Apostles and St. Irenaeus

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : Bart answered ... · Continuing with Leo Yohansen · With Leo Yohensen, Snappy Version · Leo Yohansen is Back · somewhere else : Apostles and St. Irenaeus · Where is the First Person if Moses and some Disciples wrote Torah and Gospels? · Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : Also under the video with GMS and Leo Yohansen

I got a reply about the two categories after I had stated we know from tradition that such and such wrote the Gospels, and he answered sth about "anonymous" and "rumours named them after characters in a fictional account" ... I wondered if he considered St. Irenaeus as a character in a fictional account too.

No, he didn't, obviously. But that leaves the question where you draw the line.

If we agree that Spidey and all of his surroundings are fictional, to give kind of a parallel to the situation, it would be like saying "we all know Daily Bugle" and "Randy Robertson was just on the news with an interview" ... while still denying that John Jonah Jameson Jr. ever hired any Peter Parker to The DB.

I can live with a Daily Bugle that starts fictional and continues to this day fictional. I could live with a Daily Bugle that starts real and continues real to this day (if I had better evidence than Steve Ditko and Stan Lee, known as fiction providers) - but presuming that the Daily Bugle started out as a fictional paper and transformed into a real life one staggers credibility.

And The Ekklesia is parallel* - obviously St. Irenaeus claims to be part of the same ekklesia that started out "in fictional accounts" when Jesus called Peter, Andrew, James and John or when St. Peter preached on the 50th day from Resurrection day.

When did you see Randy Robertson come out as saying "yeah, daddy - Joseph "Robbie" Robertson - had to dismiss Peter Parker from The Daily Bugle, when news came out he was Spiderman, but the dismissal was perfectly honourable and we had a farewell party" or words of such effect, and from an outlet known for news and not fiction?/HGL

* Except Christ was not exactly an employee of it!

Some Have Claimed Ezra Wrote Moses

Ibn Khaldun, a Neglected Source of Antichristianity or Attacks on the Bible · Responding to Tim Zeak on Exodus, part I · More on Exodus, not on Tim Zeak, for now · Some Have Claimed Ezra Wrote Moses · Israelites at the Exodus

Well, they would claim:

Ezra wrote "Moses"

as they don't recognise Moses as a historical person or as a real author. And likewise kings David and Solomon are a mythical touch to two kingdoms that had broadly speaking the same religion, but had never been actually one single united kingdom. It was all invented during the exile.

Horseback riding in regular use, especially military such or for hunting, was invented some time in 800 BC by the Assyrians.

If the story of Genesis and Exodus were written after this, and if the story of kings David and Solomon were written after this, why did those inventing "myths" not put horseback riding as a regular and utilitary feature into these "myths"? It would have been within their experience. With no real historic tradition from before this time, they would have had no means of checking that horseriding hadn't been practised earlier.

Yet ... Absalom rode a mule and would not have ridden the mule in battle (or presumably even for hunting). Horses and their bits tend to come behind chariots, even into the time of King David. If Ezra had been inspired by Babylonian culture without any own historical culture, how would he have known?

Yet, someone knew, as I noted in the PS of Centaurs Revisited:

Did riding exist in the time of King David? According to above, it shouldn't have. So, I looked for the Latin case forms of "equus" in the psalms:

These, first of all, have no relation unambiguously to riding:

Nolite fieri sicut equus et mulus, quibus non est intellectus. In camo et freno maxillas eorum constringe, qui non approximant ad te.
[Psalms 31:9]

Fallax equus ad salutem; in abundantia autem virtutis suae non salvabitur.
[Psalms 32:17]

Non in fortitudine equi voluntatem habebit, nec in tibiis viri beneplacitum erit ei.
[Psalms 146:10]

Hi in curribus, et hi in equis; nos autem in nomine Domini Dei nostri invocabimus.
[Psalms 19:8]

This one, of course, does:

Ab increpatione tua, Deus Jacob, dormitaverunt qui ascenderunt equos.
[Psalms 75:7]

But : In finem, in laudibus. Psalmus Asaph, canticum ad Assyrios. It's not a psalm of David, but one of Asaph.

But didn't Absalom ride when his hair got stuck in a tree?

