The Holy Spirit

Discussion in 'Sacred Scripture' started by Rexlion, Aug 29, 2021.

  1. Oseas

    Oseas Member

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    In my post #108 I wrote: 1John 5:v.7 - There are three that bear record in heaven (heaven is not the physical space of Universe, but celestial plasce in Christ JESUS-Ephesians 1:v.3, Philippians 3:v.20-21, among other references), the Father -GOD the Father- , the Word -the Word made flesh-JESUS- , and the Holy Spirit -John 16:v.7-15- : and these three are One.


    In the post #110 Invictus said "

    In my reply to Invictus, I said:
    It's hard to believe you said that "1John 5:v.7 - There are three that bear record in heaven..." is not part of the Bible. What you said is not true, of course. Be careful.

    NOTE: It seems you are saying that I said "is not part of the Bible". It was Invictus, not me, who said the verse I quoted as above, it "is not part of the Bible".
     
  2. Botolph

    Botolph Well-Known Member

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    The weight of contemporary scolarship would render the text of 1 John 5:7 "There are three that testify". In that context I understood the point @Invictus was making and tried, clearly vainly, to bring that to your attention.
     
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  3. Tiffy

    Tiffy Well-Known Member

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    Most of it is 'escapist' wishful thinking or 'vengeful' - 'Give it to all those horrible sinners God', - 'Except for ME of course'. Those that obsessively go in for it, only reveal their own inner heart's desires generally, not being indicative of any particular determination to know and do the will of Christ in his world.
    .
     
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  4. Tiffy

    Tiffy Well-Known Member

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    Quite so. The RSV has for 1 John 5:7 - And the Spirit is the witness, because the Spirit is the truth. Nothing about heaven at all. I don't know how heaven crept into the text but apparently it wasn't in any of the major manuscripts handed down to the church and finding their way into The Bible.
    .
     
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  5. Rexlion

    Rexlion Well-Known Member

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    Well, therein likes the problem. It's "contemporary (i.e., modern) scholarship." People who have bias or antipathy toward the Bible version read by and quoted by Protestants for centuries. Now, what denomination could be behind that, do you suppose? :p
     
  6. Invictus

    Invictus Well-Known Member

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    What are you talking about? Anglicans were among the leaders in the establishment of modern textual criticism, as it turns out. This isn’t some conspiracy, Rexlion. The interpolation simply isn’t in either the majority of manuscripts or the earliest ones. It’s not even a classic trinitarian formulation; it probably originated from Gnosticism. In any case, it’s not part of the Bible. Only KJV-Onlyists dispute this nowadays. I personally happen to be quite fond of the KJV. Nevertheless some of the translations it contains as well as some minor portions of its textual basis haven’t held up to scrutiny in the intervening centuries. That’s not antipathy, it’s just reality.
     
    Last edited: Jul 5, 2022
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  7. Tiffy

    Tiffy Well-Known Member

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    If the only scholarship treated with credence is "OLD" scholarship, and anything 'NEW' in scholarship is to be treated with disdain, then we would still be worshipping by candlelight, very near living in the dark ages.

    Q. How many Boris Johnson supporters does it take to change a light bulb?
    A. None at all, he just tells them he's done it and they all then continue sitting in darkness and effusively congratulating him.
    .
     
  8. Rexlion

    Rexlion Well-Known Member

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    Sorry if I didn't make myself clear. I'm not suggesting that any Anglicans are biased against KJV. I'm referring to the so-called "scholars" like Hort, Westcott, and some others; their anti-KJV sentiments have been documented. And their "scholarship" leans heavily upon the codex "discovered" by Tischendorf, Codex Sinaiticus (with all its problems). Tischendorf's efforts appear to have been sponsored by the RCC, and the translalation work of Westcott & Hort was supported by the RCC. That is the denomination which has regarded Protestantism, along with the Bible version it used for centuries, with contempt and hatred, at least until the leopard tried to change its spots with Vatican II.
     
  9. Invictus

    Invictus Well-Known Member

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    I’m sorry but that’s KJV-Onlyist conspiracy theory rubbish. When Westcott and Hort were doing their work, the RCC was telling the faithful they could not “safely” question the status of the Johannine Comma, which was in Catholic editions of the Bible at that time.
     
  10. Invictus

    Invictus Well-Known Member

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    The reference to the papal decision in 1897 regarding the Johannine Comma can be found in Denzinger:

    [From the Decree of the Holy Office, January 13, 1897, and the Declaration of the Holy Office, June 2, 1927]
    2198 To the question: "Whether it can safely be denied, or at least called intodoubt that the text of St. John in the first epistle, chapter 5, verse 7, is authentic, which read as follows: 'And there are three thatgive testimony in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost. And these three are one?' "---the response was given on January 13, 1897: In the negative. At this response there arose on June 2, 1927, the following declaration, at first given privately by the same Sacred Congregation and afterwards repeated many times, which was made a part of public law in EB n. 121 by authority of the Holy Office itself:
    "This decree was passed to check the audacity of private teachers who attributed to themselves the right either of rejecting entirely the authenticity of the Johannine comma, or at least of calling it into question by their own final judgment. But it was not meant at all to prevent Catholic writers from investigating the subject more fully and, after weighing the arguments accurately on both sides, with that and temperance which the gravity of the subject requires, from inclining toward an opinion in opposition to its authenticity, provided they professed that they were ready to abide by the judgment of the Church, to which the duty was delegated by Jesus Christ not only of interpreting Holy Scripture but also of guarding it faithfully."
    Roman Catholic editions of the Bible did not begin omitting the Comma until 1979, with the promulgation of the Nova Vulgata by Pope John Paul II. Protestant Bibles were excluding it as early as 1881, with the publication of the Revised Version.
     
