Since fornication refers to sexual intercourse between two unmarried people, if “fornication” is the proper translation of the original Greek word in the exception clause, then that would refer to what happened before the marriage ceremony, not anything that happened afterwards; sexual intercourse with someone other than your spouse is adultery not fornication.Okay help me out here, so Matthew 19 says that you cannot divorce EXCEPT in the case of fornication. So, my question is, why doesn’t the Church allow for divorce and thus another marriage in the case of fornication? Isn’t this kind of going against what Jesus specifically said?
That isn’t what Matthew 19 says, although it is often mistranslated thus. It actually speaks to unlawful marriage, not “fornication” or “adultery”.Okay help me out here, so Matthew 19 says that you cannot divorce EXCEPT in the case of fornication. So, my question is, why doesn’t the Church allow for divorce and thus another marriage in the case of fornication? Isn’t this kind of going against what Jesus specifically said?
Interesting that the Gospels say different things; that they weren’t even written by the Apostles and that they were written years after the time of Jesus and were originally oral tradition.A little more about Matthew’s exception clause in Catholic Apologist Jimmy Akin’s article, Did Jesus Say Adultery is Grounds for Divorce?
Telephone in the United States—is an internationally popular game, in which one person whispers a message to the ear of the next person through a line of people until the last player announces the message to the entire group. Although the objective is to pass around the message without it becoming misheard and altered along the way, part of the enjoyment is that, regardless, this usually ends up happening. Errors typically accumulate in the retellings, so the statement announced by the last player differs significantly from that of the first player, usually with amusing or humorous effect. Reasons for changes include anxiousness or impatience, erroneous corrections, the difficult-to-understand mechanism of whispering, and that some players may deliberately alter what is being said to guarantee a changed message by the end of the line.
The game is often played by children as a party game or on the playground. It is often invoked as a metaphor for cumulative error, especially the inaccuracies as rumours or gossip spread, or, more generally, for the unreliability of human recollection or even oral traditions.
Who Wrote The Gospels?
Though it is evidently not the sort of thing pastors normally tell their congregations, for over a century there has been a broad consensus among scholars that many of the books of the New Testament were not written by the people whose names are attached to them. So if that is the case, who did write them?
Scholars hold a wide spectrum of views on the origins and composition of the gospels. John Riches states the mainstream view: “Many scholars doubt that the Gospels were written by eye-witnesses as their attributions seem to suggest: there is too much evidence of reworking oral traditions and of straight borrowing from other Gospels to make this likely.” For example, the vast majority of material in Mark is also present in either Luke or Matthew or both, suggesting that Mark was a source for Matthew and Luke. He writes that the four canonical gospels “were probably all written by the end of the first century”. But they did not yet at that time have a consistent narrative. “In 170 Tatian sought to find a solution by composing a single narrative out of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, with some additional oral material.” Richies concludes that the gospel passages themselves can be unclear, and some of the messages within are “straightforwardly ambiguous” and intended to be “metaphorical” or “poetic”.
Just came across this right now:
There’s one just one problem — Paul didn’t write those words. In fact, virtually half the New Testament was written by impostors taking on the names of apostles like Paul. At least according to Bart D. Ehrman, a renowned biblical scholar, who makes the charges in his new book “Forged.”
“There were a lot of people in the ancient world who thought that lying could serve a greater good,” says Ehrman, an expert on ancient biblical manuscripts.In “Forged,” Ehrman claims that:
- At least 11 of the 27 New Testament books are forgeries.
- The New Testament books attributed to Jesus’ disciples could not have been written by them because they were illiterate.
- Many of the New Testament’s forgeries were manufactured by early Christian leaders trying to settle theological feuds.