Have You Ever Read Ephesians?

Well Richh, verse by verse it is going to be hard to go one way or the other on Colossians. If it and Ephesians are forged, the forgers will have had the benefit of reading Galatians among all the other prior works of Paul. It is not surprising that the forgers would have re-used some of Paul's own work.Also, I have mentioned a couple of times now, it is a legitimate question in biblical scholarship if those two books in particular were forged or not. I tend to come down on the side that they were. But even if they were NOT forged, it just means that Paul really grew up to be much more parochial than he started out. Thats fine as far as I am concerned, but it certainly does take away from this notion that these books should be revered the way that they are by some people.

Wow! Could you be more offensive? I guess you could if you tried.Perhaps you should find some support for this nonsense and take it into a thread where people give a crap. In this thread we are talking about the bible.

So I need some kind of special sauce to understand why words on this page don't disagree with words on the other page?Your telling me that the real way to get around condtradictions in the bible is to use magic?How compelling! Well the only reason this discussion on these particular verses has gone on as long as it has is because you insist on defending these verses in the most bizzare manner imaginable.It is not that I am looking for bones to choke on but rather that I have numerous people telling me that the bones I am choking on are actually gravy. They are not.It has take THIS long, for you to admit that these verses are "bad instructions". Why?Moreover, I have more than once now tempered my criticm of Ephesians on exactly the basis you are complaining about. There is plenty else in Ephesians to find value in. If what Christians claimed is that they use Ephesians because of the parts that are good and that they recognize that the parts that are bad are a product of Paul's time, this wouldn't be an issue. My problem has always been the claim that the totality of Ephesians is the holy and that there aren't any mistakes. That is because these verses in Ephesians along with some in Timothy, and something someone added to 1 Corinthians, among many others have all been used to support the idotic and immoral notion that there is a heirachy of dominance from men to women. Your very long and eloquent defense of these verses stands testament to this. They may not be major dogmas to you but they have helped shape our culture over centuries. If they are not major dogmas why is there such a frantic rush to rescue Paul on these issues that on their face offend our modern morals? It seems somewhat strange to me now that you now call this "bad instructions" when you went to such lengths to stand by it.On your position jaywill, color me confused.(As an aside, I know there are other places where Paul talks about patriarchy that are undisputed or less disputed. It is not my argument that these letters were forged because the original Paul was an obvious raging feminist. That is quite unlikely.)Edited by Jazzns, : No reason given.Edited by Jazzns, : No reason given.

You made this same point in your other reply so I will expand on it here to pivot to perhaps a new line of investigation of Ephesians.I have said, and I will say again to try to be as clear as possible, that Ephesians in its entirety is not without merit. I have never claimed, that because of these few problems that Ephesians should be thrown away in its entirety and if I have by mistake, I will retract that now.When I look back at how this discussion started, the issue I raised with these verses was enjoined quite vigerously. You went as far as to say that the entire chapter of Ephesians 5 is "wonderful". Over these few verses I have been personally attacked, told that my disagreement with orthodoxy was the equivalent of Holocost denial, had my argument falsely dismissed as trying to make Paul into a social crusader, all over what you are now claiming is a minor point in a big picture.So lets talk about the big picture some.Paul in Ephesians is looking at the fruits of the apostolic age as something that has past. He talks about how the spiritual resurrection is in the present. This is a much LATER developing theology. This is different from the kind of resurrection that Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians, Romans, etc.To this Paul, there was a current and immediate resurrection that will then be followed later by a return of Christ. This is the natural evolution that Christianity was forced to take once the generations after the apostolic age had died. The first attempts are somewhat evident in 2 Thessalonians where "Paul" once again tries to smooth things over by putting pre-conditions on the day of the Lord due to the fact that some people ALREADY were taking the leap that Paul eventually gets to in Ephesians.We are so used to this notion in our modern forms of Christianity that it is hard for us to imagine how the people in Paul's age thought about the concept of resurrection and salvation. Paul was eagerly awaiting the return of Christ. To him, the resurrection wasn't something you lived with to empower a long life with the satisfaction of knowing that you are already seated with Christ. To him, the baptism, the rejection of the law, the communion with other believers, was all for the purpose of preparation for this soon to happen event.And Paul wasn't the only one. He was one of many that took variations on this message early on in Christianity. You had messianic jews who rabidly thought that the end was nigh. They even argued AGAINST Paul's version of lawless grace and his failure to stress strict chastity.Ephesians is a post-hoc re-rationalization of original Christian dogma once that dogma had withered with the patience of time.

