Pope List

[flameburns623]

This particular passage puzzles me to no end. Some will insist, vehemently, that the Greek text, for complex reasons, differentiates beween ‘stone’ and rock-mass, justifying the interpretation that Peter is not exactly co-identical with the ‘rock’ upon which the Church is built. Others insist that the slight differences in verb forms (or is it noun forms?) have more to do with the gender of the person of Peter and of the word ‘Church’. In either case, if one probes too deeply one is told that the particular interpretation favored is ‘obvious’ if one only takes the trouble to learn Biblical Greek.

Incidentally–for some reason Catholics love to gloss the issues here by speculating what Christ may or may not have said in Aramaic. This is beside the point. The ACTUAL TEXT OF THE SCRIPTURE IS INSPIRED, not our speculations about how it may have actually been expressed in Armaic. For all we know–if the Protestant exegesis of the Greek text is accurate–Christ may have actually spoken the Aramaic phrase for ‘little stone’ versus ‘rock mass’ in the original discourse. The New Testament conversations are not necessarily word-for-word transciptions of what was actually said but are plenary, verbal, and inspired summations of those conversations. When endeavoring to aprehend discussions of this sort, we need to wrestle with the text as we have it and not as we think it might have been.

 

[joehar]

i am sorry Peter is not a Pope or the head of the church. see below

Is Peter the head of the Church?

Not according to God and the Bible!

佳木斯幸蒲顾问有限公司 The whole Bible teaches Jesus Christ: The Old Testament teaches and prepares for His coming. The New Testament teaches how to be saved through Jesus Christ. So how is it that a religion, such as the Catholic one, can get the entire overall message of the Word of God wrong? Perhaps it is because of Matthew 16:17…

Mat 16:17 And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. 18 And I say also unto thee, THAT THOU ART PETER, AND UPON THIS ROCK I WILL BUILD MY CHURCH; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

But Jesus was speaking of HIMSELF. In scripture, Jesus is referred to as the “rock” :

• EPHESIANS 5:23
  For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.

 

[flameburns623]

We seriously need a couple of people in here who can exegete the Greek of this passage.

In plain English .

 

[FightingFat]

joehar:

i am sorry Peter is not a Pope or the head of the church. see below

Is Peter the head of the Church?

Not according to God and the Bible!

佳木斯幸蒲顾问有限公司 The whole Bible teaches Jesus Christ: The Old Testament teaches and prepares for His coming. The New Testament teaches how to be saved through Jesus Christ. So how is it that a religion, such as the Catholic one, can get the entire overall message of the Word of God wrong? Perhaps it is because of Matthew 16:17…

Mat 16:17 And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. 18 And I say also unto thee, THAT THOU ART PETER, AND UPON THIS ROCK I WILL BUILD MY CHURCH; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

But Jesus was speaking of HIMSELF. In scripture, Jesus is referred to as the “rock” :

• EPHESIANS 5:23
  For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.

Well, that is to say that the subsequent understanding of the Gospel by the Apostles was errant. Also, why would Jesus change Peter’s name from Simon to Peter (meaning rock) if not in preparation for this? Also the translation says what it says. It doesn’t need to jump through hoops or mean anything different. The French translation uses the same word in both instances. All the information is put very well here- catholic.com/library/Origins_of_Peter_as_Pope.asp

Some argue that in this passage there is a minor difference between the Greek term for Peter (Petros) and the term for rock (petra), yet they ignore the obvious explanation: petra, a feminine noun, has simply been modifed to have a masculine ending, since one would not refer to a man (Peter) as feminine. The change in the gender is purely for stylistic reasons.

These critics also neglect the fact that Jesus spoke Aramaic, and, as John 1:42 tells us, in everyday life he actually referred to Peter as Kepha or Cephas (depending on how it is transliterated). It is that term which is then translated into Greek as petros. Thus, what Jesus actually said to Peter in Aramaic was: “You are Kepha and on this very kepha I will build my Church.”

 

[FightingFat]

flameburns623:

We seriously need a couple of people in here who can exegete the Greek of this passage.

In plain English .

The basics as I understand them are that in aramaic, you would have used kephas for both words but in greek, petra is feminine so you couldn’t use it for Peter’s name, so the Gospel writer gave it a masculine ending Petros. Either way, the meaning is clear and to say that the catholic church got it wrong is like saying that God got it wrong as he would know what would happen, how it would have been taken and it would wind up being important. Seeing as Catholicism is the only Christian faith until the reformation there can be little doubt!

 

[flameburns623]

FightingFat:

The basics as I understand them are that in aramaic, you would have used kephas for both words but in greek, petra is feminine so you couldn’t use it for Peter’s name, so the Gospel writer gave it a masculine ending Petros. Either way, the meaning is clear and to say that the catholic church got it wrong is like saying that God got it wrong as he would know what would happen, how it would have been taken and it would wind up being important. Seeing as Catholicism is the only Christian faith until the reformation there can be little doubt!

The problem in the Greek is that there are Protestant exegetes who say that the difference in ‘petros’ and ‘petra’ is more than a shift in gender: one is diminutive and implies ‘stone’ or ‘small rock’.The other implies ‘rock mass’.

