Summations Only

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?

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.

Acts isn't a work of Paul so I don't know what you are talking about. Paul's original works is about the here and now and addressed to all people equally. How it was modified either directly or in future works was to subjugate women and establish a hierarchy over the collective enterprise of faith that Paul established. THAT is the problem with the context of pseudo-Paul writings. Their "context" is one of fraud. But they are most certainly NOT consistent with what Paul taught. That is what I am trying to tell you. If these books are what you claim them to be, a echo of god inside of the intent of these writers in context then you have a major problem. The intent of these writers was to explain away a failure of their theology. Jesus did not return but men still wanted power. They didn't like this notion of a community of believers that Paul instituted and instead wanted a situation where they could implement control and where certain individuals had more authority than others. They wanted resources and most egregiously of all they didn't want those pesky women to be involved in the process.I mean, this is ridiculous. For all your talk about context you are blatantly ignoring the deep context in which Paul was writing. Paul spent a good amount of his time in his original letters consoling people who were worrying about the fact that Jesus hadn't returned yet. And how did Paul choose to do so? He did by REITERATING that Jesus meant to come back soon.That is WHY Paul had to be bastardized by his successors. Jesus STILL hadn't arrived and they needed a reason. So they took up the pen in the name of Paul and created a brand new theology about the long patience of god and how we should all now listen to certain dudes for our day to day mortal activities.Like you cherry pick scripture, you are cherry picking your context.The context of Matthew includes the fact that he is lying about the foreshadowing of Jesus in the OT.The context of Daniel includes the fact that he is lying about how the history of Babylonian captivity unfolded in order to support a contemporary revolution.Yet you seem perfectly willing to dismiss the obviously ahistoric events of the OT as the "context" of the cultures in which they were written. Why can't that be true for the newer writings? If you readily accept that the facts of the story of Moses and Joshua are indeed bullshit then why do you give a pass to the equally anonymous, equally agenda driven posthumous ghost writings of Paul and the gospel writers?Edited by Jazzns, : No reason given.

I haven't forgot about your last post. But since you move to another thread where I feel we may be more off topic than we were here if we were at all, can you suggest a thread we should move to?