Did you see the part of his message that I quoted? The part where he claims that 70% of black people are freeloading on society?THAT is what I was calling offensive. Not the rest of his diatribe.

This is such a cannard. I have to at least point out that this edict obviously only applies to Hebrew slaves and was well understood by ancient people that it did so.Slaves of other nations were not afforded this right. In particular, in Ephesians we are probably NOT talking about Hebrew owners or slaves.Edited by Jazzns, : No reason given.

I am sorry jaywill. I try hard to digest your posts but these last two are too much. You are waging a quote war with each line of my reply that I am not interested in untangling the mess.I invite anyone who is reading to simply take our respective points, read for yourself and decide. Read the whole books of Ephesians, Romans, 1 & 2 Thessalonians, and 1 Corinthians 15. They aren't that long, this is an afternoon exercise. Bear in mind that Ephesians and 2 Thessalonians are the two here that should stand out. Look at how Paul talks about the resurrection and the return of Christ. Notice how the tense is translated (assuming you have a good translation, I recommend the NRSV). Is Paul talking about something that has happened or something that will happen? The interpretation will be in the eye of the beholder. I have not driven a wedge between Jesus and Paul. I have simply illuminated the gap that exists between Paul and his very own self. No need to bring Jesus into this, that is something you did.You certainly are very good at pulling out particular quotes. That is true. I am simply not impressed with tapestry weaving using bible verses. These books have a history, order, and purpose that stands outside your apologetics. To divorce their understanding from these rich bases make it all ring quite hollow. I am perfectly happy to let your last two posts stand as a monument and let any readers decide.

The circumstances of Jesus are irrelevant. Lets assume for the sake of argument that everything in your mythology is true. It does not change what we know of how early christians behaved, how they believed, and how the concept of orthodoxy evolved as minds were changed over the generations after Jesus. This is just more of the, "contradictions between words on the page disappear when you apply MY special kind of magic" argument. I don't mean to be dismissive about using the word magic but you have to understand that that is what it sounds like to someone on this end. What does believing add that helps to change the contradictions? The only thing I can think of is that it adds a sense that apriori the contradictions are impossible so therefore any explanation that removes them must be necessarily better than acknowledging them.Not only are you suggesting that you can only see the wonders of your experience with your magic, but that you also must ignore facts about the history of the bible and the early church. You are replacing knowledge with magic and proclaiming THAT thought process to be like "explaining a Beethoven symphony to a cow".Now matter how much I disagree with you, I hope I would never proclaim your level of faculty to that of animal. I do think your argument is emboldened by ignorance but I would never proclaim that you will be incapable of understanding because your process is akin to that of livestock.Once again, your insults speak only to you. Nor am I! You invented that part of my argument so you could feel good to have something you think you could knock down. What is wrong with the self deceived option? If one of the world's religions is true, it means that all the other people are being self deceived (unless you believe in Loki).I won't even call the forgers vicious liars. They were pious liars. They really thought they had something important to say for the benefit of their religion. It doesn't excuse them, but I am not here to apply modern justice to them. I will simply note that we have left their tired and primitive nonsense in the dusbin of history where it belongs.Edited by Jazzns, : No reason given.

