Showing posts with label II Thessalonians 2. Show all posts
Showing posts with label II Thessalonians 2. Show all posts

Sunday, January 15, 2023

Luke omits in his version of the Olivet Discourse from Mark and Matthew the coming of false Christs who do signs and wonders

 For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs [σημεῖα] and wonders [τέρατα]; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect. 

-- Matthew 24:24

For false Christs and false prophets shall rise, and shall shew signs and wonders, to seduce, if it were possible, even the elect.  

-- Mark 13:22

As detailed below, Luke positively values the signs and wonders of the apostolic age. He certainly doesn't want a Jesus who throws shade on them, especially since it is really "the holy child Jesus" by whose name the signs and wonders are done.

And I will shew wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath; blood, and fire, and vapour of smoke:  

-- Acts 2:19

Ye men of Israel, hear these words; Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles [δυνάμεσιν] and wonders and signs, which God did by him in the midst of you, as ye yourselves also know: 

-- Acts 2:22

And fear came upon every soul: and many wonders and signs were done by the apostles.  

-- Acts 2:43

And now, Lord, behold their threatenings: and grant unto thy servants, that with all boldness they may speak thy word, By stretching forth thine hand to heal; and that signs and wonders may be done by the name of thy holy child Jesus.

-- Acts 4:29f.

And by the hands of the apostles were many signs and wonders wrought among the people; (and they were all with one accord in Solomon's porch.  

-- Acts 5:12

And Stephen, full of faith and power, did great wonders and miracles [signs] among the people. 

-- Acts 6:8

He brought them out, after that he had shewed wonders and signs in the land of Egypt, and in the Red sea, and in the wilderness forty years.  

-- Acts 7:36

Long time therefore abode they speaking boldly in the Lord, which gave testimony unto the word of his grace, and granted signs and wonders to be done by their hands. 

-- Acts 14:3

Then all the multitude kept silence, and gave audience to Barnabas and Paul, declaring what miracles [signs] and wonders God had wrought among the Gentiles by them.  

-- Acts 15:12

Luke's freedom in eliding entirely the "false Christs" line at a minimum shows that the apocalyptic tradition narrated in Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21 is not yet fixed in the evangelists' own time as they struggled to reimagine and repurpose the (failed) apocalyptic material of the earlier time of the historical Jesus which lies behind it.

It has long been recognized that this apocalyptic material is a series of independent units more or less successfully woven together into a "composite discourse", but it is a "tangled skein", some elements of which might be editorial by the evangelists, some pre-existing apocalyptic either Jewish or Jewish Christian, some authentically dominical, et cetera. So Vincent Taylor, The Gospel According to St. Mark, London 2nd edition, 1966, 1977, pp. 498ff., who considers Matthew a later version of Mark, but Luke, who has "little linguistic agreement with Mk.", to be a stand alone witness presenting material from "independent" sources who must be reckoned with for the development of apocalyptic but often is not.

As Taylor recognizes, Mark's vocabulary in 13:21f. has the "later ring" of "primitive Christianity" about it. It is an apocalyptic outlook now "strange to the mind of Jesus". So it would not be odd then for Luke to exclude it, concerned as he self-consciously is to lay out his history more accurately than have other evangelists.

What we have in these apocalyptic narratives, including Luke's, is revisionism at work.

The "false Christs" idea reflects later developments, a later Christianity on the way from a Judaism which had its own false prophets, to a later Pauline world populated also by a false gospel (II Cor. 11:4; Gal. 1:6), false apostles (II Cor. 11:13), false angels (II Cor. 11:14), the son of perdition (II Thes. 2:3), and ultimately the Antichrist(s) of I and II John.

The historical Jesus, imagining the imminent end of the world in his own lifetime, would never have imagined such developments by definition.

But Luke himself hasn't thought of such things, of course, nor about the implications for either his Gospel or his Apostle (Acts, primarily about Paul). Luke's aim is to present the signs and wonders characteristic of the early and middle Pauline period as proof of his Gospel.

What is also often not considered enough is that the false Christs language of Matthew 24 and Mark 13 might actually be explicit anti-Pauline propaganda, in which case this calumny might represent the particular trigger, among other deficiencies, which motivated Luke to compose his definitive two-volume work in defense of the real Jesus and his hero Paul as he understands them, in order that his patron Theophilus "may know the certainty of those things" in which he was instructed (Luke 1:4).

Wednesday, June 14, 2017

John and Paul do not agree on the identity of "the son of perdition"



To Paul the son of perdition is an AntiChrist figure who appears at the end of the world:

Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day [of Christ] shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition;

-- 2 Thessalonians 2:3

To John's Jesus the son of perdition is Judas, one of the Twelve, already come, and already lost, and completely uneschatological:

While I was with them in the world, I kept them in thy name: those that thou gavest me I have kept, and none of them is lost, but the son of perdition; that the scripture might be fulfilled.

-- John 17:12

Thursday, December 29, 2016

The tradition of the apostles supplanted the tradition of the elders and was both oral and written

On the other hand, our old ways were once new, weren't they?
Why do thy disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? for they wash not their hands when they eat bread.

-- Matthew 15:2

Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle.

-- 2 Thessalonians 2:15

Wednesday, December 28, 2016

A stupid delusion I heard over the holiday, attributed by the person to the movie Schindler's List

The delusion: While the Nazis attacked Jews on Kristallnacht the German Christians were in their churches singing Christmas carols, so they couldn't have been genuinely Christian. 

The fact: Kristallnacht occurred in the middle of the night on November 9-10, 1938 while most people were asleep in their beds, and weeks before the beginning of Advent that year. No one was in church singing anything, let alone Christmas carols. The enraged events of that night occurred just hours after the elaborate commemoration in Munich of the 15th anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, and after the news of the death of a German diplomat shot in Paris had reached Hitler.  

The unpleasant truth: Christians in the United States, traditional or otherwise, continue to go about their own merry lives and have since 1973 while tens of millions of the American unborn have been slaughtered in the womb and continue to be until this very day right under their very own noses, but they do nothing about it.

Yet somehow it's the German Christians who are the hypocrites.

Sunday, July 5, 2015

Same sex marriage: yet another extraordinary popular delusion and example of the madness of crowds

herd behavior
Erick Erickson, here:

"History is riddled with episodes of mass hysteria. Sometimes those episodes of mass hysteria lead to evil. Sometimes they lead to merely bizarre stories. But society, on occasion, has fits of hysteria and insanity burning like wildfire through it. The wildfire eventually burns out, but it often leaves destruction in its wake.

"The United States of America and much of the West are currently in a fit of hysteria. A wildfire is burning through it. Up is down. Down is up. Good is evil. Evil is good. Wrong is right, and right is wrong. Boys can suddenly be girls. Sex and gender are suddenly different things. And Justice Anthony Kennedy believes that because someone may look at the horizon and find loneliness, the Constitution guarantees him the right to marry another man.

"Leave aside the fact that any judge who can redefine a multi-thousand-year-old institution on a whim has more power than our Founders would want. Our society is going through a round of hysteria."

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"Therefore God sends upon them a strong delusion, to make them believe what is false . . .."

-- 2 Thessalonians 2:11