And it happened that Absalom met the servants of David, riding on a mule: and as the mule went under a thick and large oak, his head stuck in the oak: and while he hung between the heaven and the earth, the mule on which he rode passed on.
[II Kings 18:9]

He rode a mule, not a horse. Mule riding and donkey riding is older and it is not used in battle.

So far my PS ... so, the Ezra idea of Mosaic authorship should be at least somewhat shaken by the accuracy about conditions centuries older than Ezra in which there were no horseriders.

There is another idea which is also ludicrous, and I have seen AronRa propose it - the Tower of Babel story records the loss of one common language.

• First, cuneiform writing had been used for both Sumerian and Akkadian (two languages about as different as Chinese and Japanese) since centuries before the exile.
• Second, the cuneiform writing was not lost, it continued to be in a somewhat more restricted use after the fall of Babylon for a few centuries more, up to 1st C BC for last Sumerian and 1st C AD for last Akkadian texts.
• Third, Aramaic immediately took over as new official language, and it was a more practical one, closer to the actual spoken languages.

In other words, the non-miraculous event pretended to be behind the Tower of Babel story is impossible historically. It's as impossible as Queen Victoria getting exited at watching Back to the Future. Or C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien plagiarising George Lucas' Star Wars. Or a huge civil war breaking out in Germany when Hitler died, due to the power vacuum. This is impossible as in truly impossible, whether miracles be possible or not.

As a matter of fact, I think miracles are possible. But even if they weren't, that "explanation" behind the linguistic miracle of Babel would be Scooby Doo on an entirely wrong track.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Matthew, Apostle
21.IX.2021

John Shelby Spong Decided to be Wrong ...

Progressing Spirit had a new article on historicity of the Gospels, with the Questioner asking what we can historically actually know, given that, on their common view, Matthew is supposed to be liturgy which by definition is supposed to be non-historic.

I just finished Bishop Spong’s book arguing for Matthew as 1st century synagogue liturgy. ... Accepting that the Gospel accounts of events in Jesus and the disciples’ lives are nonhistorical creations intended to reach Jews in a traditional Jewish liturgical framework,

which obviously leads up to the question:

what *did* Jesus do and say that made the God’s presence in human life so clear to his followers, that it was worth teaching about in synagogues 50 years later?

Now, the obvious stumbling block is Spong's assumption (according to the Questioner Hugh's resumé) that liturgy by definition is non-historical.

It would be a very Protestant approach to imagine the Martyrology entries are non-historical, and it would be a very ignorant approach to imagine they are not liturgy. The Martyrology was read at a specific entry in the liturgy of hours, during Matins.

In Pagan liturgy too, namely Greek tragedy, the fact that the context is a liturgy of Dionysus doesn't mean that the tragedies are supposed to be non-historical (note, in the case of dialogues, it was accepted that dialogues were fictional renderings of what was said rather than straight recordings, but as the dialogue snippets in the Gospels are much shorter, this need not have been the case with these, as with predecessors even back to Genesis).

Disqualifying liturgy and other religious text types from being thereby historical accounts would definitely leave us with questions like the follow up by Hugh.

Behind the proposition, sometimes you do find rank atheism, but in this case it's revolutionary para-Christianity:

But then matters changed. As the disciples died a new generation of followers arose and the thinking and organization of the “Way” changed dramatically. The written gospels took shape in different locales with different purposes, and so also did other Christian writings of the same period. Much of that writing makes it painfully obvious that a reaction to the revolutionary impetus of Jesus and his disciples had set in. If Jesus had manifested equality of caring and sharing in the community of friends, much of the later writing rejects that vision, epitomized in the warning of 1 Timothy that slaves obey masters, women obey men, the church obey the bishops, and everyone obey the rulers. Not what Jesus had in mind.

So, Dr. Carl Krieg claims to know what Jesus had in mind despite tradition and despite texts accepted by tradition as by contemporaries (directly with Matthew and John, by intermediates who took good note with Marc and Luke). With such an agenda - for his agenda is showing "Jesus" forth as a prophet for Lenin - he has a vested interest in the pretexts that Spong and others invent for not taking the texts as what tradition accepted them as.

Then the fact that such apostates with "Christian" sugarcoating invest their erudition and reputation as scholars into such wild schemes helps atheists to pretend "we don't know who wrote the Gospels."

