Summations Only

p.s. jar is a believer - just not of everything.
I think he chose to think rather than blindly follow.

But I am not an unbeliever, rather a very devout Cradle Creedal Christian who is very active in the faith, have taught adult and child Sunday school, design and maintain several Christian church websites, helped found Mission and build churches and the product of education in a Christian School.Even you admit that it is so far failed prophecy if it did refer to Jesus, and that makes it just plain silly.

Kinda. I just don't think that GOD is as picayune as folk like Archangel market it.

An interesting move of the goalposts there. I was giving reasons to mistrust Matthew's reliability. I was not giving reasons that demonstrate that Matthew was incorrect or outright wrong.For reasons to suppose he is outright wrong there is always the freeing of the prisoners tradition. Yep, it's God talking to Abraham. That does not make them prophecies. I don't believe it actually happened. But it is what happens in Genesis. My point was that nothing in Genesis 12 and 22 is really fulfilled in the Gospels. Basically, I see no reason why they should be applied to either Jesus or the messiah, let alone both. Are you giving up on the Genesis quotes as being a messianic prophecy that Jesus and only Jesus fulfills? According to the Old Testament all the ethnic Jews were in fact descended from Abraham. That is Isa Chapter 9. I was talking about Genesis 12. Are you saying that Isa 9 is your best messianic prophecy? We can move on that if you want.

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[Jar] But I am not an unbeliever, rather a very devout Cradle Creedal Christian who is very active in the faith, have taught adult and child Sunday school, design and maintain several Christian church websites, helped found Mission and build churches and the product of education in a Christian School.

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Sure you're an unbeliever; if you possessed the Holy Spirits indwelling you wouldn't be spiritually dead and blind to Gods truths. You wouldn't deny the infallible word of God as you pick and choose what you determine to be believable according to your finite human mind. The supernatural is just that, supernatural and beyond our human comprehension. It requires true faith to accept that which belies reason according to our human understanding.I truly mourn for anyone who sits before you and learns what you perceive to be truth based on your very limited perspective.

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Even you admit that it is so far failed prophecy if it did refer to Jesus, and that makes it just plain silly.

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I admitted no such thing and I resent your dishonest implication that I said such a thing. Nothing about any prophecy is either failed or silly. Only those who mock them as silly has failed in their comprehension of truths that are far too deep for your secular mind to grasp.

Did you say "This aspect of the prophecy has not yet occurred since we haven't come to the end of this Age and entered the new Age"?If it has not been fulfilled it is failed prophecy.You are of course free to make any unsupported assertions about me that you want; however that does not change the facts that I am a Christian raised in the Christian tradition in a Christian home educated in a Christian school who is active in my faith and has taught both adult and children's Sunday school who has helped establish new missions and build churches and who actively designs and maintains websites for Christian churches.Nor does it address the factual points I have raised where you simply misrepresented what the Bible actually says by taking quote mined phrases out of context.

So you distrust the reliability of any ancient document? What is mistrustful of having an agenda if your agenda is to spread the truth? It probably was not anonymous to the receivers of matthew's text. Who ever delivered the document to each church knew who it came from , and can probably made that known to the elders of that church. You are assuming that just because its author is unknown now doesn't mean its author was unknown when it was first delivered. A human can write something under inspiration and under non-inspiration. If the author of Matthew was under the inspiration of God, you cannot say it is totally the work of a man. If you sit under a teacher for over ten years and listen to no one else, and then write a thesis based on what you have learned, is it your work alone? No. It is a reflection of the thoughts of your teacher seen through the prism of your personality.Edited by foreveryoung, : No reason given.

Yes, exactly.

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Unfortunately, you have extracted a portion of the debate which is tangential to this topic. If you want to, I'm happy to discuss Messianic prophecy with you. I'm happy to answer anything else you said, but doing so would be moving us offtopic so perhaps I can get back to it later if we are at least also discussing on topic matters as well.

Anybody with an agenda to tell The Truth™ should be distrusted.Edited by ringo, : Spelinge.

What does it mean to be inspired by God? We often say that Beethoven was inspired, an athlete can play an inspired game, leaders can inspire their followers etc.When Paul writes what he does in 2nd Timothy 3:16 isn't he just suggesting that God inspired people to write down their experience and reflections of God. This in no way diminishes God's ability to be able to bring truth to us through the scriptures but IMHO it is important to understand the scriptures in the context in which they were written or we will wind up with a distorted view of God and of course prophesy.

In some ways you are right, it is a waste of time and you will never get through to them. But look at it from this perspective. There are other people that view the website and you may be making an impact on them, because of things they have never saw, heard or understoodAlso, dont stop plugging away, ignore these fellows insults and jibes, its apart of thier M.O. Actually I eat it like candy. Not that I mean to, but upseting them is like shooting fish in a barrel, its kinda funny to watchCompared to the earliest Christians, and even to the serious persecution of Christians today, in parts of the world, if all we have to do is put up with these clownish fellows, we are blessed indeedJust remember there are other people that may not have heard the truth in these matters and that should fuel your intrest.Keep up the good work. See ya in a day or so with responses to the latest postsDawn BertotEdited by Dawn Bertot, : No reason given.Edited by Dawn Bertot, : No reason given.

Since that would not be a christian thing to do, it is lucky that you have never succeeded in doing so.

