Choosing a faith

Not looking for loopholes but Christian scholars now have new data such as in the Dead Sea Scrolls, they are gaining more understanding of 1st century Greek language and there is better communication and access to more information through the internet.I went through this with Paul K using Mark 13.What you quote is Jesus drawing a reference to Isiah Chap 13. Here is a part of that chapter.

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6 Wail, for the day of the LORD is near; it will come like destruction from the Almighty.
7 Because of this, all hands will go limp, every heart will melt with fear.
8 Terror will seize them, pain and anguish will grip them; they will writhe like a woman in labor. They will look aghast at each other, their faces aflame.
9 See, the day of the LORD is coming —a cruel day, with wrath and fierce anger— to make the land desolate and destroy the sinners within it.
10 The stars of heaven and their constellations will not show their light. The rising sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light.
11 I will punish the world for its evil, the wicked for their sins. I will put an end to the arrogance of the haughty and will humble the pride of the ruthless.
12 I will make people scarcer than pure gold, more rare than the gold of Ophir.
13 Therefore I will make the heavens tremble; and the earth will shake from its place at the wrath of the LORD Almighty, in the day of his burning anger.
14 Like a hunted gazelle, like sheep without a shepherd, they will all return to their own people, they will flee to their native land.
15 Whoever is captured will be thrust through; all who are caught will fall by the sword.
16 Their infants will be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses will be looted and their wives violated.
17 See, I will stir up against them the Medes, who do not care for silver and have no delight in gold.

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That quote starts out calling it the day of the Lord and then says it will be LIKE destruction from the almighty, but not done by the almighty. As you can see from that and from the whole of Chap 13 you can clearly see that it is about the Jewish nation dealing with the Babylonians and their suffering that brought on them. The passage you are referring to is Jesus forecasting what it is that the Romans will do in response to a military revolt, as the Babylonins had done previously.I'll repeat the last part of the your Biblical quote

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Then will appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven. And then all the peoples of the earth will mourn when they see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory. And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other.
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Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.

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When it says "coming on the clouds" Jesus is still referencing Daniel 7 where it says the following:

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13 “In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence.

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In this quote that Jesus is using we can see that it isn't about Jesus coming to earth on a cloud, but Jesus coming to the Ancient of Days or Yahweh.Jesus was in addition to being opposed to violent revolution was also very opposed to a corrupt Temple. In this He was of course opposed to the powerful Temple culture that it had become, which of course was one of the primary reasons He was crucified.Jesus is saying that with the destruction of the Temple His message will be a sign of His vindication and His message of peace and love will go out to the world in the hearts of those who receive that message. As we know the Temple was destroyed in 70AD. Once again I'm not saying that Jesus knew this supernaturally but was forecasting it from understanding the political situation as well as His understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures in the context of His 1st century Jewish world. Lewis IMHO was a great Christian philosopher. He was not as he often said a theologian. Probably the foremost and certainly the most well known Christian scholar in the world is N T Wright, and what I have written is completely consistent with his understanding of the passage.

This from Philippians 3.

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21 who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.

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AS we can see from that quote that is not the case.
Resurrection was central to Paul's faith and if he differed from Peter and company on that issue he would have been very clear about it.I'd like to see your reference to that being a consensus view of resurrection. In the first place there would have been no expectation of one man being resurrected within human history so it wasn't something that they would have wanted in advance. That statement would be more apt after the witness of the disciples and whoever else was an eye witness to Jesus' resurrected body.

I'm not seeing that as at all relevant.

I agree with that but you are answering my response to what you had said earlier about Luke using Matthew. Certainly the Jewish expectation for a messiah was for an earthly throne but Jesus rejected that idea. I'm not saying that Jesus didn't talk about the next life but I was responding to your quote, as well as the quote by Tangle which is simply two different guys giving their accounts of what Jesus said. I have no idea whether or not the authorities were after them If I had to guess I would think that they weren't. The point is that the disciples thought that they might be.

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I agree with that but you are answering my response to what you had said earlier about Luke using Matthew

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But as I said that is not a problem. Matthean priority is all about Matthew being written before Mark.

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Certainly the Jewish expectation for a messiah was for an earthly throne but Jesus rejected that idea. I'm not saying that Jesus didn't talk about the next life but I was responding to your quote, as well as the quote by Tangle which is simply two different guys giving their accounts of what Jesus said.

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It’s not really clear what Jesus actually thought. And in standard Christian views Jesus will rule - the Messianic stuff is all postponed until the Second Coming.

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I have no idea whether or not the authorities were after them If I had to guess I would think that they weren't. The point is that the disciples thought that they might be.

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And my point is that fear goes away as soon as it is clear to them that the authorities aren’t after them. Since they aren’t. Really the whole argument is dubious psychologising - which doesn’t even take account of the stories we have.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1940s and 50s, in biblical terms this might be "new" but not in normal scholastic terms. What's new in scholastic terms is that a few non-Christians have started researching and providing alternative interpretations of the same "data". But what we're talking about here is not new. Exactly what information has been revealed about that passage by the Dead Sea Scrolls? Yes the entirety of the NT is a throwback to the OT attempting to rationalise the failed prophecies therein. Mostly Daniel.But none of your apologetics can escape from what was actually written, which you quote"Then will appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven. And then all the peoples of the earth will mourn when they see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory. And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other.
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Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened."I say it is what it says. And your ex hero CS Lewis does too.