Usually ghostwriting is considered valid when it is able to be endorsed by the person who is the public face. Nobody thinks that when the president delivers a speech that was prepared for him, that he does not endorse the ideas therin.The problem with Ephesians (something that is even more grossly overstated in other forgeries such as 2 Peter, the Pastorals, etc) is that the content is at ODDS with what the public face would have said or HAD said.Also, we just can't know. Most of the obvious forgeries were made long after the peole who they are named for had died. We can't know how Paul's ideas would have changed with the time. Perhaps he would have been right on board with the whole "resurrection in the now" ideas expressed in Ephesians. Maybe Peter really would have come around to the whole justified by faith thing. But we can't assume that they would have, we can only go on what we know of their character and what they said and did while they were alive.The only reason I think you have any consistency with this point is that you don't seem to accept Ephesians on the basis of authority but rather on its content. As I have said many times in this thread thus far, I think that is perfectly fine but there is a cost even to this. That cost is that you are deciding to accept the agenda of someone who decided, perhaps even piously, to go against their forebearers and to justify that agenda with deception.Just like the author of A Million Little Pieces discovered, even if the message may have value on its own, people tend to disregard both the message or the messenger after the lying is revealed. Trust is important. Jaywill and Richh are off the hook for this because they simply deny the lie. To not do this yourself you are either being very disengenuous or very enlightened and I can't quite tell.Edited by Jazzns, : No reason given.

Just to correct a point, if Bart Erhman ever once did claim that forgery was typical and acceptable, he has since changed his mind quite dramatically.The popular press version of his work is simply called "Forged" and it is a discussion not just of the various forgeries in and out of the Bible but a long discussion about how the practice of forgery was both widely used and widely condemned.It is bizzare how brazen some people were. The father of the modern canon himself, Athanasius, used forgery as a tool to change the character of his opponents after his death.Forgery was throught of so badly in fact that it was perhaps even used to attept to discredit legitimate writings by claiming that they were forged.At any rate, not to drift too far off topic into forgery in general, I agree with you that not only forgery is not acceptable, it was not acceptable to the ancients either.

[qs]The more I think about it, the more this actually is relevant to Ephesians. Is it not relevant that the person who put one of the final stamps on the status of Ephesians as authoratative was himself a known forger? He was a forger not for money or for piety, but rather to elevate the status of his power. He was brazen enough to forge a letter from the emperor himself! Or is it simply post-hoc rationalization of the fact that a person Tychicus was already there. This is also done in a better known forgery of 2 Timothy at the end where the forger gives a bunch of very personal instructions including asking for a cloak. This is the known technique of adding verisimiltude to the forgery. It was well practiced in other known forgeries. You would have to ask the many many many other forgers that we KNOW about who did very similar things that didn't happen to make it into canon. Often times not even in rivalry of Paul but in support. One of the more famous forgeries of Paul is someone who was trying very hard to make Paul look really good. He forged a series of letters between Paul and an important philosopher of the day Seneca. The letters were intended to retroactivly improve the status of Paul, as having sparred with a celebrity. The Pastoral Epistles were forged precicely to undermine a growing branch of Paulean Christians who preached equality of the sexes and chastity even in marriage, they themselves supported by the false stories that later became the forged Acts of Paul!Of all of the hypotheticals you mention above, we have KNOWN examples of people doing that! And I think that you are plainly misreading Romans and 1 Corinthians on this point as I have mentioned before. But I won't go into those depths again. I don't think it is worth trying to change your mind on this point because it is based on your theology, not on the evidence.

To some extent I think this is true especially early on. The early church was as disconnected from the establishment just as far as the establishment was in opposition to it but it didn't stay that way for long.I would highly recommend the book Jesus Wars by Phillip Jenkins. Violence and interferance were the name of the game for the early church once they stopped being an annoyance to the empire and starting being the official state religion of Rome. You don't get more connected to the establishment that.But I agree that that was not Paul. Paul did not write in those circumstances. I also am NOT claiming that Paul was on a crusade against slavery. I am saying that in this ONE case, Paul very clearly is asking for the freedom of a Christian slave from his Christian master.Just poking around the internet I can see that I am not alone. I don't know about the particular people you are reading but if I just search for "Philemon slavery" I get a ton of things. I don't really want to copy and paste them here becuase I don't want to pretend that support from blogs and such is a massive support and I don't really feel like getting in a reference war over this.It just seems to me, that reading the book of Philemon, as a whole, that you cannot rationally come away from it with the notion that Paul is not asking for Onesimus' freedom. I cannot fathom, not only how you read it otherwise, but to what purpose you could possibly desire to.