  11. Rexlion

    Rexlion Well-Known Member

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    I have no idea why you're fixating on the "Comma." The differences stretch far beyond one passage in the Bible.
     
  12. Invictus

    Invictus Well-Known Member

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    I'm not "fixated" on anything. The Comma is what we've been talking about. I'm not going to discuss debunked KJV-Onlyist conspiracy theories. That's a waste of time for all concerned.
     
  13. Rexlion

    Rexlion Well-Known Member

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    You throw that phrase around as if it were a 'swear word.' Do you have an axe to grind with people who think their particular Bible version is the best version?

    I am not an "Onlyist" but I have read their reasoning concerning the historical evidence and found it compelling. Anyone who thinks that the RCC was all nicey-nice, holy, and friendly toward people who disagreed with them must be living in la-la land. One does not need to be a "conspiracy theorist" to recognize historical facts.
     
  14. Botolph

    Botolph Well-Known Member

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    If we are going to rely on the Bible, we need to know that the Bible we rely on is reliable. Now we know that the New Testament was primarily written in Koine Greek - the Greek spoken in trade across the empire. The extension to the original text is not in the original Greek manuscripts, as best we can determine. Its origins appear to be in Latin manuscripts, and then later written into Greek manuscripts initially as a margin note and then fully into the text.

    Now I am not disputing that the text is a very convenient weapon when it comes to refuting Arianism, however, the bible is not a club, but a sword. We can refute Arianism with the work of the Cappadocian Fathers, and of course, they relied, as do we, on the Johannine Prologue.

    The work of translating the Epistles for the KJV was done by the second Westminster Company, translated the Epistles: William Barlow, John Spenser, Roger Fenton, Ralph Hutchinson, William Dakins, Michael Rabbet, Thomas Sanderson (who probably had already become Archdeacon of Rochester). Erasmus initially committed the comma, and later was prevailed upon to include it. The work of translation relied in part on work that had been done on earlier translations including the Bishops Bible, which was influenced by the Latin Vulgate.

    The problem that it presents is where we allow our theology to inform the text, rather than allowing the text to inform our theology, we end up with a house of cards.

    https://www.bible-researcher.com/comma.html

     
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  15. Invictus

    Invictus Well-Known Member

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    I don't know what that means. Their "reasoning", if it can be called that, has been debunked by competent scholars time and again. It is on the same level of scientific rigor as flat-earthism, and I simply have little patience for either, in an age when we have such things as digitized comparison of manuscripts, and manned flights into space. More importantly, the arguments underlying the KJV-Onlyist movement are part and parcel of the extreme anti-intellectual fringe of American fundamentalism, which I have zero interest in discussing on an Anglican forum, or anywhere else for that matter.

    My only interest in discussing the Comma at all was because Oseas seemed not to be aware of the textual issues involved in citing it as an authority. My attitude toward it is the same as it is toward the Apocrypha: I don't have an issue with its inclusion in printed Bibles or its being read in churches that prefer the traditional-language liturgy (the interpolation occurs in the Epistle reading for the first Sunday after Easter in the 1662 liturgy), but it is not (and historically was not) the basis of any doctrine.
     
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  16. Rexlion

    Rexlion Well-Known Member

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    Very well then, let's review the evidence in favor of the Johanine Comma. For starters, read this article (by a person who is neither a "KJV-Onlyist nor biased against the Comma). There is ample evidence that the Comma was present in 1 John. Eugenius quoted the Comma while addressing the Council of Carthage in 484 A.D. Cyprian quoted it in his writing, On the Unity of the Catholic Church (roughly 250 A.D.). Jerome wrote in his Prologue to the Canonical Epistles that the Comma had been improperly removed from many copies (quite likely by Arian scribes). The Comma is said to have been present in the Old Latin and, IIRC, in the Peshitta.

    Furthermore, the text of 1 John 5 makes more sense with the Comma than without. It has been observed by some scholars that the Comma’s presence provides greater grammatical consistency. It is my understanding that Greek grammar calls for gender agreement among sentence parts. One writer stated: “If the Comma is present, the masculine article, participle, and number in the apodosis of verse 7 then agree with the two masculine (Father, Word) and one neuter (Spirit) nouns in the protasis. This agreement is made by means of the principle of attraction, a rule of Greek syntax by which a masculine noun in a series of nouns within the same clause determines, or ‘attracts’ to itself, the gender for the series as a whole.... if the Comma does not appear in the text, then the masculine predicate in the apodosis of verse 7 is mated with the three neuter nouns (water, blood, spirit) found in verse 8 (which then becomes the subordinate clause), a serious grammatical error...”

    I think it is high time that some people accept the fact that the arguments against the Johanine Comma are most certainly disputable. There is ample, I repeat, ample evidence to support the belief that John truly wrote the Trinitarian phraseology in question. Neither "correcting" nor denigrating the quoting of the Comma should be tolerated on this forum. It is in the Bible.
     
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  17. Invictus

    Invictus Well-Known Member

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    I will read the link you posted later this evening. Please answer me this, though: did you read the link Botolph posted earlier in this thread?
     
  18. Botolph

    Botolph Well-Known Member

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    I really do not agree. I did read the article and it does seem to me that it pushes the envelope quite a bit. Pushing it into the mouths of the Greek Fathers does not excite me, and I have no doubt that they accepted the theology it commends. I most certainly do not think that Gregory of Nazianzus had any familiarity with the Johannine Comma, or he would have used it. Why was it not presented at the 1st Council of Constantinople? Because it was not known is the most obvious answer.

    I refuse to be cancelled.
     
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  19. Rexlion

    Rexlion Well-Known Member

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    Yes, it was quite brief.
     
  20. Invictus

    Invictus Well-Known Member

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    But action-packed, and hard to argue with.