I will say again that we have to deal with the actual Greek text and what that means–in it’s fullest possible Greek meaning. IF Christ, in this discourse, addressed Peter in Aramaic and not in Greek (we don’t know of a certainty that Christ and the Apostles were not highly conversant in Greek and employed Greek as frequently in discourse as they employed Armaic)–I say again IF Christ addressed Peter in Aramaic he may have said “You are ‘Little Stoney’ . . . .” which could conceivably alter the interpretation of the passage in the direction advocated by Protestants.

More importantly: Protestant Evangelicals speak of Scripture as having ‘plenary, verbal’ inspiration–every last jot, tittle, verb form and grammatical variation found in the original manuscripts was inspired, stroke for stroke. Given this, one MUST wrestle with the text as it exists, not as we think it might have been verbalized in Aramaic or some other ancient language. (Of course to start with one must agree on which Greek text is the most-reliable one, which is the real source of argumentation between Protestants over the King James Only issue. But that’s a topic for another thread entirely).

 

[FightingFat]

Yes, but Mathew couldn’t have used Petra- or Petros for both terms, wouldn’t make sense in Greek.

I think the most convincing fact about this argument is the existance of the Catholic Church, unchallenged, up until the time of the reformation.

 

[StubbleSpark]

All this hair-splitting. Catholics do not like to do this. If we can think of the Church as being built on Peter AND on Christ, we’ll take it. This is exactly how we figured the Holy Trinity. God is both three AND one. Saying His threeness invalidates His oneness is a heresy. Saying His oneness makes His threeness impossible is also a heresy.

From what I read of the above quotes from St. Augustine, he was not out to disprove the papacy, but to flesh it out from a different angle. Peter is the rock but Christ is also the foundation, so Peter gets his new name from the solidness of Christ. Without the rock that is Christ, Peter could not be a rock himself (on his own power). No Christ, no rock. Hey! That is exactly what every Catholic believes!

The confession is also the rock. Why? It has to do with human perception. When I ascertain that a glass of water is cold by touch, I am letting the coldness of the glass enter my body through my skin. Perception of truth is a moment of UNION, of co-mingling. Peter’s confession is an outward sign of that this union had finally taken place. What Peter was perceiving was what a wonderful foundation Christ would make – in other words, his “rockness.” Christ then, being the lovingly perceptive and omnipotent God of Truth that He is, reflected this reality back to Peter by renaming him “Rock.”

Wow!

Amazing how St.Augustine, St. Peter, and St. Thomas Aquinas all sort of hold hands with Christ at that moment. Also nice to see that the only tradition that accentuates the fullness of that truth (in that it does not erroneously proclaim one half at the expense of the other but ALL SIDES) is the Catholic tradition. All those quotes, even the heavily edited ones, actually bolstered my faith in the papacy.

'night

 

[Aris]

“You are ‘Little Stoney’ . . . .” which could conceivably alter the interpretation of the passage in the direction advocated by Protestants.

More importantly: Protestant Evangelicals speak of Scripture as having ‘plenary, verbal’ inspiration–every last jot, tittle, verb form and grammatical variation found in the original manuscripts was inspired, stroke for stroke. Given this, one MUST wrestle with the text as it exists, not as we think it might have been verbalized in Aramaic or some other ancient language. (Of course to start with one must agree on which Greek text is the most-reliable one, which is the real source of argumentation between Protestants over the King James Only issue. But that’s a topic for another thread entirely).

“Simon Bar Jonah, … You are Little Stoney and upon this Big Rock…”

Doesn’t look logical. No sense.

You’d have to jump through hoops to make sense of this.

 

[Church_Militant]

Fr Ambrose:

I refer to the greatest Doctor of the Western Church, Saint Augustine. His teaching is *not * that our Lord gave the keys to Peter alone.

From Saint Augustine’s sermon on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul…

"Our Lord Jesus Christ, in the final days of His earthly life, in the days of His mission to the race of man, chose from among the disciples His twelve Apostles for preaching the Word of God. Among them, the Apostle Peter for his fiery ardour was vouchsafed to occupy the first place (Mt 10:2 ) and to be as it were the representative person for all the Church. And therefore it is said to him, preferentially, after the confession: "And I give thee the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven: and if thou bindest upon the earth, it will be bound in the Heavens: and if thou loosenest upon the earth, it will be loosened in the Heavens (Mt 16; 19 ). Wherefore it was not one man, but rather the One Universal Church, that received these “keys” and the right “to bind and
loosen.” And that actually it was the Church that received this right, and not exclusively a single person, turn your attention to another place of the Scriptures, where the same Lord says to also all His Apostles: “Receive ye the Holy Spirit” – and further after this: “Whoseso sins ye remit, are remitted them: and whoseso sins ye retain, are retained” (Jn 20:22-23 ); or: “with what ye bind upon the earth, will be bound in Heaven: and with what ye loosen upon the earth, will be loosened in the Heavens” (Mt 18:18 ). Thus, it is the Church that binds, the Church that
loosens; the Church, built upon the foundational corner-stone – Jesus Christ Himself (Eph 2:20 ) doth bind and loosen. Let both the binding and the loosening be feared: the loosening, in order not to fall under this again; the binding, in order not to remain forever in this condition. Wherefore “by the passions of his own sins – says Wisdom – is each ensnared” (Prov 5:22 ); and except for Holy Church nowhere is it possible to receive the loosening.

Good as Augustine was… he’s not infallible.