Things for which Jesus said there is no forgiveness and for which dying on the cross would have been therefore beside the point

 

The religious ideas in the following stand in sharp contrast to the idea that Jesus gave his life as a ransom for many (Matthew 20:28; Mark 10:45), which is the idea which won thanks to Paul's "other gospel" (I Corinthians 15:3 "Christ died for our sins"): 

Verily I say unto you, All sins shall be forgiven unto the sons of men, and blasphemies wherewith soever they shall blaspheme: But he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation: Because they said, He hath an unclean spirit.

-- Mark 3:28ff.

But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

-- Matthew 6:15

Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come. 

-- Matthew 12:31f.

And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due unto him. So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses.

-- Matthew 18:34f. 

But if ye do not forgive, neither will your Father which is in heaven forgive your trespasses. 

-- Mark 11:26

And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but unto him that blasphemeth against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven.  

-- Luke 12:10

The everlasting trinity of horribles: The fire, the damnation, and the destruction

Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire (πῦρ). 

-- Matthew 18:8

Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:  

-- Matthew 25:41

But he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation (κρίσις): 

-- Mark 3:29

Who shall be punished with everlasting destruction (ὄλεθρος) from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power;

-- II Timothy 1:9

Of the doctrine of baptisms, and of laying on of hands, and of resurrection of the dead, and of eternal judgment (κρίμα).

-- Hebrews 6:2

Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.

-- Jude 1:7

 

 

Cave art all over the world shows digits may have been ritually removed, rendering Christian gospel accounts calling for self-mutilation less exceptional

In a paper presented at a recent meeting of the European Society for Human Evolution, researchers point to 25,000-year-old paintings in France and Spain that depict silhouettes of hands. On more than 200 of these prints, the hands lack at least one digit. In some cases, only a single upper segment is missing; in others, several fingers are gone. ... Four sites in Africa, three in Australia, nine in North America, five in south Asia and one in south-east Asia contain evidence of finger amputation. “This form of self-mutilation has been practised by groups from all inhabited continents,” said Collard. “More to the point, it is still carried out today, as we can see in the behaviour of people like the Dani.”

More. 

 

The Christian gospel accounts have been dismissed perennially as mere hyperbole:

And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. 

-- Matthew 5:29f.

Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire. And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.

-- Matthew 18:8f.

And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched:

Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.

And if thy foot offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter halt into life, than having two feet to be cast into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched:

Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.

And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire:

Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.

-- Mark 9:43ff.

 

This older tradition is remembered in stark contrast to the miracle working Jesus of resurrection imagination who is wont to undo some of these extreme expressions of repentance:

The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them. 

-- Matthew 11:5

And great multitudes came unto him, having with them those that were lame, blind, dumb, maimed, and many others, and cast them down at Jesus' feet; and he healed them:  Insomuch that the multitude wondered, when they saw the dumb to speak, the maimed to be whole, the lame to walk, and the blind to see: and they glorified the God of Israel. 

-- Matthew 15:30f. 

And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple; and he healed them. 

-- Matthew 21:14 

And in that same hour he cured many of their infirmities and plagues, and of evil spirits; and unto many that were blind he gave sight. Then Jesus answering said unto them, Go your way, and tell John what things ye have seen and heard; how that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, to the poor the gospel is preached.

-- Luke 7:21f.

All kidding aside, it's stunning that a believing Catholic like Ross Douthat thinks morality is a secondary aspect of religion

 Here:

But the challenge does run a little deeper if the only parts of church that Dad believes in are the secondary goods of religion (community and morality and solidarity and choral music), while the primary good — communion with God and the integration of human life with divine purposes — is assumed to probably be so much wishful thinking even before the specific dogmatic questions get involved.

 

 

Stunning because Douthat elsewhere recognized, in 2011, that the unique human characteristic of passing moral judgment is demonstrative of the way human beings strangely stand outside nature, just like God:

Second, the idea that human beings are fashioned, in some way, in the image of the universe’s creator explained why your own relationship to the world was particularly strange. Your fourth- or 14th-century self was obviously part of nature, an embodied creature with an animal form, and yet your consciousness also seemed to stand outside it, with a peculiar sense of immaterial objectivity, an almost God’s-eye view — constantly analyzing, tinkering, appreciating, passing moral judgment.

God desires mercy, not sacrifice (Matthew 9:13; 12:7):

Then his lord, after that he had called him, said unto him, O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt, because thou desiredst me:  Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant, even as I had pity on thee? And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due unto him. So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses.  

-- Matthew 18:32ff.

Douthat, like much of Christianity and the West, suffers from too much vertically-oriented individualism, at least this year, for which we'll just have to forgive him.

"I came not to judge the world", or "Woe unto the world"?

