The Collapse of a Christian Pillar

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In Christianity does not matter what you’ve done before, matters to change the hearth . Sins can be washed through confession.
 
The thing is Paul sacked the error and become christian because Jesus appeared to him and you can see God directing him and he did well not following Sanhedrin error and following God remember Jews in connection with God become Christians, actually St Paul appeared many times after his death confirming he did a good decision.
You and your postmortem apparitions! You should bring this talk to another section of this Catholic Forum. Here, in the Non-Catholic section, you are dealing with people more complex minded. You can even cause an embarrassment to yourself.
 
You’ve been selectively answering whatever you feel you can, consistently ignoring the challenges you cannot answer. You are exceedingly rude to us, believing that anybody who believes something you don’t is completely deluded and unable to use reason.

Well, if you’d like to block out any possibility that you’re wrong so you can be more sure of your own beliefs, don’t let me stop you.
 
**Only God lives forever. Anyone else who has been born will eventually die. **
Dear Ben,

Adrian put out this scripture to show you that the those who eat of the bread of life shall live forever in the afterlife; we call it everlasting life. Of course everyone born will eventually die.
 
Acts 24:5-18
5"We have found this man to be a troublemaker, stirring up riots among the Jews all over the world. He is a ringleader of the Nazarene sect 6and even tried to desecrate the temple; so we seized him. 7 But the commander, Lysias, came and with the use of much force snatched him from our hands 8 and ordered his accusers to come before you.9The Jews joined in the accusation, asserting that these things were true. 10When the governor motioned for him to speak, Paul replied: "I know that for a number of years you have been a judge over this nation; so I gladly make my defense. 11You can easily verify that no more than twelve days ago I went up to Jerusalem to worship. **12My accusers did not find me arguing with anyone at the temple, or stirring up a crowd in the synagogues or anywhere else in the city. 13And they cannot prove to you the charges they are now making against me. 14However, I admit that I worship the God of our fathers as a follower of the Way, which they call a sect. I believe everything that agrees with the Law and that is written in the Prophets, 15and I have the same hope in God as these men, that there will be a resurrection of both the righteous and the wicked. 16So I strive always to keep my conscience clear before God and man. **
17"After an absence of several years, I came to Jerusalem to bring my people gifts for the poor and to present offerings. 18I was ceremonially clean when they found me in the temple courts doing this. There was no crowd with me, nor was I involved in any disturbance

Hello Ben and God Bless,
Please read the scripture which you referred to and continue to the following verses. I do not see how Paul was stirring up problems when it is clear that he was being falsely accused by ‘these jews’ just like Jesus was. Paul defended himself and humbled himeself before the court and God.
Please stop using the NT scriptures to make your point when you don’t believe them to be true. If you do use them then make sure to use it in its full context so as to get the ‘true picture’. God will help you understand the truth Ben; I pray for it.
Paul simply denied the charges. But he had been arrested because he was teaching the Jews to abandon Moses, to stop circumcising their children, and to denounce the Jewish customs. On the top of all this, he was in the Temple camouflaged as an observer of the Law when he had no vow to fulfill. Being arrested and brought before the Sanhedring, he was asked why he had been arrested and he lied saying that it was because of his hope in the resurrection. The man was a liar. Of course, he had to deny the charges. (Acts 21:21-24, 27-29; 23:6.
 
You’ve been selectively answering whatever you feel you can, consistently ignoring the challenges you cannot answer. You are exceedingly rude to us, believing that anybody who believes something you don’t is completely deluded and unable to use reason.

Well, if you’d like to block out any possibility that you’re wrong so you can be more sure of your own beliefs, don’t let me stop you.
I do not answer a post just for the purpose to elongate a thread. I answer what makes sense and I feel that theres is something to learn from. There are too many reptetitions and empty talking, which only cause wasting of time.
 
Dear Ben,

Adrian put out this scripture to show you that the those who eat of the bread of life shall live forever in the afterlife; we call it everlasting life. Of course everyone born will eventually die.
So, you and Adrian are contradicting yourselves.
 
