Dear friends in Christ....

[Guest racer]

astralis,

You asked for references and you got them at least 100 or 200 of them - I didn't count.  What's the problem?

Like I said, just a tad bit dishonest - 100 or 200?  Ha!  References to what?

[angels4u]

Astralis,

To answer you back,can you see it like this, if we could contribute to our Salvation by works,then God would owe it to us. This is impossible, God cannot be indebted to anyone Rom.11:35

In contrast to works, faith excludes boasting Rom 3:27 .

A man has no reason to be proud that he trusted the Lord. Faith in Him is the most sane,rational, sensible thing a person can do.

If we cannot trust Him ,who can we trust?

We are not saved by good works ,but we are saved for good works. Good works are not the root but the fruit.

We do not work in order to be saved, but because we are saved.

Angels

[Guest astralis]

Racer,

 Go here like I said in my previous post and you'll find references to the Apocrypha in the NT like you asked for.  I'm guessing that there are 100 to 200 at least because I didn't count them all.  Check it out.  Here is the link again:  http://www.cin.org/users/james/files/deutero3.htm

 After you go there, will you explain how I'm dishonest?

[Guest racer]

Not to fear, I provided astralis with even more!

Hows about a little scientific evidence?

<http://www.rae.org/veracity.html>

The Veracity of the Old Testament: A Scientific Validation

Author: Scott Jones Subject: Old Testament Date: 1/22/98 Essays by Author <essay_author.html> Essays by Subject <essay_subject.html>

Copyright

[Guest astralis]

Since the Septuagint is not a Hebrew text and the Samaritan version reached us through a breakaway sect, their value to reflect the early stages of the Biblical text was debatable. This battle was first waged between Catholic and Protestant scholars on theological grounds, and in the 19th and 20th centuries amongst Bible scholars against a scientific background.

This is dangerous ground because for thousands of years the works of Christianity has been based on the Septuagint.  The Apostles used the Septuagint to teach from so if you are claiming that the Masoretic Text is better than the Septuagint, then you should explain why the Apostles used an inferior text.  You will also need to explain why the NT quoted directly from the Septuagint and how that's wrong (Protestant scholars will also back this up), and you will need to explain how you got the NT without the Authority of the Catholic Church on which inspiration was confirmed at the councils where the OT and NT were affirmed together.  Thus, we don't have the Gospel of St. Thomas and other NT deuterocanonical books included:

Many Christians do not realize that some of their favorite passages in the New Testament Gospels are deuterocanonical - their inspiration was in doubt and contested for significant periods of Church history:

Mk 16:9-20 Now when he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons. 10 She went and told those who had been with him, as they mourned and wept. 11 But when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe it. 12 After this he appeared in another form to two of them, as they were walking into the country. 13 And they went back and told the rest, but they did not believe them. 14 Afterward he appeared to the eleven themselves as they sat at table; and he upbraided them for their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen. 15 And he said to them, "Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation. 16 He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned. 17 And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; 18 they will pick up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover." 19 So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven, and sat down at the right hand of God. 20 And they went forth and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by the signs that attended it. Amen.

Lk 22:43-44 43 (And to strengthen him an angel from heaven appeared to him. 44 He was in such agony and he prayed so fervently that his sweat became like drops of blood falling on the ground.)

Jn 5:4 For from time to time an angel of the Lord used to come down into the pool, and the water was stirred up, so that the first one to get in (after the stirring of the water) was healed of whatever disease afflicted him.

Jn 8:1-11 but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. 2 Early in the morning he came again to the temple; all the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them. 3 The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst 4 they said to him, "Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. 5 Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such. What do you say about her?" 6 This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. 7 And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her." 8 And once more he bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. 9 But when they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the eldest, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. 10 Jesus looked up and said to her, "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?" 11 She said, "No one, Lord." And Jesus said, "Neither do I condemn you; go, and do not sin again."

How many people are willing to throw out the story of the adulterous woman, the story that Jesus' sweat was like blood during the Agony in the Garden, the story of the angel stirring the pool, or Christ's appearance to Mary Magdelene? Yet, why whould one accept deuterocanonical New Testament passages and accounts while rejecting deuterocanonical Old Testament passages and accounts? If the Popes and the Church Councils got it wrong with the Old Testament, why would they get it right with the New Testament? If bishops who could trace their consecration back to Peter and the Apostles were not infallible in their definitions, why should today's Christians be so certain that THEY have the true canon of Scripture? One could argue that Christians couldn't be wrong on something so basic, and yet, historically speaking, if sola scriptura Christians are correct, the whole of Christendom MUST have been wrong for some period of time prior to Trent, for the whole Church admitted the deuterocanonical Old Testament books; everyone used them in liturgical worship during the several centuries leading up to Trent. How do we know we aren't still all wrong today, just as they were all wrong in that era? Without an infallible teaching authority, there is simply no way to tell.

