Featured Enigmas and inconsistencies

If your old man had forbidden you from taking out the trash your entire life, under threat of it polluting you to the point of separating you from your dad, you might respond the same way.

 

How about,

"Not so dad, I've always obeyed your command to never take out the trash my whole life. I've never polluted my body by taking out the trash. I don't want to pollute myself and separate myself from you"

That would be the comparison between the "old man" telling you to take out the trash and how Peter responded to being told to eat "unclean" food.

 

No, as they rightly discen both of them that the Pharisees were indeed fools worthy of condemnation!

 

You really need to learn the English language. "Unclean spirit" and "unclean food" are completely different concepts.

Quit trying on that one. You're only digging your hole deeper.

 

And now you are changing the narrative. The term "unclean" does not appear in the Matthew passage which you started with. Now you are doing a "bait and switch" by using the Mark parallel passage where the term "unclean" does actually appear. If you had started out with the Mark passage, you might have a case. You did not.

The context in which I facetiously said you need to learn the English language is where you tried to make us think that "unclean spirit" and "unclean" food are the same thing, or at least have the same import in the two different passages. Perhaps I should have said that what you need to learn is logic.

 

That's not how we do NT studies in the academic world. The actual incident in the life of Christ is technically called a pericope (per-ih-koh-peh), and it may be recorded in up to all four of the Gospels. The places where the pericope is recorded are different passages in each Gospel. You yourself tried to make the two passages of the pericope into one passage, and that's confusing.

Also, in this case we are dealing with the synoptic Gospels. Each of the synoptics has a different viewpoint (taught in freshman NT Survey if you've been to Bible college), and those viewpoints are important in exegesis. So, we just don't study and discuss the NT the way you are trying to.

I was 3rd board on our champion chess team in HS my own self. But chess is not where you learn logic, at least not formally. Find an online course on formal logic. Or, there's a great little book on it, Logic, by theologian Gordon H. Clark.

Yeah, then you tried to make Peter's unclean food (following OT revelation) somehow equal to calling the Holy Spirit an unclean spirit. Sorry, I don't buy that.

 

No, that's how it is done across the board in evangelical, conservative New Testament studies. It was true when I taught 4 credits of Synoptic Gospels in a fundamentalist Bible school in Tokyo in the 1980s, and it's true at the Bible college where I now teach.

Are you actually telling me that you can't see a difference between "passage" and "pericope" meaning "incident"? That somehow your way of doing things is better than that of all the evangelical NT scholars combined??

You have totally misunderstood. I did not say this and did not mean it. The very meaning of the term "synoptics" has apparently escaped you.

And I haven't been discussing divorce.

I didn't start the "conflict." I simply tried to get clarity from you. If you wanted to talk about uncleanliness in the blasphemy pericope, why did you not use the Mark passage from the start? Then we wouldn't be having this conversation.

I've been trying to get clarity here, but apparently you don't want it. You'd rather do things your own way. Fine. Go ahead and "stand your ground." No concern of mine.

In a chess team there are usually 5 "boards," meaning 5 players on the team, best to worst. I wasn't the best, but wasn't the worst.

 

The ones that Jesus thundered down judgement upon were a group really led by Satan!

 

Peter was arguing against God, but was not like the Pharisees engaging jesus, as they were active agents of the devil...

 

What do you think? Are Jesus and Paul in danger of condemnation to a fiery hell?

 

This is actual a quite simple problem--not even a problem, really. In Matt. 5 Jesus clearly says that calling your brother a fool makes one to be "in danger" of Gehenna. (By the way, note that Alcott has pulled a switch on us. He is not quoting from the KJV, and does not tell us what translation this is, contra normal rules of sourcing.)

Now, in the Matt. 23 passage where Jesus calls the Pharisees fools, He is not rebuking His brothers, but His enemies! So very obviously, he is not in danger of Gehenna. He even notes in v. 9 of that chapter that there is a Father in Heaven, but to Jesus, the father of the Pharisees was the Devil (John 4:44).

A lot more could be said, but this easily puts to rest Alcott's apparent belief that this passage shows there are errors in the Bible.