I am not talking about Christianity but Judaism. Jewish writings that Christians interpret literally. They should leave them alone, and just ask what they need to know. Just as Isaiah says in Isaiah 2:2,3. Why? Because the address to get instructions about God’s Word is Zion, the Jewish People.
Ben what are you doing? You are giving advice to christians about leaving it to jews to interpret jewish writing and yet you continually use our jewish/christian writings to propogate your erroneous ideas. Dear friend you are not listening to me when I tell you to leave the NT alone. I was more than willing to debate with you when you made an appeal to me now you are telling us who Jesus is and what is his message was. To be a christian is to accept Jesus as Lord and Messiah(CHRIST). Who knows Him better than we who accept Him. Here is your quote to Kathleen:

Kathleen, allow me to tell you what Jesus meant by “Salvation is from the Jews” in John 4:22. There are two kinds of salvation. One is personal salvation which comes to us as a result of obedience to the Law. (Ezek. 21:21) The other is collective salvation. And this is the one Jesus was referring to when he told the Samaritan woman, which comes from the Jews. After the Flood, God promised Noah that He would never allow another catastrophe to hit all Mankind again. That’s in Genesis 8:21. And in verse 22 He made His promise as solid as the natural laws. Jeremiah read that text and, under prophetic inspiration, he said that if Israel ever ceases as a People before the Lord forever, the natural laws will cease functioning properly. (Jer. 31:35,36) If this ever happens, universal catastrophes will end with Mankind like those that finished with the dinosaurs. If you believe the Prophets, there is no other way to look at this. Therefore, God’s promise to Noah was guaranteed by the permanent existence of Israel as a People. That’s what Jesus meant when he said that salvation of Mankind comes from the Jews.

How can I begin dear Ben. It has been pointed out to you that we christians believe salvation is from the jews because Jesus is our Savior and Messiah and He was a Jew. How simple is that. We gave you loads of scriptual evidence to which you did not answer to mine and some others, which leads me to believe that you are evading the facts so as to avoid the obvious; that Jesus is Lord, Savior of Mankind (remember he was a Jew), and that He is the Son of the Most High. God from God–one and eternal.

God Bless
 
Paul simply denied the charges. But he had been arrested because he was teaching the Jews to abandon Moses, to stop circumcising their children, and to denounce the Jewish customs. On the top of all this, he was in the Temple camouflaged as an observer of the Law when he had no vow to fulfill. Being arrested and brought before the Sanhedring, he was asked why he had been arrested and he lied saying that it was because of his hope in the resurrection. The man was a liar. Of course, he had to deny the charges. (Acts 21:21-24, 27-29; 23:6.
He was not lying, dear Ben…your forefathers did.

Here are the scriptures you quoted, Acts 21:24:

24 Take these and sanctify thyself with them: and bestow on them, that they may shave their heads. And all will know that the things which they have heard of these are false: but that thou thyself also walkest keeping the law. Keeping the law… The law, though now no longer obligatory, was for a time observed by the Christian Jews: to bury, as it were, the synagogue with honour. 25 But, as touching the Gentiles that believe, we have written, decreeing that they should only refrain themselves from that which has been offered to idols and from blood and from things strangled and from fornication.

Your forefathers falsely accused Paul of renouncing Moses’ Law when in fact he was merely teaching that the gentiles are not obliged to adhere to all the laws of Moses(which many jews found burdensome); James and the elders referred to the laws by which gentiles must adhere to and that is quoted in verse 25.
Paul earnestly sought to reconcile himself with the jewish community because of the lies spread about him. He was instructed to fulfill this through this jewish purification. He was anything but honorable.
 
So, you and Adrian are contradicting yourselves.
John 6:58 This is that bread which came down from heaven: not as your fathers did eat manna, and are dead: **he that eateth of this bread shall live for ever. **"

How are we contridicting ourselves? We are saying the same thing that eating this bread (body and blood of Christ Jesus) gives everlasting life.
 
As I said, there is nothing in the NT closer than Luke 1:5,36 to relate Mary to a Tribe. So, we have got to do with what we have.
Tradition tells us that Mary too was a descendant of David. According to Numbers 36:6-12, an only daughter had to marry within her own family so as to secure the right of inheritance. [Matt 1:2-19]The husband of Mary… The Evangelist gives us rather the pedigree of St. Joseph, than that of the blessed Virgin, to conform to the custom of the Hebrews, who in their genealogies took no notice of women; but as they were near akin, the pedigree of the one showeth that of the other.After St. Justin (Adv. Tryph. 100) and St. Ignatius (Letter to the Ephesians 18), the Fathers generally agree in maintaining Mary’s Davidic descent, whether they knew this from an oral tradition or inferred it from Scripture, e.g. Romans 1:3; 2 Timothy 2:8. St. John Damascene (De fid. Orth., IV, 14) states that Mary’s great-grandfather, Panther, was a brother of Mathat; her grandfather, Barpanther, was Heli’s cousin; and her father, Joachim, was a cousin of Joseph, Heli’s levirate son. Here Mathat has been substituted for Melchi, since the text used by St. John Damascene, Julius Africanus, St. Irenæus, St. Ambrose, and St. Gregory of Nazianzus omitted the two generations separating Heli from Melchi. At any rate, tradition presents the Blessed Virgin as descending from David through Nathan.