More about the Septuagint:

By Christ's birth, the canon of Hebrew Scripture had only been partially defined. The Hebrew Scriptures had a tri-partite structure: the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. While the list of books belonging to the Law and the Prophets was clearly fixed and ordered by 130 B.C., it was not clear what books belonged to the Writings. The Septuagint, on the other hand, arranged books by style; narrative, poetical, and prophetic. Since most post-Exile Jews wrote primarily in Greek, the Greek collections soon added historical books which the Hebrew version never saw. Because the Septuagint didn't have a standard ordering or a completely standard list of books, the list of books included in the Greek varied according to collection, with no distinction made between earlier and later works. By the time of Christ's Incarnation, the Septuagint had acquired several more books than the Hebrew Scripture had: Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch (including the Letter of Jeremiah), 1-3 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh, Psalm 151, the Book of Jubilees, 1 Esdras, additions to Esther and Daniel, and very rarely, 4 Maccabees, since this last was not widely used and was never considered inspired by Jews or Christians. Since none of these books contained law or prophecy, they all properly belonged to the Writings.

This situation was not considered a serious problem, however, since Jewish teaching relied heavily on oral tradition. Even the Torah was read according to oral tradition. Prior to about the ninth century A.D., the Torah was written as one long word, a string of consonants without spaces, punctuation, or vowels - it was literally the word of God. Students learned how to read the text by listening to their elders read it over and over again. Although targums existed, the rabbis disliked them - these encouraged private interpretation of Scripture and undermined the Divinely authorized oral teaching authority of the Levitical priests (cf. Mt 23:2-3. Christ commands the people to respect their teaching authority, but not their lived example). What we today call the Talmud had not yet been committed to writing. The Talmud (which means "learnt by heart"), the rabbis' oral tradition of civil and religious law, is made up of two parts, the Mishna (the text of the oral law itself) and the Gemara (commentary). The Mishna was not written down until about the end of the second century A.D., while the Gemara was only written down during the 3rd to the 6th centuries A.D. Oral interpretive tradition was the rule of faith for the Jews.

How did Jesus handle this situation? He acted like the Jewish teacher He was. Nothing indicates Christ authorized either His Apostles or disciples to write anything down. He only authorized them to preach orally, in the ancient Judaic teaching tradition. Of approximately 350 references made to Old Testament Scripture by the inspired writers of the New Testament, over 300 (85%) refer to the Septuagint, not the Hebrew version of Scripture. Jesus, for instance, when discussing "human traditions" (Mark 7:6-8), quotes a version of a passage in Isaiah found only in the Septuagint.

By 70 A.D., when the temple in Jerusalem was razed by the Romans and the Levitical priesthood was wiped out, the Jewish faith was hemorrhaging followers to the rapidly spreading belief that Jewish prophecy had been fulfilled in the person of Jesus. These new "Christians" were as likely to be Gentile as they were Jew, and if they were Jewish, they were quite a bit more likely to be Hellenistic Jews than Palestinian Jews. That is, these Jewish and Gentile "Christians" didn't read or speak Hebrew, they spoke "koine" Greek. Because the Jews of the Diaspora and the Gentiles of eastern Mediterrenean were the first converts, the Greek Septuagint was not only in wide use among Jews, but it was virtually the only text used by Christians.

Jewish Christian oral teaching competed successfully against Jewish oral teaching, and it used Jewish Scripture to do it. This sparked two movements within non-Christian Judaism. First, Jewish scholars began debating whether or not the Christians' "Greek Scripture" was really Scripture. Second, around the year 200, the rabbis began writing down Jewish religious and civil law and their commentaries on it, creating what would eventually become the Talmud six centuries later. Non-Christian Jews ultimately refused the deuterocanonical Old Testament books, probably because of theology (e.g., 1 and 2 Maccabees teaches resurrection of the dead, while Wisdom chapters 1-5 contains an unsettlingly prophetic description of Christ's Passion and Death) and because they were written in Greek, not Hebrew.

Meanwhile the Christians had their own problems. Not only were Jewish brethren arguing that some of the Septuagint wasn't really Scripture, Gentile and Jewish Christians were writing numerous works about the life of Christ and Christian practice/belief, and no one was certain which of those writings should be considered sacred. During the first two centuries of the Church's existence, Christians simply couldn't be sure of the sacredness of many of the books in either their Jewish or their new "Christian" tradition. Even Jude, verse 9, alludes to the Assumption of Moses, a book which was not in the Hebrew canon or the Septuagint and is not now considered part of Sacred Scripture. The arguments led early Christians to distinguish between the homologoumenoi (the "accepted" books) and the antilegomenoi (the "contested" books), sometimes also called the amphiballomenoi (the "contradicted" books).

