In a message dated 4/8/2006 3:51:13 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
pimvanmeurs@yahoo.com writes:
As others have already pointed out, that argument does not hold. Many
hundreds of years ago, some got to decide what they liked and disliked
as the 'canonical gospel'.
But of course you know there were very many fictional accounts written long
after the time of Jesus, and these were promoting theologies that disagreed
with each other. So the early church simple **had** to proclaim which were the
fictional accounts and which ones represented the actual tradition going back
to Jesus. To say that they decided based on what they "liked and disliked" is
to distort the matter, as if the church itself was one of the groups trying to
promote a fictional account of Jesus. Do you really believe this?
I don't think it was really all that hard for the early church to choose the
correct tradition about Jesus. It was probably quite easy, and to them it was
not a matter of making a determination so much as it was a task of settling
the matter publicly. Certain books of course were more difficult -- like the
epistles of Jude and 2 Peter. But these hardly decide the overall picture of
Jesus.
Phil Metzger
Received on Sat Apr 8 19:45:42 2006
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