The geneology of Joseph by Julius Africanus:
In it he proposes what is still the favourite explanation of the two pedigrees of our Lord (Matthew 1:2-19; Luke 3:23-38), namely that St. Joseph’s two fathers, Jacob (Matthew 1:16) and Heli (Luke 3:23), were half-brothers of the same mother, that Heli died without children, and Jacob took his wife to raise up seed to his brother according to the Levitical law (Deuteronomy 25:5-6).

Is this enough scripture both in the OT and NT to prove Mary is of the House of David and not Levi?
 
Acts 22
1"Brothers and fathers, listen now to my defense." 2When they heard him speak to them in Aramaic, they became very quiet.

Then Paul said: 3"**I am a Jew, born in Tarsus of Cilicia, but brought up in this city. Under Gamaliel I was thoroughly trained in the law of our fathers and was just as zealous for God as any of you are today. 4I persecuted the followers of this Way to their death, arresting both men and women and throwing them into prison, 5as also the high priest and all the Council can testify. I even obtained letters from them to their brothers in Damascus, and went there to bring these people as prisoners to Jerusalem to be punished. **
6"About noon as I came near Damascus, suddenly a bright light from heaven flashed around me. 7I fell to the ground and heard a voice say to me, ‘Saul! Saul! Why do you persecute me?’

8" ‘Who are you, Lord?’ I asked.

" ‘I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom you are persecuting,’ he replied.
 
We need to let Ben have his time to put the new information in order and to think about it.
 
Paul earnestly sought to reconcile himself with the jewish community because of the lies spread about him. He was instructed to fulfill this through this jewish purification. He was anything but honorable.
My apologies… the last line in quote #289 should read that he was honorable.:o
 
Ben what are you doing? You are giving advice to christians about leaving it to jews to interpret jewish writing and yet you continually use our jewish/christian writings to propogate your erroneous ideas. Dear friend you are not listening to me when I tell you to leave the NT alone.
 
He was not lying, dear Ben…your forefathers did.

Here are the scriptures you quoted, Acts 21:24:

24 Take these and sanctify thyself with them: and bestow on them, that they may shave their heads. And all will know that the things which they have heard of these are false: but that thou thyself also walkest keeping the law. Keeping the law… The law, though now no longer obligatory, was for a time observed by the Christian Jews: to bury, as it were, the synagogue with honour. 25 But, as touching the Gentiles that believe, we have written, decreeing that they should only refrain themselves from that which has been offered to idols and from blood and from things strangled and from fornication.

Your forefathers falsely accused Paul of renouncing Moses’ Law when in fact he was merely teaching that the gentiles are not obliged to adhere to all the laws of Moses(which many jews found burdensome); James and the elders referred to the laws by which gentiles must adhere to and that is quoted in verse 25.
Paul earnestly sought to reconcile himself with the jewish community because of the lies spread about him. He was instructed to fulfill this through this jewish purification. He was anything but honorable.
**Humble Maid, I read the text again and I am sorry but I did not find where it says that Paul had a vow to fulfill. He was told to join fou other Jews who had a vow to fulfill, so that
the local Jews could see that Paul also was an Law observer. And Paul accepted the plan. That’s a lie to give a false impression. I am sorry. If you want to consider me stupid, you have all the right in the world, because I can’t see this any other way.

The Law is no longer obligatory! In that case Jesus lied, because he said as long as there is heaven and earth, not a dot of the Law would pass without being fulfilled by all of us. That’s in Matthew 5:18,19. Have the heavens and earth passed? I didn’t think so.

Regarding verse 25 you mention above, that’s a reference to the Noahite laws which the converts of the Apostles who had decided to follow Paul had been reverted to their previous condition of Gentiles, which it is exactly what Paul wanted. They were no longer Jews but Gentiles. They would lose their Jewishness by becoming Christians, subject only to the Noahite laws.**

Regarding your saying above that Paul was falsely accused to teach the Gentiles against Moses, you are either purposely adulterating the text or not focused on what you are reading. According to the text, Paul was teaching the Jews, and not Gentiles, to abandon Moses, to stop circumcising their children, and renounce the Jewish customs. Read again Acts 21:21 One does not teach Gentiles to abandon Moses, because they never had him. One does not teach Gentiles to stop circumcising their children because they never used such a practice. One does not teach Gentiles to renounce Jewish customs because they were Jewish customs and not Gentile customs. Did you get the point?

Nothing at all spread about Paul was a lie. I challenge you to prove it.
 
Back to my post, you made some interesting comments, but my lack of computer skills is disabling me to directly refer back to them at this point. Another time.

I have been gleaning the posts, and briefly, I would not consider Paul’s teachings as Replacement…

What you are missing here is the universal ‘new life’ a person receives when finding life in God through Christ. The initial and basic understanding of the Messiah is the same, but once people begin to incorporate into their lives, that is where the misunderstandings and divisions begin.

