Deadworm

In my view, the best of contemporary praise choruses are more enjoyable and conducive to worship than the best of the old hymns. But the lyrics of the typical praise chorus are typically theologically shallow and far too repetitive. The best way is to project the lyrics on a screen against a background of ever changing beautiful scenery. I love the true story of the pastor who introduced a new hymn to his congregation, enraging members who thought that melody was a godless bar tune. That hymn was "What a Friend We Have in Jesus!" The worst policy is to insist: "We mustn't entertain with the Gospel!" If I really enjoy the rhythm and beat of Christian music, my spirit soars and I can worship more intensely and fully. We need the foot-stomping, hand-clapping hymns and praise choruses.

Most NT scholars I know believe that Jesus' disciples had authentic visions of Jesus, but think the evidence suggests that He did not rise bodily from the dead. They deem it more reasonable that the Romans removed Jesus' corpse from the nearby tomb on Saturday night, when they come to dispose of the corpses of the other 2 thieves, so that they could dump all 3 corpses in a common criminals' pit. This is the Apologetics section and Apologetics deals with evidence that might convince a skeptic. Your declaration, therefore, that Jesus' resurrection is a "fact" is not helpful in this context. From a neutral point of view, the bodily resurrection of Jesus is indeed "speculation" because no disciple was present to witness it and because apparitions are often accompanied by seemingly "physical" corroborations, even when no bodily resurrection is claimed. That said, I choose to believe that Jesus rose bodily from the dead. See my new resurrection thread for a discussion of how to defend the Resurrection rationally to a skeptic.

Readers should note that David Taylor has never heard Chuck Templeton preach. I have; and I know the reverence with which older Canadian evangelicals hold his memory and his unique role as a prolific soul saver. My forthcoming post on OSAS will decisively refute David's warped and heretical view of biblical teaching on this issue. Again I say, stay tuned!

He led thousands to Christ, was a marvelous Christian, and was Billy Graham's best friend. Your response just shows how judgmental you can be about a believer you don't know, regardless of the facts.

By then Clopas had already died, like Cloopas, due to the short life expectancy at the time. So Mary the wife of Clopas (Jesus' mother!) really was a widow at the cross. When Jesus' brother-cousin James was killed, the leadership of the Jerusalem church was assumed by "Simon the son of Clopas," Jesus' brother and his cousin.

A case in point is Canada's most eminent ever Christian leader, Charles Templeton. With Billy Graham, Chuck founded Youth for Christ and converted thousands with his powerful preaching. In the late forties and early 1950s the evangelical consensus was that Chuck had more potential as a mass evangelist than Billy Graham. When I was a student at Princeton, a group of Canadians listened to a tape of his old sermons. He preached with great power, passion, and anointing. Once his prayers even raised the dead! But Chuck was a victim of the Domino Theory of Scripture, the belief that if the Bible contains errors, none of it can be trusted. He challenged his pal Billy Graham with his growing doubts and Billy had no answer, except to blindly reaffirm his faith in God's inerrant Word. Chuck tried to be a liberal Christian for a while, but eventually his integrity drove him to agnosticism. He renounced his faith, divorced his Christian wife, and began drinking too much. He became one of Canada's most eminent editors and media personalities, but as an avowed agnostic. Only God knows if he lost his salvation. But I think that's possible and he was definitely once a born again Christian.

There are innumerable contradictory denominational theologies out there that can't all be right. So what does you mean by your question?

Paul seeks recognition as the spiritual "Father" of Corinthian believers: "For though you have ten thousand guardians in Christ, you do not have many fathers. Indeed, in Christ Jesus I have been your father in the Gospel (1 Corinthians 4:15)." This seems to stand in tension with Jesus' command to avoid honorary spiritual titles like "Father" (Matthew 23:8-10). Obviously, Jesus' comment focuses on the ostenatious spiritual pretense of the scribes and Pharisees. catholics feel entitled to ignore Jesus' anti-Pharisaic comment and follow Paul's example--also taking into account the texts you cite.

Modern scholarship recognizes that Joseph is dead at the time of Jesus' public ministry. The Greek of John 19:27 can imply that "Mary the wife of Clopas" is Jesus' mother! Or are you claiming that Mary would defy the biblical law of levirate marriage? How else can you account for the ancient Jewish Christian tradition that Jesus' brothers were in fact His cousins? And how do you explain the possibility that rabbinic Judaism viewed Jesus as the son of the husband's brother--a fact nicely explained by levirate marriage theory?