We do, but some don't want to know.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Sts Dorotheus and Gorgonius
9.IX.2021

Quoting first entry for today's martyrology:

Nicomediae passio sanctorum Martyrum Dorothei et Gorgonii, qui, cum essent apud Diocletianum Augustum honores amplissimos consecuti, et persecutionem, quam ille Christianis inferebat, detestarentur, praesente eo, jussi sunt primo appendi, et flagris toto corpore laniari; deinde, visceribus pelle nudatis, aceto et sale perfundi, sicque assari in craticula; atque, ad ultimum, laqueo necari. Interjecto autem tempore, beati Gorgonii corpus Romam delatum fuit, ac via Latina positum, et inde ad Basilicam sancti Petri translatum.

Of course the Gospels were meant for liturgic reading, that makes them a very conservative and well conserved text type. Like martyrologies./HGL

PS, it seems Jewish rejectors of Jesus are also into the game, an ex-Christian Muslim just recommended Geza Vermes.

He was also an apostate from Catholic priesthood.

And when getting back to the Judaism he came from, very badly wanted to get Jesus with him, so badly he was willing to invent "Christian editing" adding fake stories to the Gospels. He pretended even the reachout to Samaritans was an invention, not a fact.

He died 2013 and is arguably in Hell.

Also in Paris, Vermes befriended and worked with Paul Demann, a scholar, like him, of Hungarian Jewish origins.[7] Together with a third collaborator, Renee Bloch, they battled doggedly against the anti-Semitic content in Catholic education and ritual of the time.[7] The Second Vatican Council would later accept many of the trio's theological arguments.[7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A9za_Vermes

With footnote 7 referring to:

Geza Vermes, Hungarian Bible Scholar Who Returned to Jewish Roots, Dies at 88
Benjamin Ivry | May 15, 2013
https://forward.com/news/176752/geza-vermes-hungarian-bible-scholar-who-returned-t/

The One Myth that is True?

New blog on the kid: Was C.S. Lewis refuted by Elisabeth Anscombe? · somewhere else: The One Myth that is True?

C.S. Lewis:

Baldr, Osiris, how come Jesus isn't also a myth?

J.R.R. Tolkien:

Of course it is, but it's the one myth that is true.

T.W. Rolleston:

[named a book Celtic Myths and Legends]

How come Baldr and Osiris are untrue myths and Jesus is a true one?

Now, I would say definitely that Baldr is an untrue myth, the Danes seemed to have kept a memory from before they became Odinists of Odin simply grieving over a Baldr killed in battle (see Saxo). The ideas later spread of Baldr being killed by Hodr and then ruling a land of blessed dead in the underworld is simply a rip off from the Osiris story.

Osiris could have lived and been killed by his brother Seth and had his wife and sister impregnated by some primitive type of artificial insemination, but the parts about his then going on to rule the blessed dead in the netherworld is an error. It's wishful thinking on part of those grieving. It involves no immediate nor any observed resurrection.

With Perseus, I don't deny he killed a dragon to save Andromeda. I do deny he went up to heaven to form a star constellation and that she did so.

Romulus, Perseus, perhaps (as said, it's more questionable to me) Osiris were played out by real men, before their eyes. Like Ulysses getting home to Ithaca, like Aeneas leaving Troy.

What one would normally mean by "divine myth" (Göttersage in German) are things like Apollo chasing Daphne and then turning her to a laurel tree or Ymer proceeding with the cow Audhumbla from a mixture of ice and fire. If true, we would not have seen it, and it concerns the divine.

What one would normally mean by "heroic legend" (Heldensage in German) is - if true - played out before human eyes.

Sometimes these overlap, as with Romulus : it is divine myth that he and Remus were sired by Apollo or that he vanished and was taken up to the gods and one ows him worship. It is heroic legend that he and Remus had a part semi-feral upbringing (semi-feral, since having each other, if no adult humans around among the wolves, or with the she-wolf). It is also so that they revenged their at least reputed grandfather Numitor on the grand-uncle Amulius and that they founded Rome, on which occasion Romulus hit too hard, namely with a sword, and killed Remus.

