It’s called the Gospel of the Nazarene, alternate title “Gospel of the Holy Twelve” and you only have to read this to see why it was immediately banned from the Bible:
More evidence the “Holy Bible” was just a political exercise in expediency initiated by Constantine to rid the Roman empire of infighting among a bunch of heathen representatives of a menagerie of pagan religions.
It was at this Council that the final decree that Jesus was to be deemed the Divine Son of God and the second Person of the Holy Trinity. :smack:
If Jesus himself didn’t believe in blood atonement for forgiveness of sins how are we supposed to???
And so you see why this gospel was not allowed into the canon.
You know, up until now, I had read your threads and thought only that you have been a selectively-quoting gotcha artist with an axe to grind against Christianity.
But this revelation? THIS is exactly what I need to turn my whole life around!!!
If you really believe I have the truth here’s what I want you to do:
I want you to go to your checkbook, write out a check for 10K made payable to SeekerofTruth and as soon as you send it off into the mail to me God will reward you with more "truth’ than you can handle. Can you do that?
But since you’re not so good with the numbers (the text in question predates 175 AD and the Council of Nicaea was in 325, and you call that “immediately”), would you take $11.50 instead?
In return, I’ll agree to a reduction on what you’ve got to deliver, to more truth than that with which I’d typically be comfortable.
Sure. I’m game for anything that makes this more fun.
But I don’t see the controversy about the dating. The text existed in 175 and was one of the thousands of texts that came up for review in 325 at the Council.
So a bunch of ignorant hayseeds calling themselves "church fathers’ vote on what to include and what not to include based on whether it lines up with the doctrine they were trying to initiate at the Council, namely that Jesus Christ was the Son of God made flesh who came to the earth to become a substitutionary sacrifice for us; by dying on the cross Christ’s blood redeems us from our sins if we believe He rose from the dead and ascended on high.
that’s the Nicaean Creed essentially. Anything that didn’t fall into line with that was banned. The Gospel of the Twelve didn’t line up with that as I plainly demonstrated and so it had to be thrown out. That’s all I asserted.
What you’ve done is taken the position that a document that could be read as not completely congruent with the decrees that came out of the Council exists.
And on this, I agree with you.
However, that’s only the first step.
Next, what you need to do is demonstrate that:
this document is more likely to be an accurate representation of what the faith ought to have become than the others in whose favor it was rejected; and
that the reasons for this were secular and political, for the purpose of unifying dissenting groups; and
that there is no theological foundation equally or more plausible.
But you haven’t done any of these things. All you’ve done is posted an excerpt of a document that doesn’t fall exactly in line with what you assign as the fundamental beliefs of Catholicism, and called a bunch of people “heathens” and “ignorant hayseeds.”
So as you can see, you’ve got a long way to go before you can make any passable claim to actually being a seeker of truth, particularly when all the evidence indicates that you are a selectively-quoting gotcha artist with an axe to grind against Christianity.
Let’s see you make, support, and defend a cogent argument along the lines of the above. I’ve got an open mind for now.
This is the Straight Dope. If you continue to post factual errors on easily discovered subjects, I am going to start shutting down your nonsense. I get tired of having to repeatedly correct simple errors that are based on New Age inventions.
Specifically:
[ul]
[li]Nicaea did not address which books were to be included in the canon. Nicaea did not “ban” any gospel. Any claim that the Council of Nicaea “banned” any work demonstrates that the claimant has never actually studied that Council and is simply repeating nonsense from equally ignorant sources.[/li][li]You are not clear whether you are purportedly quoting the Gospel of the Holy Twelve, (of which we have only a couple of fragments quoted by other authors) or the Gospel of the Nazarene that parallels the Gospel of Matthew and you conveniently left out any links that would allow us to see whether your quote was accurate.[/li][/ul]
(And if you come back to say that you don’t really want a debate, that you are throwing out concepts, I am going to move this sludge over to IMHO just as I moved the last thread where you admitted that you were not interested in defending your position.)
The Council of Nicaea was pretty dramatic. You had the Emperor showing up to give it official sanction. You had some heated theological exchanges. You even had Nicholas of Myra, later St. Nicholas, getting so pissed off, he belted Arius and got thrown in prison. What you didn’t have, though, was bishops going through manuscripts trying to decide what should be in the bible. Didn’t happen. The Council of Nicaea decided the Arian controversy, whether men who castrated themselves could become priests, whether deacons could give communion, how somebody who had previously renounced Christianity should be let back into the church, and a lot of things. But they never defined what books made up the new testament. You can see the canons here:
They especially didn’t decide the Gospel of the Holy Twelve shouldn’t be in the bible, because they didn’t know about it. The Gospel of the Holy Twelve is a 19th century forgery written by an English minister who rewrote the Gospels to make them pro-vegetarian. There’s a historic Gospel of the Nazorines, but that’s pretty much just a variant gospel of Matthew.
It was lost to history, until the 19th century, when Gideon Ousley, a former priest in the Church of Ireland who first converted to Roman Catholicism, and then was excommunicated from that church, “discovered” it in a Tibetan monastery where it had been hidden, converted it to English, and published it.
As for the blood offering, that is how I view Job. Job’s ‘error’ was he was atoning for his family’s sin, and bearing the weight of it, which he could not. Job in his suffering learns about the enemy here and in the end repents. It is the repentance that brings salvation, not the blood offering.
In the case of Jesus, it was the same. The Crucifixion by itself did not bring salvation, but the realization that they executed a innocent man and it was really their own sins they were condemning, which brings about an intensification of the sin then repentance and salvation.
So yes the blood offering and repentance are tied together, but the blood offering will intensify the weight of sin, not releave it. And that is why the blood offering of a innocent it needed, to intensify the weight of sin. (an innocent can not accept the sin of another, it will reflect back to the sender)
So I do not seen any inconsistencies in faith.
However you mention the way the Bible was created. God knows and is above man’s attempts to manipulate in such a way - and plays man’s attempts to do so like a fiddle. The Bible is the way it is to reach a audience. Other people may seek out such gospels as the one you stated, or other ‘holy books’. Even non-holy works such as movies with moral messages. God created everything and it will find the right person with the right message.
It is very much like raising many children. You don’t use the same method for all but tailor them to the child.
Nobody can win an argument of “my scripture says your scripture is wrong.” Because the argument is its own counterargument and then the rational part of the debate is done and all that’s left is the yelling.
tomndebb, thank you for posting those corrections, but I think you should have done so as a poster and not as a moderator. As I understand it, it’s not the moderators’ job to be the Accuracy Police.
