matter out for yourself?
Try studying up on what wine signified among that era's Jewry specifically in context of wedding celebrations which often could go on for days.
Was Adam human? How limited is your god if he must, MUST take a gamete from mary? How many women are in the lineage of Mary AND Joseph? The hoops catholiciism requires their god to jump through in order to serve their institution can get downright funny at times! And that doesn't even address the duplicity of Mary pledged to Joseph then consents to be 'god's wife in giving her genetics to God's use, violating her vows to Joseph. The god of catholiciism is not The Righteous God, if he can cause mortals to sin against his commandments. Think about it before you 'spittle fleck' (term from a Catholic priest on this very forum just the other day!) any further duplicity
Here, you err.
What is being discussed was not Jerome's original rendering, but instead was later alteration. Whether it have been merely later copy(ing) error, or something more deliberate, is anyone's guess.
Check out the latest, now corrected Vatican (Latin) version.
That's one of the weakest 'Catholic' arguments on this subject, of them all.
It is one thing to ask for prayers of the living, it is yet another things to make requests to those who have passed on to await final judgement.
If you desire to include Paul in this as some kind of recommendation, show us where Paul advised such requests be made of those who had passed on (who had died earthy, physical death), or else be honest, and leave Paul out of it entirely...
Did you ever quiet yourself enough you could hear what He may have tried to convey to you, back? If you said "yes", I'd find that hard to believe without something further to counter what I'm so far detecting to the contrary.
Yet I would need to write up several book length replies to counter the nonsense you are sending me off into? I've had about enough of that from FRomans, on this forum. You have no clear idea who you are talking to...I've been at this for many years -- and have seen/investigated (in general, and in close details, too) most any argument you may care to make.
After these many days since I last posted comment to which you eventually gave reply, you go through a laundry list, and in the middle of it is Steve Ray?
YOU'VE GOT TO BE KIDDING.
That guy? I've already seen some of his counter-arguments on the particular subject, and as usual, it fails, so I won't even bother wasting my time further with the "detailed replies" of persons such as Steve Ray. He's full of [unprintable on this forum]. The only way his arguments could possibly work -- is to fulfill the a priori assumption and assertion of the Church of Rome -- arguments which nobody else countenances (including the various Orthodox) other than those who have been successfully brow-beaten into not rocking Rome's boat in interest of having peace among various churches.
I'm interested in TRUTH foremost. Regarding claims it makes for itself (alone, as it were) truth is not much found among the Church of Rome -- other than having been tortured into submission to it's own self-interests.
Nothing Steve Ray would have to say at this point would convince me that singular papacy as known to Rome was how the church initially was organized. There is far too much undeniable evidence to the contrary.
To simplify --- if singular papacy, as known to Rome --- was how the earliest Church had been duly arranged, it would not have taken many centuries for it to eventually develop, and one would not have to seek out the likes of the Steve Rays of this world for blathering explanation of how what can be found within historical record does not indicate what it obviously enough DOES indicate.
Then, in this note you send -- after how many days(?) you end with obscurities, like mention of articles written in German, allegedly asserting prayers among Jews TO the dead were common (rather than marginal if at all, and a thing borrowed from pagans) to then end with the special pleading worthlessness of catacomb "evidence"?
That last is prime example of Catholics reading into what is there -- what they want to see, instead of what is more actually there.
Then there remains the huge problem of prayers for, and regarding the dead having been common enough from the beginnings of Christianity, which can be proved through earliest records, but (and his is crucial) which LACK elements of prayer being directed TO the dead (as in --- requesting assistance directly from the departed) although prayers to the dead rather than more merely "about" and concerning them did come eventually to pass, first, as expansion of cult of the martyrs.
Whatever the argument in support of the practice --- prayers TO the dead are not biblical, and even counter-biblical.
Jesus instructed us how to pray. He provided the template. Matthew 23
Jesus also made a point of saying, in context of "religious" teachers, and those whom would seek to lord it over others in "religious" context ---call no man Father.
Who should be believed? Jesus himself, who was Immanuel, God among us -- or those who follow the template/model of the very Pharisaical practice Jesus was warning His disciples about?
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