We are never taught in Christianity to disobey the Decalogue. It is not replaced. We still obey the law. But it is summed in one word, and that is love.

I see much good and great contributions to mankind by the Jewish people in the last hundreds of years in the areas of science.

But I believe Christianity has the greatest witness to the world by recognizing what the Church in particular has done for mankind it the foundations it laid down in Europe. The Church was the one who provided the framework of modern law that we use today, the building of schools and universities for a greater reach of helping more people, the foundations of hospitals and hospice, the compassion shown to the lepers, to the foreigner.

Don’t get me wrong, but some people are offended when anybody of any ethnic group cares only for their own people, or self isolate from others who also contribute to the world that provides for them…

True Christianity is exhorted not to just care for its own, but to see Christ before the heart of every person, including our enemies.

True morality can’t just be found in the law. Truth can not be just found in morals. Truth can only be found in the moral person. And as we are all sinners, the only one without sin is Christ. Check out, ‘Veritatis Splendor’, by John Paul II.

God loves nothing more than people serving each other as brethren. Christ is the summation, the way and mean and end of God’s love.
 
**What is the difference between what you say and what Paul decided in Ephesians 2:15, when he contradicted Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:17-19? Jesus said I did not come to abolish. Paul said, that’s not true; everything was abolished on the cross. Who was on the cross? Jesus. So, who is lying Jesus or Paul? Please, do not discard my question. It does make a lot of sense.**You don’t seem interested to telling us much about the context, otherwise you’d see the contradiction is only apparent, just like in many passages in the Tanakh (Lapell)

First of all, you cannot prove the resurrection because there was no eyewitness to it. The cornerstone for the NT was set down by Paul. The NT must include Gentiles; and Jesus had an aversion to Gentiles. He even forbade his disciples to take the good news of salvation to the Gentiles. (Mat. 10:5)

Too hypothetical.


**Are you sure you could? So, mind you that the converts of the Apostles of Jesus would become staunch defenders of the Law. The Old Covenant that Jesus did not change. Read Acts 21:20. **

When Jesus said that nothing of the Law had changed, and everything was confirmed down to the letter, he said that as long as there is heaven and earth, everyone of us must do the same as he did. He was talking about the Old Covenant. Heaven and earth are still here. So, must we do as he did.

I am sorry, but I can’t find any other way to see Paul contradicting Jesus’ words by abolishing what Jesus had not abolished. What you are trying to do is to let us know that Paul was the one who decided that what Jesus did not do in life, he did in death. I wonder how Jesus’ Apostles did not see that way. And if God blessed what Paul did, why did He keep the Apostles in the dark?

Do you know that a few Scholars have classified Replacement Theology as a kind of Antisemitism? And they are not all Jewish, mind you.

Everyone else from another religious denomination different from yours, also puts his or her trust in Him. As you can see, that’s not enough. You could be wrong as much as anyone else.


**I can think of someone who can. Remember what is written in Isaiah 2:2,3? It says in there that if you lack understanding in the Word of God, the address is Zion, the Jewish People. Why? Because the Word of God was given to Israel only and to no other people on earth. That’s in Psalm 147:19,20. **
 
Even if you are a Jew, you did not live in the days of Jesus’ ministry, did you? No way we should change the NT, for then we would change the Truth, even though you don’t believe the NT tells the Truth… If you are waiting for the Church to change it to leave us, well, you will be stuck with us forever, my dear Ben Masada!!!
 
Acts 21:2121 Now they have heard of thee that thou teachest those Jews, who are among the Gentiles to depart from Moses: saying that they ought not to circumcise their children, nor walk according to the custom.

Dear Ben, you are doing it again; taking our scriptures out of context. Please I humbly ask you to sincerely read these scriptures in bold and listen carefully. Paul was not teaching the gentiles to refute Moses’ Laws, as you say, he was falsely accused by your forefathers of teaching the jews among the gentiles to refute the laws. This is confirmed by the following verses which are aforementionned. If you wish to deny it then you will remain obstinate.

Either you are sincerely unable to understand or this is an attempt to undermine our christian beliefs. As you can observe and I have mentionned it before that my brothers and sisters on this forum are not deluded by your false teachings because their convinctions in Jesus and the scriptures are firm and founded.

Thank You Lord for sending us the Advocate whom you have promised. Even now I am sad but not proned to anger by your attempts to villify St. Paul and Christianity; even going to the extent of calling us anti-semetic. We are not what you say Ben. We for the most part are patient, accomodating and loving towards others on this forum.

You are testing us but we will not falter and give in. We have the true testimony of Christ and God. You may have had it once but you have foresaken Him who was of yours.
 
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