I ran across a reference to St. Polycarp over at newadvent’s Catholic Encyclopedia, and followed it.
I came across something represented as an epistle from said saint:
Say Whaaaa?
Non-believers are antichrists/devils/children of Satan?
Do you believe this to be an accurate quote of said saint, and if so (please say it no to one of these?) is this the person after whom you took your user name?
OK, I freak easily when Christians start talking like this - it was a joke, right? just seeing if anybody recognized the name, right?
Catholics:
pls say nobody prays to this guy? that he is the patron saint of nothing? never heard of him?
Oooooh shoot! You see, I rather liked Polycarp the saint long before I heard of Polycarp the poster. The only information I have on hand about the saint is that he was the Bishop of Smyrna and the story of how he wound up a martyr, which is what led to my admiration of him. The short version of that story is, when the Romans were rounding up Christians and demanding they worship their gods or be killed, Polycarp went into hiding twice, but, when he was found and captured, instead of fighting back, he asked for time to pray, then accepted his capture peacefully. He refused to renounce his faith (the reference I have refers to people yelling “Kill the Atheist”, the Atheist in question being Polycarp :quizical look:). As a result, he was burned at the stake. His reply to those who asked him to swear by Caesar, not Christ was “For 86 years I have been his servant and he has done me no wrong; how can I blaspheme my King?”
Happyheathen, I’m sorry. I don’t believe “Non-believers are antichrists/devils/children of Satan”; if I did, I’d lose too many friends. Fortunately, Episcopalians don’t have patron saints of anything (or at least this one doesn’t), and we don’t pray to them. We are supposed to admire they’re lives, but, if what you’ve cited is accurate, I may decide to limit my admiration.
BTW, I hope I didn’t offend you in a recent Pit thread. I’ve enjoyed your posts ever since the 80’s song thread which would not die!
Nonono. They tried to burn him but he wouldn’t burn. Evidently he wasn’t a witch;)
That’s why for Polycarp’s 4K post celebration he was able to tell the story of (the future) St. Polycarp on his death bed, instead of on his death stake.
Re: the quote in the OP, I’d be interested in seeing it in the original language, since things can get, er, liberally translated to suit one’s purpose (NOT that I am in the same neighborhood as accusing hh of doing this … indeed, since I don’t know that he knows Latin or whatever language it was originally in, I don’t know that hh could have. Or that he would, considering the q is addressed to Polycarp).
Sorry gang, I don’t do translations - just cut-n-pastes (at least for MB’s) - as stated, the quote came from newadvents’ Catholic Encyclopedia. If you want to see for yourselves:
the CE was compiled from approx. 1908-1918, and, from what I can tell, is quite well researched.
CJ - it takes a bit more than an electron stream to annoy this boy - I enjoy your thoughts, too.
BUT… OPERA! an SDMB opera? a dreck musical, I could have helped. a friggin’ opera? maybe I could get a couple ideas from What’s Opera Doc?, but really…
“They should have tested whether he weighed more than a duck.
He turned me into a newt. . . . . I got better.” --Abe Babe, referring to Sir Bedevere’s adventures in logic.
Witches are made of wood, says Sir Bedevere. Wizards also are made of wood. Hence the song lyric, “We’re off to cedar wizard, the wonderful wizard of Oz!”
It’s part of Polycarp’s epistle to the Phillippians. That quote was probably in reference to Marcion and his followers, who were gnostics who claimed that Jesus wasn’t physical or human, but he had some sort of “spirtual flesh” or something like that. So, according to him, Gnostics are antichrists/devils/children of Satan
Early dogmatic struggles tended to get pretty heated, as you can see.
Apparently, he’s a patron saint against earache and dysentery.
“For whosoever does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, is antichrist; and whosoever does not confess the testimony of the cross, is of the devil…”
is specifically referring to those who deny that Christ had appeared. NOT those who believe Jesus was the Christ, but got the message wrong.
If you’re familiar with the gnostic Christian ideas it does make a lot of sense in terms of railing against them.
The gnostics believed (this is the mega-simple version) that Christ was a spiritual entity of some sort, too pure for the flesh that the false creator had made. In some versions he worked through a “body” that was infact never there and in others he directed the body of someone else.
In either case gnostics denied that Jesus had come in the flesh. The part about the testimony of the cross is that Christ couldn’t be killed, not being physical and all. In some versions the schmuck he was working through got executed in his place and in others people just thought he was up on the cross.
I doubt that there was all that much in the way of active denial that Jesus was a real entity of some sort and that was what Polycarp was railing against. It seems more plausable he was letting loose venom on a strong heresy of his day.