Paul didn't write 2nd Timothy, or 1st Timothy for that matter. Which is unfortunatly not a position taken by the people who wrote the new testament. Matthew in particular does a great disservice to the old testament context. The fradulent author of Timothy does a great disservice to Paul who never intended his writing to even be considered scripture.What do we do with SCRIPTURE that doesn't understand other scripture in the context which it was written?

Well we don’t know for sure one way or the other but the Pastoral Epistles are written with a different emphasis than other letters where there is a much stronger consensus. If the author is someone other than Paul, which is quite likely, they would be appealing to his teaching for the authority of what is being written. I’m not sure what it is specifically that you are referring to, but in my view it is, as far as I understand it, consistent with the OT context in the way in which it seems to me that Jesus understood the Hebrew Scriptures. Jesus seems to have re-interpreted the Hebrew Scriptures in a way that was out of sync with the vast majority of Jewish thinking at the time, which is of course a huge part of the context in which the Gospels have to be understood.I agree that Paul would not have considered his letters to be scriptural, but he did write his letters with the intent that they would be used to inform and establish orthodoxy within the various churches. That is hard to answer with a 21st century understanding of the world. Fortunately we have better access to historic artifacts and writings than we have had in the past. (The Dead Sea Scrolls for example.) As a result I believe that historians have a better grasp of the mindset of the ancient cultures than we have had in many centuries, and as a result I believe that the scholars have a better understanding of the context, as well as the intent of the writers, than ever before.A agree that if the Bible is considered to be ghost written by God then there is a problem. If however, the Bible was written by people, inspired by God to write down their histories and revelations while allowing for cultural and personal influence in what they wrote, then the problem is largely solved.It seems to me that parts of the Christian church want to worship something that is tangible and that becomes the Bible. The NT writers took a different approach. Their belief was that Jesus had come to establish His Kingdom, (the Kingdom of God in the synoptic, or the Kingdom of Heaven in Matthew), and that through His death and subsequent resurrection that message that He had preached had been vindicated or if you like confirmed by God.With this in mind then, IMHO, the NT authors would have been careful in what they wrote about Jesus and His message and personally that aside from details of things like the sequence of events I have confidence in what they wrote.Incidentally to change the topic for a second, I doubt very much that Jesus ever intended to see a separate religion established around Himself. I believe He saw Himself very much in a Jewish context, although He expected that His Jewishness as He understood it was for the world.The only real question that we have to decide, is whether Jesus is dead or alive. If Jesus was not resurrected to a new form of life, then Christianity is based on a lie. If we conclude, as I have, that the answer to that question is that He is alive then that would be the starting point to the understanding of Scripture. Christianity is about worshipping God as embodied by Jesus. It is not about worshipping the Bible.IMHO, I don’t think that understanding the Biblical message is that difficult when taken in that light unless you are determined to have answers to every question such as who is going to hell and who isn’t, or for that matter how to explain contextual differences between the OT and the NT.Incidentally I recently purchased a book called The Jewish Annotated New Testament. One of the editors is Amy-Jill Levine who is a noted Jewish scholar. All of the writers in the book are Jewish and it does provide a very interesting perspective on the NT.

A different emphasis is being VERY generous. I would call them outright contradictory. This point is perhaps for a different thread but Timothy and the other questionable epistles are questionable precisely because they are trying to put a spin on Paul's earlier message.The point I was trying make about this is against your claim of taking scripture in context. These other writings exist entirely to try to CHANGE the context of original Paul. In particular, they bastardized Paul's egalitarianism into the rigid church patriarchy that we all know and "love". In other words, scripture itself does not meet your own standards for good theology. Well the reason I brought up Matthew is because it is the most egregious case of twisting scripture for its own purpose. Matthew tries desperately to wring a suffering messiah out of the OT and pretty much failed to convince its target audience. Matthew is a great example, along with the pseudonymous epistles, of scripture that itself ignores your call for proper context. While this may be true it is beside my point. Your point was that we need to examine scripture in context. My challenge is that by taking such a liberal approach to the scripture you start pulling on a thread that starts to make the situation unravel.The scriptures are not independent. Scripture refers to scripture either directly or indirectly and does not follow your advice for examining context. In fact it does the exact opposite. For example, 2 Thessalonians is written in the name of Paul as a response to 1 Thessalonians in order to change the narrative about the timing of Christ's return.If one is to take 1 Thessalonians in context like you suggest then we should regard Jesus as a failure. He was supposed to come back in the days that Paul wrote it. He didn't. 2 Thessalonians is an attempt to salvage the situation by changing the context.Matthew is changing the context of the OT to make room for Jesus as the messiah to appeal to a Jewish audience. So to properly take Matthew ITSELF into context as you suggest we should come to the obvious conclusion that he is lying.The newer OT scriptures rest on the weight of the bizarre circumstances of the older stuff. You can't take any truth out of the book of Daniel regarding god without deference to the tribal war lies of the prior books that motivated it. So while superficially you can get some metaphorical truths about the nature of god by reading Daniel in its isolated context, once you also include the context of the history that Daniel is trying to forge it poisons your situation.The punishment of the jews of the babylonian exodus cannot be ANY illumination of the nature of god in the context of Daniel unless god is also a territorial tyrant war god the original exodus. The scriptures don't stand alone.Edited by Jazzns, : No reason given.