"And upon Cephas, I will build My Church..."

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I haven’t posted in some time, but it seems that some things never change. This so-called statistic quoted from Whelton has been brought up over and over again on the Eastern Christianity forum through the years.
I didn’t know it came out of Whelton, but the original source is Roman Catholic bishops, no?
One important thing to note is that those who have used this argument against the papacy have failed to take into consideration is that the ECF’s often spoke of the “rock” as both Peter AND his confession.
Without that Faith, he would just be Simon. He didn’t just graduate and get a new name, then get to profess anything he wanted to.

The Faith is primary.
I would suggest that anyone interested do an archive search of the Eastern Christianity forum (I see it is now called Eastern Catholicism) for a more in depth discussion of the issue based on the ECF’s writings.
Lots of luck…:rolleyes:

Why would you suggest that? Did you not know that a completely new forum replaced the old one, and the entire archive has been removed?

Michael
 
This is a fallacious argument, sorry. I will address the language first.

The Jewish population of Galilee was mainly composed of Judeans who migrated from further south (essentially the vicinity of Jerusalem) in the last previous few generations. The entire Jewish nation had lived under Hellenic powers for several hundred years, sometimes under enforced Helenizing policies. The upper classes were fluent in Greek, and most of the rest were exposed to it constantly for generations, even if they refused to use it.

The Romans resorted to Greek constantly in the East, because it was the language understood by common people on the street wherever they went.

There were also descendants of Greek colonists residing all over the region of Galilee.

It is very, very likely Jesus at least understood Greek, most of the Jews did, and Galilee had a greatly mixed population. A rudimentary knowledge of the language would be very useful to a woodworker plying his trade.

He seems pretty clesar Jesus read from the Septuagint, at least some of the time. It is believed He quoted from it.

Anyway, all the preceeding is not as important as the fact that Jesus called Simon Bar Jona Kephas, or Cephas. That is pretty obvious, which makes the question about whether Jesus spoke Greek moot point.

Michael
I’ll just add that archaeological evidence (inscriptions, etc.) show Greek was quite common: it even shows up in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
 
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