As the language of the western Church switched from Greek to Latin in the first and second centuries, Latin Scripture translations were made. These were always made from the Greek Septuagint, since few Gentile or Jewish Christians knew Hebrew. Over time, 3 and 4 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh, Psalm 151, Enoch, and 1 Esdras, were all dropped from the Latin translation, while the Greek-speaking eastern Church, who didn't need to translate the books, retained everything but 4 Maccabees. The Coptic and Ethiopian churches followed the eastern Church, but also kept the Book of Enoch, a book which was never translated into Latin, and therefore never had common usage in the western Church. Enoch was soon also dropped by the eastern Church due to heretical misuse, though it was widely used and considered inspired by the Church Fathers up to the fourth century - in fact, Jude 14 refers to it. By the time Pope Damasus commissioned Jerome to write a new Latin translation of the Gospels and the Psalms, the Old Latin version already had long usage in the western Church. This laid the groundwork for the four major variations in the canon of the Old Testament we have today: Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Coptic, and Judaic/Protestant/Evangelical.

While Old Testament arguments revolved around Jewish acceptance of the books as sacred, New Testament difficulties related mostly to authorship. If the book was not clearly apostolic in origin, the Church tended to dispute or reject it. For instance, the western church was not convinced Hebrews was written by the apostle Paul, while the eastern church was. Meanwhile, the eastern church doubted the Apostle John wrote the Apocalypse, while the western church knew he had.

Several dozen books claimed apostolic origin, and their theological quality varied widely. Some works ultimately deemed apocryphal were and are recognized as essentially good to excellent theological works, e.g., the Didache, the Shepherd of Hermas, but uncertain authorship prevented their acceptance as inspired. Other apocryphal books were not only of uncertain or flagrantly false authorship, but also had serious error mixed in with otherwise acceptable theology, e.g., the Gospel of Thomas, the Acts of Pontius Pilate, and the Gospel of Mary. Many orthodox Christians fought to include theologically sound works like the Didache in the canon of the New Testament, arguing for their apostolic origin. However, the typical early Christian was illiterate. He could make no judgements himself about matters of canonicity, inspiration, or the fine points of theology in a written work. Even the literate Christians faced raging disputes. No one could tell the canonical books without a scorecard and nobody had one.

The Scorecard:

Councils and papal decrees which defined or re-iterated the list of Sacred books

[Guest racer]

You guys want to see what Astralis had to say in response to all that information I posted on the other thread?  Here it is:

I had said, a day or two preceding the current topic:

I think the most controlling RCC doctrine, that has such a hold on you, is that the belief in the doctrine that the laity are incapable of accurately discerning Scripture.

 

Astralis said:

I think 33,000 Protestant Denominations are enough to explain this.

He presented a challenge, I responded, and he acted like he didn't even notice.

He recently on this thread said:

I have studied the Masoretic Text and how it was developed.  The following refutes my belief that this text in whole was solely authoritative to the Apostles and the Early Christians.

I had previously asked him:

Are you saying you've never heard of the Masoretic Text, or are you denying it's existence? Do you think the text is a myth? Are you asking for me to find the document in print? I'm not sure, but right off I found a few articles:

He never responded to those questions.  Yet now he says he's studied those very texts. :???:

[Guest racer]

astralis,

This is dangerous ground because for thousands of years the works of Christianity has been based on the Septuagint.  The Apostles used the Septuagint to teach from so if you are claiming that the Masoretic Text is better than the Septuagint, then you should explain why the Apostles used an inferior text.

What I said about the Masoretic Text is that is was the "Original Hebrew Text."  Do you deny that? :???:

[angels4u]

Racer and Astralis,

I'm sorry, but you are going far over my head with all that information, Racer, why not join the conversation about heaven, do you know where you are going when you die?

Love in Christ, Angels

[Guest racer]

angels4u,

I'm sorry, but I do get carried away.  Am I going to heaven or hell.  I wouldn't even presume to say.  I do know that we are instructed by Scripture not to boast as if we know everything.  We are told that when speaking of the future, to say for example, "God willing, I'll be talking to you tomorrow."  I may be living as a saint today, and fall from grace tomorrow.  So, if you are looking for a yes or no answer, I can't give it to you.  

[Guest astralis]

What I said about the Masoretic Text is that is was the "Original Hebrew Text."  Do you deny that?

Racer,

 I'm truly not following you.  I've been moving for the past couple of days and some of your posts have not been responded to but I believe they are all now replied so now you have your answers.

  To answer this question, I did so in the Canon topic and the short answer is, yes, I do deny it.  Please answer it there and everyone who wants to discuss the Canon can go there as I will too.