I'm not sure there's going to be much point in arguing this since there's no way to establish what kind of expressions the 4th century church would or would not have interpreted in a way that they considered theologically problematic, but it's not at all clear to me that this verse is...
No one is disagreeing that the Gospel of Thomas is non-canonical. That is a given. However, the quotes you posted earlier are from a different text, and the links you just posted are also all for different texts than the one that is the subject of this thread. (edit: except for your last link...
I'm not sure I'd agree with that. Galatians 3:27 says (and the eastern orthodox liturgy has sung) that "as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ." It's certainly possible to nuance different meanings of becoming "like" Jesus and say some are rejected and some are not, but I...
That's the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which is not the same text we were discussing, just fwiw
Infancy Gospel of Thomas - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Gospel of Thomas - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
As far as reacting to the religious or spiritual content of the Gospel of Thomas, I have never personally been as drawn to it as I have (for example) the Sermon on the Mount, or the Johannine tradition. Although I think something like half of the sayings are at least quite close to sayings found...
I agree with this, and a point I've attempted to make in the past is that, even within Christianity, where I believe (perhaps alongside Islam) the classical view of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God came to be prevalent theologically, it does not seem to me to be true that such a...
For me, the question "is there a deeper meaning?" is a question of faith. By which I mean both that I don't think it can be demonstrated that there is a deeper meaning in an objectively certain way, and also that the search for meaning itself requires an openness to what is unknown, and that is...
I'm afraid I don't understand what the distinction would be between giving his faith a name that would be distinct from his religion. Since you said "not his religion", I interpreted the question along the lines of the answer I gave. I probably don't have anything useful to say about the...
I would say he had faith that he was not separate from his heavenly Father, who he dared to call Abba. He had faith that love and mercy, patterned after the connection he felt with God ("be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect..."), could heal and make people whole, and that human evil...
You're thinking of the term "ex cathedra". I'm not an expert, but I'm not sure that the catholic church would consider papal statements made ex cathedra to have the same sort of authority as scripture, although they assert that in some sense they are infallible. Papal authority is a point of...
Without pretending to demonstrate in some perfectly neutral and objective way the "correctness" of this approach, which I don't think is possible, the eastern orthodox view is a little different from the way questions about biblical authority and inspiration are usually presented, and I think...
I think the question is hard to answer without teasing out a lot of presuppositions. For example:
I'm not sure Orthodoxy would agree with the statement that Mary was "born with sin", but it depends on what you mean by it. I assume it's a reference to the idea of "original sin" (or the Orthodox...
I think you have pointed out difficulties with democracy that are real problems, but I think Bunnyip may have succinctly responded to many of them when he said that what was so great about democracy was the alternatives. Both the problems cited and the defense based on an evaluation of...
Thank you. I will now stop pestering you obnoxiously :P (True story, at first I just typed "I will not stop pestering you obnoxiously" but I decided to correct it...)
I've said repeatedly that I'm not suspecting your intent. My criticism is with your actual words and choice of example, which perpetuates a racist stereotype (and is also contradicted by the actual evidence) regardless of your intent.