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We live in a strange community, where it is not uncommon to see bumper stickers that say things like, I am Light, or Due to circumstances within our control Armageddon has been cancelled. But the one that really gets me is the one that reads simply, I AM. Thank God, the I AM doesn’t drive a VW van. If the guy driving that van has numbered our days, we’re in trouble. Somehow I don’t think he was the one that hung the stars in space and sustains all things by his word. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad.
"A classic type, common to many Renaissance paintings is the ’student.’ A favored follower, a protege or disciple, is always portrayed as very youthful, long-haired and clean-shaven...Throughout the Renaissance, artists portray St. John in this fashion. He is the ’disciple Jesus loved’ ....Only a colossal fool would paint a heresy where the monks could study it day after day. While no evidence suggest that Leonardo held the church in contempt, proof abounds that he was no fool." (Elizabeth Lev, "The Real Leonardo")
First of all, the Gospel of Phillip is a Gnostic text that is widely considered by scholars to have been written at least a century after the canonical gospels. So it’s not authoritative.
Second, even that debunked book does not refer to Jesus having married Mary Magdalene, but simply states that he kissed her. The word used does not even denote a romantic kiss, but denotes something more like a kiss on the cheek or forehead.
A kiss was a common way for men to greet each otherPhillip, in mentioning that Jesus kissed Mary, is telling us that he treated her like other disciples.
John 14:6 – “Jesus told him, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me.’”
This is so hard for prideful people to accept.
Elaine Pagels (author of The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ) says she had an epiphany while reading the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas during graduate school, particularly this passage: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.” According to Pagels, “The strength of this saying is that it does not tell us what to believe but challenges us to discover what lies hidden within ourselves….” This Gnostic perspective essentially says that salvation is within ourselves, and that it is in a process of self-discovery that we find redemption.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer had a different perspective: “The fact that Jesus Christ died is more important than the fact that I shall die, and the fact that Jesus Christ rose from the dead is the sole ground of my hope that I, too, shall be raised on the Last Day. Our salvation is “external to us.” I find no salvation in my life history, but only in the history of Jesus Ch...
“Constantine did not collate the Bible. The Old Testament had been compiled even before Jesus’ time. The New Testament’s formation began by the end of the first century (about 90 or 100)—almost two hundred years before Constantine. In fact, recognizing which books of the New Testament were authoritative was a century-long process within both the Easter (based at Constantinople) and Western (based at Rome) churches. They independently agreed on which books belonged in the New Testament.”
Richard Abanes in The Truth Behind the Da Vinci Code
“I’ve become convinced that the problem with believing the Bible is not based on what we don’t understand about the Bible – but it’s based on what we do understand about the Bible.
“What we do understand challenges everything about us. Jesus calls us to follow him, and that means we have to give up our life. That, I think, is the major reason why people don’t want to believe in the Gospels, because it involves self-surrender, the hardest thing in life to do.” (Dr. Scot McKnight, Biblical scholar, professor of religious studies at North Park University, Chicago. Quoted in Exploring the Da Vinci Code, Lee Strobel and Garry Poole)
NO TOLERANCE OF FALSE TEACHING "VIRUSES"
I remember hearing about computer viruses. Could a computer catch a germ? I then learned that computer viruses were often malicious programs, developed by evil-doers, to destroy computers. They are often downloaded stealthily, without you knowing it. Perhaps opening an email attachment or surfing the web.
When you combine intelligent effort with evil and the craving to destroy, misery results. All of us want to make a difference, but some of us will feel like we make a difference by destroying, hurting, and irritating others. We can be that desperate to matter.
False teachers, often unknowingly inspired by Satan, do just that: They are out to destroy the truth of God's Word and they are out to keep believers from living in a godly fashion. They are being manipulated by the evil one and do not even know it.
God encourages leaders and Christians to hold a "no tolerance" position of false teaching, particularly in major and clear areas.
Leonardo was “skilled at painting the difference between the sexes,” and the “delicate folded hands, and the hint of a bosom. It was, without a doubt…female.”
The reference to delicate folded hands as a proof that the figure traditionally identified as John was really Mary Magdalene is forced. In the Study for the Hands of John in the Windsor Castle Royal Collection (no. 12543), they do not appear distinctly feminine. They may be the hands of a woman, but then again they could as easily be those of a man. In The Last Supper itself, John’s hands are no less masculine than most of the other hands in the picture.
As for the hint of a bosom, this is entirely unjustified. Even if an overly fertile imagination might find such a “hint” on the character of John where his clothes are loose, on the other side, given the absence of the loose cloak, we should be able to detect even clearer evidence of a bosom, we see instead that John’s chest is conspicuously bosomless. Here again Brown’s assertion may derive from his reliance on the conspiracy book The Templar Revelation, where we read of “the tiny, graceful hand, the pretty, elfin features, the distinctly female bosom and the gold necklace” (p. 20).
Interestingly a more recent, post-1999-Last-Supper-restoration book by The Templar Revelations author Lynn Picknett now replaces the old distinctly female bosom claim, with the equally groundless assertion that there is “a dark smudge where ‘his’ breasts should be.” Picknett apparently wants us now to believe that the female bosom was originally there, but that it was subsequently rubbed out.
In a posting from ABC News (Nov 3, 2003) we read.
“Many art historians have dismissed the theory that the figure is a woman, saying it’s just a tradition to paint John as beardless and long-haired. ‘It looks like a young male. I see no breasts,’ art historian Jack Wasserman told ABCNEWS.” Wasserman is a well-known Leonardo scholar.
Finally, John’s face is admittedly effeminate, but not more so than th...
3 of every 10 U.S. teens have played the Ouija board or had their palms read. 8 in 10 have read horoscopes.
(The Foster Letter 6/25/08)
CONFUSING MESSAGES
PARIS (AFP) – Heart attack survivors who eat chocolate two or more times per week cut their risk of dying from heart disease about threefold compared to those who never touch the stuff, scientists have reported.
...the new study, led by Imre Janszky of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, is the first to demonstrate that consuming chocolate can help ward off the grim reaper if one has suffered acute myocardial infarction -- otherwise known as a heart attack.
"It was specific to chocolate -- we found no benefit to sweets in general," said Kenneth Mukamal, a researcher at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and a co-author of the study. "It seems that antioxidants in cocoa are a likely candidate" for explaining the live-saving properties, he told AFP in an exchange of e-mails. [AFP, Aug. 09]
It seems like everything they used to say was bad for you is now good for you, and everything they said was good for you is bad for you -- or not as good as they thought.
Take raw vegetables and spinach. They now say raw spinach is not nearly as good for you as cooked; the same is true with tomatoes. The cookies releases nutrients your body would not absorb otherwise.
There are lots of confused and confusing people and facts in life.
And sometimes God’s working in someone’s life can be very confusing...like Paul’s.
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