Was Jesus a False Prophet? | Catholic Answers

... and of course we can rely on an atheist like yourself to provide an unbiased and objective assessment of the Scriptures. LOL!! What would CS Lewis know?He was so clueless he couldn't even figure out that the Catholic Church is the one and only true Church. His took his ignorance all the way to the grave.

Why would he care about catholicism? He was not raised catholic.

Simple ... the search for truth. Plenty of Christians not raised Catholic convert to Catholicism.Take John Henry Newman for example, an Anglical priest and prominent theologian, academic and intellectual, who saw the light, converted to Catholicism and even become a Cardinal (which is one step less than Pope).CS Lewis would have no doubt examined the Catholic Church and her teachings, but concluded she didn't teach the truth. So he proved himself to be an ignoramus.

For centuries, the only scholarly analysis of the historicity of the bible was performed by Christians. By definition they are not going to find problems in the bible that interfere with their pre-determined beliefs.It's interesting to see what happens when the same material is studied by agnostics and atheists. Suddenly the unchallengeable is easily challenged and the things that were known to be problematic to the insiders - the contradictions, the forgeries, the historical context and total lack of any independent external corroborating evidence - are seeping out into the open.

Exactly. A Muslim would be more likely to be biased against YOUR scriptures. A Scientologist would be more likely to be biased against YOUR scriptures. A Mormon would be more likely to be biased against YOUR scriptures. And YOU would be more likely to be biased FOR your scriptures. The one who is least likely to be biased is the one who puts them all in the same category - fiction.

Ya it was a typo. Yes and he did so by inventing Q and discounting the work of all the early Christians and that was still true right up until his time. There are as you know other arguments for Luke using Matthew that don't require the invention of an unevidenced documentAlso, Streeter claims that Mark was written about 70AD and then Matthew was completed in 80 to 90AD. This makes no sense at all. If Matthew was that late it would hardly have not included any mention of the destruction of the Temple. Also much of it was about the Jesus' argument against the Temple authorities which no longer existed by that time.The position that any of the synoptics would be written after 70 AD simply doesn't make any sense either internally or externally. The only evidence is what the church fathers wrote. However, as far as the argument for matthean priority goes it is inconsequential.M Why, is it because it doesn't fit in with your position. You left out the part of the kingdom which implies a throne.Also the Jewish nation at had two particular hopes for the future. One was the return of Yahweh to their nation and the other was that of a messiah who would be a man anointed by God to lead them against Rome. The Gospels story essentially sees Jesus as fulfilling both of those hopes but in a very different way than what the Jews expected.Jesus used the term "son of man" which combined both hopes. The Gospel message is that it was both with the earthly kingdom being a kingdom dedicated to bringing Christ's message of peace and love to the world, as we see in the Lord's Prayer where we pray "your kingdom come on earth as in heaven". I agree that it reads like a contradiction but it is by two different authors and if Jesus met some in Galilee and some in Jerusalem it could be a different times. I know that is just a speculative answer.

The fact that he chose to be a stone mason has nothing to do with the metaphor. What matters that he was given a stone to carve in a particular way without knowing how it was to be used. Then he is shown that it is used for something bigger that he ever imagined. The point is that God will take every little act of kindness and self giving love that is done, and use it in the renewal of the world to come where the wolf lays down with the lamb. Maybe a freely chosen marriage makes it harder as there is likely a higher expectation of the new spouse. Love at the time of a freely chosen marriage(usually hormone driven), will change, and it is a matter of how love evolves into a loving partnership from there. That is mostly correct but what I mean by ultimate is when this world is fully recreated sacrificial love will be freely chosen as the norm.I also contend that it does come from God as it is my belief that sacrificial love is not part of the evolutionary process but something that is outside of it namely God.
We in turn can accept that still small voice in out heart and mind or reject it. Yes that is my unproven belief.
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For the supernatural? I never. Either you're having a hard time keeping people's positions straight, or you're being purposefully irritating. You just keep repeating how you feel over and over again. That's not evidence, just a broken record. No one objects to anyone forming their own beliefs, but you've gone way beyond that. You've claimed objective reality for your beliefs, that there's evidence for them. I think you must have misread it. Of course it tells you nothing about what is true. If you read it again you'll see that it's not about what is true but about how subjective your beliefs are, how they're a product of the culture and religion in which you were raised and not of evidence. I don't think you really meant to say there's a lack of material evidence for the existence of life, that we only have our subjective conclusions for life's existence. That would be absurd. I think you actually meant to repeat something about how hard it is for you to believe that life could arise from inanimate matter again. You began this message by mistakenly asserting that I'd acknowledged that the Bible is evidence, and you're concluding it by conceding that it isn't.--Percy