So is the NT claim that Jesus rose bodily from the dead. Many scholars assume that the Romans removed Jesus' nearby corpse from the tomb when they removed the corpses of the 2 thieves from the cross to put all 3 in an unknown pit for criminals. but I believe that speculation that Jesus' rose bodily from the dead is well grounded in evidence, just as I (less importantly) believe that Mark may well have been Peter's son. Much of the biblical record involves speculation, but there is evidential speculation and wild speculation.

No, he doesn't! He refers to Timothy and Titus as his "loyal child ("Greek: "teknon") in the faith," but never uses the biological term for "son" (Greek: "huios") like Peter does. So he uses a term of endearment without ambiguity. Peter's reference is clearly biological, especially given our knowledge (1) that Peter's wife joined him on his missionary efforts and (2) that he had children, who would likely joiin their parents.

YOu haven't understood my post. Mary could legally marry Joseph's brother Clopas if Joseph was not the biological father of Jesus. Therefore, if the ancient tradition of this marriage is true, this would prove that Jesus is not the natural son of Joseph and thus provide evidence for the virgin birth. Such evidence is helpful to response to the skeptical scholarly consensus that the Gospel virgin birth stories are later legends. This claim is based not only on skepticism about the possibility of a human virgin birth, but on 3 additional facts: (1) Paul's epistles and Mark's Gospel are decades earlier than Matthew and Luke, but know nothing about the claim that Jesus was born of a virgin. (2) In fact, Paul claims that Jesus is by descent "a sperm of David." Skeptics argue that Paul means Jesus us more ommediately a sperm of Joseph. So Gospel virgin birth traditions can use a defense against the charge that they are later legends.

You don't think evidence for Jesus' virgin birth is relevant to Christianity?

According to anti-Christian ancient Jewish polemic, Jesus' alleged real father was a Roman soldier named "Panthera." Where did they come up with that name? The Greek equivalent of "panther" is "pentherides," which means "husband's brother." If rabbis transliterated that noun into a name, they would drop the suffix "ides," leaving "penther." But Hebrew is often written without the vowels. So "penther" could easily become "panther." So originally the phrase "Jesus the son of Panthera" meant "Jesus the son of the husband's brother." But this would mean that, after Joseph died childless, Mary married Joseph' brother Clopas to fulfill the OT law of levirate marriage (Deuteronomy 25:5-10). According to John Chrysostom (born 347 AD), bishop of Antioch, that is exactly what happened! He claims that after Joseph's death, Mary lived as a wife with Clopas, Joseph's brother. If this scenario is true, then Jesus' 4 brothers would actually be biological sons of Clopas. This would explain the early Jewish Christian tradition that Jesus' brothers were also His cousins! They would be His biological cousins and legally His brothers through levirate marriage; and Clopas would be Jesus legal father. Joseph figures in no story of the adult Jesus' ministry and the crucified Jesus entrusts the care of His mother to the Beloved Disciple. The scholarly consensus is that Joseph has died before Jesus' adult ministry. This understanding changes the interpretation of John 19:25: "Standing near the cross of Jesus were His mother and His mother's sister, namely Mary the wife of Clopas (His mother!) and Mary Magdalene (His aunt, His mother's sister)." This is John Chrysostom's understanding of this verse. Why might this be important for Christian apologetics? If Jesus were Joseph's biological son, then it would be incest for Mary to marry Joseph's brother. But if Jesus was born through a virgin birth, then Mary's marriage to Clopas would be obligatory. So such a marriage would be the best conceivable evidence for Jesus' virgin birth.

And I hope everyone realizes that, I am not Catholic, but rather a Pentecostal United Methodist, Indeed, far from being Catholic, I have successfully sued the Catholic Church in a lawsuit that was national news! But I also recognize that, though few things are worse than Catholicism at its worst, no Christian spirituality is superior to Catholicism at its best. And I know that God is displeased when evangelicals who are abysmally ignorant of Catholic apologetics hate on Catholics with little regard for fair play and facts.