Look, I am not trying to make this personal. I am sorry if it came out that way. Genuinely.But the main part of my reply came the paragraph before what you decided to respond to.Your entire point about ghostwriting, about the validity of doing what these forgers did, is ignoring that UNLIKE ghostwriting, they are not only unauthorized but CAN NEVER BE authorized by the original authors. I dont see a controversy of Paul using ghostwriters while he was alive and then endorsing their message! The problem is of ghostwriters who did their ghost writing LONG after Paul was dead and buried and did it in contradiction of what the real Paul actually wrote! If someone wants to value these writings because of their content on their own, there is nothing wrong with that in general but to do so must take into account that they are intended as deception.These were not pen names. These were not ghostwriting. These were forged so that they would carry the authority of the name of the author. That that is not at issue. At that is a terrible analogy to apply to this situation. Nobody has suggest to throw out the entire Paulean corpus or that Ephesians is not useful AS THAT, as a reference to history of the teachings of the time. The controversy of Ephesians from my perspective is only the claim that it is both legitimate and holy because of its legitimacy.

Well no I don't think you did. I remember reading a lot of quote sniping from Romans but my unwillingness to dissect your apologetics does not mean this point was conceded. I will again defer to the reader and simply quote from what I believe to be one relevant section of Romans. To the Paul of Romans, we are baptized into Jesus' death and will, future tense, be resurrected. The whole character of his writings, the history we have from the early believers, the other non-Paulean apocalyptic sects of Christianity, all have a primordial, concrete, and futuristic belief in the resurrection. THAT you could translate this into a daily notion of being resurrected is a real known thing and it is known to have come later, long after Paul's death. I don't have to dismiss it. Saying that I am incapable of understand something because I don't possess your magical attributes of belief is impossible to rebut. It is in the class of arguments that are not even wrong.The argument dismisses itself. I was just pointing out the fact.You are welcome to continue to assert that you win arguments because of the divinity of your understanding but I cannot possibly grasp how you would feel that would be compelling to anyone! Acts was written by a devotee of Paul. You cannot defer to the writings of someone who had all the motivation in the world to turn Peter into a endorsee of the Paulean theology.Even IF you are so generous to assume that Peter eventually came around to Paul's view, you MUST recognize that early on there was a division between them or else you disregard Paul's own testimony to the conflict. You must also ignore the other evidence we have outside of the Bible for Petrine sects of Christianity, multiple varieties of Messianic Jews who revered Peter and continuation of the law. No it wasn't. But the Paulean branch that won the war did its darndest to make it seem like he did.There are NO legitimate writings of Peter in the New Testament. This is true for reasons not the least of which that there are no known legitimate writings of Peter at all.

Yes I absolutly am. You are the only one presenting this opinion that it is holy because a group of a bunch of guys decided 300 years later to make it so. Other people in this thread are arguing it is holy because Paul was authorized to write it. The only thing you are doing is laundering the blame here. It doesn't matter under what circumstances they accepted it. It doesn't wash the culpability of the forger away because someone later decided to look the other way. (if they even did that!)Also, could you please respond to my main point about your bad use of the ghostwriting excuse? That same point applies if you are accepting Ephesians on that basis directly or if you delegate that responsibility to the builders of the canon. If it was ghostwriting it cannot possibly be authorized by the named author if not only because writings go against the original theology of the author (more true in other cases of forgery than Ephesians) but also because they were dead. Those issues plainly makes this deception regardless if you consider that deception holy.