Now, I would definitely say that in the divine myth part of mythology (the pure divine myths, and the divine myth part of overlapping myths/legends) Pagans were bad theologers. Their views include errors. But I would equally say, that in the heroic legend part of it (pure heroic legends and the heroic legend part of overlapping myths/legends), they were decently good historians.

Hercules was a strong man, and wrongly taken to be son of Zeus. Romulus and Remus were sired mysteriously (bad guarding or demonic versions of medically assisted procreation) and belligerent and victorious and this was wrongly taken to mean they were sons of Mars. Nothing in the lives indicates any serious claim to real divinity, except to Pagans who have low bars. Hercules restoring Alcestis to life could be plagiarised from an event older than the oldest telling we know of Alcestis, namely Elias raising the boy.

Gospels are far nearer, and Jesus raising dead and even, very uniquely, resurrecting without someone else raising Him, that argues the divine of some sort. And the Church, founded on a basis of pious Hebrews, give a faithful recording, both of the miracles and of the claims to be God, the Son.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St.Henry I
15.VII.2021

Do Different Interpretations of Christianity Make God a Liar if Existant?

somewhere else: Do Different Interpretations of Christianity Make God a Liar if Existant? · Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: OceanKeltoi on The Interpretation Argument ...

Lita Cosner answered a question for CMI, but not on Creation Science. It is more into general Christian apologetics, though it has ramifications into my specifically Catholic apologetics.

Here is the article:

The ‘interpretation argument’: an irrefutable argument against Christianity?
Published: 26* June 2021 (GMT+10)
https://creation.com/interpretation-argument

Here are two arguments by the arguer who is there answered, both are right:

1. For any event God wants, he knows how to bring it about (omniscience)
2. For any event God wants, he is capable of bringing it about (omnipotence)
Therefore: If God chooses to bring about a particular event, it must occur.

1. For any message God wants to communicate, he knows how to communicate it such that it will be interpreted correctly
2. For any message God wants to communicate, he is capable of communicating it such that it will be interpreted correctly
Therefore: If God chooses to communicate a message it must be interpreted correctly.

I absolutely agree to both.

I also consider there is freewill and there is the fall. It would be contradictory for God to want to have any message ONLY interpreted correctly, overriding freewill with mistakes and overriding sin, so the consequence of error doesn't occur.

If God chooses to communicate a message it must be interpreted correctly.

Correct as it stands. This does not mean:

"If God chooses to communicate a message it must be interpreted ONLY correctly."

But there must be a means for a man of goodwill to get to know the difference, if it is important to him and the matter is important.

The solution is, there must be some kind of "denomination" (for want of a better word) which is not just a denomination, but outstanding.

There exist two types of claim to being that:

• the claim of having preserved unaltered apostolic tradition;
• the claim of having restored correctly a previously altered apostolic tradition.

Modern Anglicans claim neither.

Roman Catholics, Greek or Slavic or Eastern Orthodox, Copts, Armenians, Assyrians claim the former. So du certain Baptists with Baptist Continuity theory.

Mormons, JW, Church of God, and if I get them correctly, Messianic Jews as well, make the latter claim.

Now, Lutherans, Zwinglians, Anglicans, Calvinists once upon a time used to be making the claim, not quite "we have successfully and correctly restored the true apostolic tradition" (though I think Lutheran Orthodoxy in Sweden came fairly close to making it), but at least "we are in the process of restoring the apostolic tradition that the RCC bungled or perverted intentionally" - the kind of claim the JW sect would be making for Charles Taze Russell back when he was reconsidering whether rapture was Biblical doctrine or Christian tradition.

This would mean, on a first approximation, look to those making the claim of perfect doctrine.

However, there is a second approximation to make, namely to avoid the restorationist type of claim. I don't mean claims of restoring papacy after a gap of 32 years, I adher to one such claim myself, but more like claims of restoring Bible obedience after gaps of centuries. The reason is, messages of God supposedly "stantis et cadentis ecclesiae" would have been for centuries inaccessible to men of good will.

On the other hand, the mainstream of either RCC or EOC would by now accept Evolution - no way that could be part of apostolic tradition or the accomodations it now calls for (I have recently seen RC or so called such denying the individuality of Adam, a Babylonic trait in theology, and a documented such, since Babylonian "gods" were supposed to create mankind directly on a collective level, fit for working to make their celestial lives a bit easier with sacrifices of food) being accomodations that apostolic tradition allows.