This is another one of the few places in which Matthew preserves a memory of the historical Jesus' "Jew only" gospel. There are "woes" on Jews, too, of course. Many in Israel are called, but few even of them are chosen. There is no thought of calling Gentiles and Samaritans, only the lost sheep of the house of Israel. οὐαὶ τῷ κόσμῳ.

John is part of the post-crucifixion consensus whose hand thoroughly contaminates and dominates the record with Christianity as universal religion, open to all.

Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!

-- Matthew 18:7

And if any man hear my words, and believe not, I judge him not: for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world.

-- John 12:47

On the incoherence of Matthew's Gospel on forgiveness by the Son of Man

The triple tradition contains the healing of the paralytic at Capernaum at Matthew 9:1ff. (Mark 2:1ff., Luke 5:17ff.).

And at Matthew 9:6 we have 

But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power ["authority"] on earth to forgive sins, (then saith he to the sick of the palsy,) Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house.

Jesus performs the healing, it is said, to demonstrate his authority to forgive sins in answer to the charge of blasphemy, since only God can forgive sins it is believed. But this explanation of blasphemy is unstated in Matthew, unlike Mark 2:7 and Luke 5:21.

Matthew, or his editor, has trimmed the content just this little bit, doubtlessly because he feels the difficulty involved because of what he has Jesus say on the subject just previously in the Sermon on the Mount. This "solution" is clumsy and incomplete, and still hands us here a Jesus with authority to forgive sins, as if forgiveness were only God's prerogative.

But Matthew's Jesus doesn't really believe that. He believes it is every man's prerogative, nay, obligation. Matthew's Jesus believes forgiveness is the sine qua non of discipleship. And if the obligation, then it must be effectual.

After this manner therefore pray ye ... forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. ...
For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you:

But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

-- Matthew 6:9ff.  

One need hardly mention here how this is consistent with the keys of the kingdom duties of the "church" in Matthew 16 and 18 in binding and loosing sins and trespasses, on which see on those passages.

Clearly the triple tradition introduces a foreign conception at this point in Matthew. It is concerned with the Christ of faith, not with the Jesus of history, with the divine Jesus who was a sacrifice for sins, not with the eschatological prophet of repentance. Hence the introduction of miracles to validate the new narrative.

As such the triple tradition's understanding of Son of Man is also suspect, suffering as it is from reinterpretation in conformity with the post-resurrection rationalization of Jesus' death. The title has already lost touch with what its owner meant by it and is starting to signify something else. The Son of Man in Jesus' mind is a military figure who is suddenly coming with the divine armies of God for judgment, at which time it will be too late for forgiveness. Hence the urgency of forgiveness now. One cannot wait for someone else to win it and bestow it. The disciple must bestow it himself, or be lost with the many following the broad path to destruction.

Minos, the final arbiter of the two ways in the afterlife

On Minos' right hand Rhadamanthys, and on his left Aeacus

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Minos, the strict inquisitor, appears,

And lives and crimes, with his assessors, hears;

Round in his urn the blended balls he rowls,

Absolves the just, and dooms the guilty souls.

-- John Dryden's Aeneid 

 

Then spake Zeus: ... 'Now I, knowing all this before you, have appointed sons of my own to be judges; two from Asia, Minos and Rhadamanthys, and one from Europe, Aiakos (Aeacus). These, when their life is ended, shall give judgement in the meadow at the dividing of the road, whence are the two ways leading, one to the Isles of the Blest (Nesoi Makaron), and the other to Tartaros. And those who come from Asia shall Rhadamanthys try, and those from Europe, Aiakos; and to Minos I will give the privilege of the final decision, if the other two be in any doubt; that the judgement upon this journey of mankind may be supremely just . . .’

-- Plato, Gorgias 523ff.

 

Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

-- Matthew 7:13f.

 

There are two Ways, one of Life and one of Death; but there is a great difference between the two Ways.

-- Didache I.1

 

But if he will not hear [thee, then] take with thee one or two more, that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established.

-- Matthew 18:16

The absence of "church", "saints" and "early catholicism"

You will search in vain for church and saints [ἐκκλησία and ἁγίων] in the gospels, save for Matthew 16:18, Matthew 18:17 and Matthew 27:52 (and what "saints" meant in the latter isn't exactly the same idea which we find after the gospels, but let's not open that can of worms right now).

The gospels dubiously tell us Jesus predicted his future death and resurrection on the third day, but the future church and its many members? not so much, which only underscores the dubiosity of the third-day rising predictions. (For fun, I resurrect the word "dubiosity", which had fallen into disuse already by the time of Samuel Johnson).