(2) A Roman inscription found at Nazareth prohibits grave-robbing on penalty of death. The inscription is traceable to the reign of Emperor Claudius, which coincides with the great expansion of Christianity throughout the Mediterranean world. For a more detailed discussion, google: "The Nazareth Inscription - Did you know that Caesar outlawed grave robbing after the Resurrection?" Our earliest rationalization of Jesus' empty tomb is the Jewish claim that Jesus' disciples must have stolen His body (Matthew 28:13-14). This accusation suggests that the Jews had no other explanation for what happened to Jesus' corpse. Some modern skeptical Bible scholars (e. g. James Tabor) claim that Jesus tomb was near Gogotha andRoman guards removed Jesus' corpse on Saturday evening (when none of Jesus' followers were around to witness this), when they came to remove the corpses of the other 2 crucified thieves. These guards then dumped the 3 corpses in a common pit, according the usual Roman practice for crucified corpses. But if that is what happened, why don't we find a trace of this explanation in ancient sources? Claudius's warning near Nazareth against grave-robbing seems directed against Christian Jews, and if so, is a tacit admission that they have no record of what actually happened to Jesus' corpse. Two caveats must be attached to this thrilling possibility: (1) the marble inscription was found at Nazareth, but its actual original location is not mentioned by its discoverer. (2) the marble is similar to the marble in a quarry on the island of Kos, but it may have been shipped to Palestine for Roman use. Still, the most likely explanation is a Roman rebuttal against alleged Christian theft of Jesus' body, a charge that lends further credence to Jesus' resurrection.

This thread is further evidence that evangelicals tend to live in their myopic doctrinal Ghetto and lack the integrity to challenge their doctrinal agendas by stepping out of their Ghetto to launch an honest inquiry. Thus, no one posting in this thread has bothered to google "New Evidence for the Shroud of Turin" and "The Sudarium ("facecloth" of Oviedo. If they had, they'd encounter electrifying new evidence for the authenticity of both the Shroud and the Facecloth. Among other things, they'd learn that secular scientists who discredited the Shroud in the 1970s later recanted when confronted with new evidence and came to accept the authenticity of both cloths. On what grounds? Many! Actually do some research and report on the results. Or do you not value the redemptive blood of Jesus enough to study whether that blood is on both the Shroud and the Facecloth with the same blood type AD and in the same blood spatter pattern, with evidence of the marks of an ancient Roman flagrum used to beat Jesus. New dating methods now date the Shroud to a range that includes the time of Jesus.

In the OT era there was a Jewish colony on the island of Elephantine on the Nile river. This colony worshiped both Yahweh and His female consort, the goddess Anath. Of course, as a monotheist I reject goddess worship, but I recognize the egalitarian status the Jewish women of Elephantine enjoyed by virtue of having a female ultimate symbol of power. And their fourfold equal status illustrates the need to also stress the female imagery of God in Scripture. 2. There was no polygamy or concubinage at Elephantine. By contrast, Jewish men in Israel could take multiple wives and concubines. 2. In OT Israel only the husband could divorce his wife and the wife was her husband's property. But Jewish women at Elephantine could divorce their husbands. 3. In Israel wives and daughters could almost never inherit. But Jewish women at Elephantine could receive and exchange property. 4. The egalitarian status of Jewish women at Elephantine meant they shared the burden of paying taxes and serving in the military. Here are just some of the teachings of ancient patriarchal Judaims that oppress women: 1 . “Better is the wickedness of a man than a woman who does good, and it is a woman who brings shame and disgrace (Sirach 42:14).” 2. “Rather should the words of Torah be burned than entrusted to a woman...Whoever teaches his daughter the Torah is like one who teaches her obscenity (Mishnah Sotah 3;4).”) 3. A Daily Prayer of Thanksgiving for Jewish Men: “Praise be to God that He has not created me a Gentile. Praise be to God that He has not created me a woman. Praise be to God that He has not created me an ignorant man (Tosephta Berakhoth 7.9)..” 4. “Speak not much with a woman. Whoever speaks much with a woman...earns Hell. One is not so much as to greet a woman (Mishnah Aboth 2:5).”.” 5. “One is not so much as to greet a woman (Talmud Berkhoth 43b).” 6. No Jewish woman could approach a rabbi in public; and so, no Jewish woman ever approaches Jesus to request healing.

No, these ex-evangelicals have discovered the beauty of Christ crucified in a beautiful and more biblically sound way in our local Catholic church and, as a result, have become glowing fruitful Christians. I guess it's time to start a thread that demonstrates what Catholics have to teach evangelicals about the full counsel of God in Scripture.

One of the greatest saints who ever lived is St. Francis of Assissi, who once said, "Witness to everyone you meet, and if necessary, use words."

Some evangelicals in my small city have been flocking to our local Catholic church and finding God real there.