One could take the view this mainstream only allows evolutionism, but this seems less and less likely to be true. Once it de facto demands it, for instance by stamping Young Earth Creationists not just as kooks in the colloquial sense, but as mentally ill, that departure from Apostolic tradition seems to be already done. Such RC are not RC, such an RCC is not the RCC. Similar observations for EOC.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. William the Confessor
founder of Order of Monte Vergine
25.VI.2021

* CMI articles are published in Australian Time Zone, available while it is still previous date in Western Europe.

Does 3.14 in any sense mean 3?

"Also a molten sea of ten cubits from brim to brim, round in compass: it was five cubits high, and a line of thirty cubits compassed it round about."
[2 Paralipomenon (2 Chronicles) 4:2]

"He made also a molten sea of ten cubits from brim to brim, round all about; the height of it was five cubits, and a line of thirty cubits compassed it round about."
[3 Kings (1 Kings) 7:23]

Sounds like someone rounded off 3 point 14 to 3, right?

Now, I was told early on by my mother that "pi" is "tre komma 14" (3,14 as per non-English for instance Swedish notation of decimals) and that area of a circle was "radius times radius times pi" and circumference was "radius times two times pi".

But here the circumference seems to be only 3 times the diameter, as if pi had shrunk?

The mathematical solution is arguably hidden in plain sight a few verses further down:

Now the thickness of it was a handbreadth, and the brim of it was like the brim of a cup, or of a crisped lily: and it held three thousand measures.

And the laver was a handbreadth thick: and the brim thereof was like the brim of a cup, or the leaf of a crisped lily: it contained two thousand bates.

When measuring the diameter from brim to brim, you measure across the top. And you hold the measure strings on the outside of the brim.

When measuring the circumference compassing it round about, you hold the measure string, the "line" as it was called, end to end with all around the "molten sea" at its cylinder below the rim, a handbreadth further in. They are diameter and circumference of two different but concentric (and vertically somewhat displaced) circles. Pi is still pi. Hat tip to Jonathan Sarfati for this solution!

King Solomon would have known a fairly exact value of pi from Egypt. He would also have known Babylonians round it off to three (Mesopotamians had made two incursions into the Holy Land, see Genesis 14 and Judges 3. He would have enjoyed the mathematical pun.

But there is another thing. As all patriarchs, prophets, priests and kings, he was aware of the Holy Trinity. He was also aware - by prophecy - that a certain passage in Exodus would be numbered as part of chapter 3 (not yet in existance) and even later than that as verse 14. Here God gives His name, which is pronounced Adonai.

So, by "making pi equal 3" he was stating "the Trinity is Adonai" or "the Father is Adonai, the Son is Adonai, the Holy Spirit is Adonai, yet not three Adonaim, but one Adonai" as St. Athanasius was going to write later on.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Boniface of Frisia
5.VI.2021

St. Luke's Reliability in Acts 4:4

Robert M. Grant has noted that although Luke saw himself within the historical tradition, his work contains a number of statistical improbabilities, such as the sizable crowd addressed by Peter in Acts 4:4.

Now, what is the text:

But many of them who had heard the word, believed; and the number of the men was made five thousand.

We do not know how many had been converted between Pentecost day and this event, so we do not know how big the crowd was.

On the other hand, it was the number of the men, meaning women and children were also among the converts, but since the conversions happened while Peter was in prison overnight, we need not be sure that they all were present when St. Peter spoke.

Let's say the crowd adressed was 1000 people. 700 men, 300 women who told their men.

Now, let's suppose each person had room to 1 meter squared. This means, a circle of 1000 meters squared.

1000 / 3.14 = 318, sqrt of 318 = a radius of 17.846 meters.

I think that the crowd would have been able to hear what was said.

Is the statistic improbability supposed to be about the total of conversions early on?

There is a very much more improbable option, if you doubt that : namely that 4300 + 700 men, plus their women and children, were invented later on as converts first year, if only 500 men or so were. How do you convince a group that were 1500 - 2500 persons, that they were in fact 15 000 - 25 000? Even with decades of reworking memories, you can see a difference between a small and a big group you were part of./HGL