You would think that a guy who knew he was going to rise from the dead and found a church would have said much more about it. After all, predicting the future church is small potatoes compared with predicting your own crucifixion and resurrection on the third day. Jesus' imagination was clearly focused on something less pedestrian than the now interminable church age and the salvation of its billions of goyim.

And you would also think the church would have made him talk much more about it.

Talk of the "church" only in a little corner of Matthew is probably "early catholicism" at work, or at least something like it. It looks suspiciously similar to the insertion of the third-day-rising predictions themselves. It too is propaganda, but on a much smaller scale.

This tells us something very important.

The absence of "church" from the gospel tradition, even from John, testifies to, if not the sway of a smoldering conception of the eschatological future imagined by Jesus, at least to the enduring cognitive dissonance the memory of that still produced. The problem still being wrestled with in the gospels is the death of Jesus and the failure of the end of the world to materialize, not something else. This dissonance probably had everything to do with the production of the written gospels in the first place. The emphasis on, and the similarity of, the passion narratives in the gospels both make that plain.

The absence of "church" as a category, however, points to an earlier stage in this process of self-reflection than we find in the epistles. We are not yet at the later self-referential stage of the church found in Paul and elsewhere in the New Testament after the gospels where "church" and "saints" are most definitely used as routine categories. This means the material in the gospels, if not the gospels themselves, dates much earlier than is generally appreciated. The absence of "church" in the gospels is thus similar in significance for their dating to the gospels' failure to mention the destruction of the Jewish temple. Together they point to a date for the gospels before 70, perhaps well before.

It is difficult to believe that when the rest of the New Testament after the Fourth Gospel is loaded with uses of "church" and "saints" that the gospels could possibly come from that era.

The hypothesis of an intrusion of "early catholicism" has not been without its problems, however, for example for the composition of Luke-Acts. It is almost inconceivable that the repeated use of "church" in Acts, for example, comes from the very same hand as gave us the Gospel of Luke, or at least that Acts comes from the same time period of composition as the gospel, a point which perhaps speaks against the two-volume history hypothesis of Luke-Acts. But it is more inconceivable that on the original conception in New Testament scholarship of "early catholicism" at work all over the place in Luke's Gospel that it could be an exponent of that without once mentioning the church. To make matters worse for the theory as originally conceived, the third gospel's unique witness to some of Jesus' most pointed eschatological assertions hardly fits the relatively more mundane future ecclesiastical setting from which it is supposed to have sprung.

What this means is that as a phenomenon "early catholicism" remains a useful hypothetical category whose content has to be rethought and scaled back. The gospels' solution to the eschatological dilemma which occasioned their composition in the first place supplies that content. Early catholicism is thus at the same time a lot earlier than originally conceived and dedicated to a different object.

It seems best to view the gospels as earlier than 70, at least in spirit, and as attempts to rewrite the narrative of the failed eschatological message of Jesus.

Jesus enters into life maimed

Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have. And when he had thus spoken, he shewed them his hands and his feet.

-- Luke 24:39f.

The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe. And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you. Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing.

-- John 20:25ff.

Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire. 

-- Matthew 18:8

And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched:

-- Mark 9:43

And if thy foot offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter halt into life, than having two feet to be cast into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched:

-- Mark 9:45

Paul's idea of the kingdom of God would have been foreign to Jesus and John the Baptist

Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption.

-- 1 Corinthians 15:50

And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

-- Matthew 5:29f.

Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire. And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.

-- Matthew 18:8f.

And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched . . . And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire:

-- Mark 9:43, 47

And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect's sake those days shall be shortened.

-- Matthew 24:22

And except that the Lord had shortened those days, no flesh should be saved: but for the elect's sake, whom he hath chosen, he hath shortened the days.

-- Mark 13:20

And all flesh shall see the salvation of God.

-- Luke 3:6

Nebraska Has A Lutheran Pastor, Dan Delzell, Who Doesn't Know The Catechism

A Lutheran pastor should know better than to ask, as Rev. Delzell does for The Christian Post, here:

"Is it up to us to hand out the punishment to lawbreakers....and the free gift of eternal life to sinners who repent and believe the good news? All of this is beyond us, and outside of our human understanding."

Well yes, it is up to you. And no, it is not beyond us.

I guess they don't teach The Office Of The Keys anymore in the Lutheran Church, number five of the six chief parts of the small catechism, knowledge of which was normally assumed in pastors, and also expected of confirmands . . . already at the age of 13.

It is based on these texts:

And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

-- Matthew 16:19

Verily I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. ... Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.

-- Matthew 18:18, 21f.

Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; [and] whose soever [sins] ye retain, they are retained.

-- John 20:23

Clearly in Matthew the emphasis is on the side of overflowing mercy, but you rarely find that from Christians these days, who are very quick to condemn.

Things are evidently worse in Lutheranism than I thought.