Walking Christian

Today (Tuesday, September 18, 2012) an announce was made. A new fragment from a previously unknown Gospel has been “discovered.” I put discovered in quotes because with this sort of thing it is usually the case that a fragment or such will be discovered decades earlier but won’t be translated or get attention until later. The Sea Scrolls were discovered in the 30s and published in their full form in the 90s because of legal and governmental issues. It is claimed that this fragment lends support to idea of Jesus having been married.

I am unaware of the location the fragment was discovered but because it is Written in Coptic (the language of the native people of Egypt during the later half of the Roman period, spoken by the lower social class of people like Athanasius of Alexandria) we will assume it was located in Egypt where documents have a greater chance of surviving because of the humid climate. Though the scholar making the claims Karen King admits in her presentation today at the Vatican conference for Coptic studies, “nothing is known about the circumstances of its original discovery or early ownership.” It is possible that this document may turn out to be a forgery, one remembers the James ossuary controversy of 2004 where a Jewish coffin supposedly belonging to James the Just (Brother of the Lord) was uncovered and was later exposed as a forgery. Putting aside any doubts about authenticity for a moment let us consider what the reality is.

The fragment only contains 8 lines on one side and 6 on the other. The only quotation anyone is talking about from the document is “Jesus said to them ‘my wife’…” and then the rest of the text is cut off. And another quotation “she can be a disciple.” That’s it that’s all that’s being said. So what we have here is a document written under a fake name like the rest of the non-conical gospels (IE, Thomas, Philip, Mary, proto-James, proto-Matthew etc. none of which written by any disciples). This forgery was dated to the fourth century, 300 years after the life of Jesus written in a foreign language to the events and times it describes, though King supposes the document like Thomas was written in Greek originally and what was found is a later Coptic translation, we have yet to see evidence for this claim. Given the short length of the document, and a lack of context, what can we really say about it? I don’t speak Greek but I’m told ‘wife’ can also mean simply ‘woman’ in some cases. This reminds me of Gabriel’s vision where it is said that there was prophecy about the messiah being resurrected, when in fact the line being translated by anti-christian scholars could also read as just “get up.” I submit to you that it is possible that Ms. King is simply letting a post Da Vinci Code perspective color her translation of the text.

In a quote made by the Washington Post King says “Christian tradition has long held that Jesus was not married, even though no reliable historical evidence exists to support that claim,” this quote would seem to spell out a biased against the Gospels as being reliable history about the life of Jesus. The fact is that the 4 canonical Gospels are our best sources of information about the life of Jesus as even noted by the radically liberal and anti-Christian Bart Ehrman in his 2006 debate with William Lane Craig.  Folks our best sources are totally silent on Jesus having a wife.

In the earliest years of the Church it is James the Just  (the brother of the Lord) who takes over as leader of the movement after Jesus and after James is put to death, Simeon another of their relatives takes over. You never hear of a wife or son taking the family business and continuing the message of Jesus. There was no wife and no children. The fact of the matter is that there is NO good source that says that Jesus did have a wife. The definitive argument against this is in 1 Cor 9:3-6 aswhen Paul is speaking about taking his wife with him on missionary journeys. Paul in effects says “Peter brings his wife along and so does James the brother of the Lord, why can’t I do it.” Would it have not been better for Paul to say “Jesus took his wife” if Jesus was in fact married?  NO ONE AT ALL SAYS JESUS HAD A WIFE! We don’t get these kind of crazy claims until long after the death of Jesus in far off lands and you can find every crazy theory under the sun from it was actually Simon of Cyrene who was crucified on the cross like Islam teaches from the Gnostic documents to Jesus had a secret twin brother named Thomas AKA “the Twin.” Trying to put these stories back into the real life of Jesus is like saying Abraham Lincoln was actually a vampire hunter based on the recent movie by the title Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

What we actually have here is more of the media in an anti-Christian world seeing a new way to cash in on the old and already refuted lies of people like Dan Brown and  the Da Vinci Code and Michael Baigent and the Jesus Papers. The first page of Da Vinci Code straight up tells you that there is little historical fact in the book at all and in fact it is all fiction if not straight up lies! But people take it as undercutting the truth of the Gospel and latch on to it like it is itself gospel because they don’t want to look at the facts.

The conclusion simple, it wouldn’t matter if Jesus was married it would not have been a big deal or even a sin the fact is that people think it is a way of undercutting the Christian worldview so they latch on to straws to try to support the claims of fringe scholars and this fragment is no more proof than that there were crazy people 1600 years ago just like there are today. There is no evidence anywhere in history that Jesus had a wife and that’s a fact.

Foot notes
Info Ehrman’s view of Jesus and marriage provided by Robert in the comments.

Preface

This message is inspired by recent events in this blogging community being decisive and factious. My words are a paraphrase of messages God is speaking to much better people than myself right now. Creating sects and becoming heretic hunters is not God’s will for you. It is my intention to insult you and hopefully get you thinking about the way we’ve been acting.

When I became a Christian so many years ago, the clearest and most concise thing I realized about the walk I had in front of me was that I must first figure out exactly what church I wanted to attend. Let’s face it, there are 52,000+  Protestant denominations. America, you have more gods than you do towns. Through pure chance (or will of God) I connected with an unnamed Charismatic church. I attend a denominational church every week because God told me to. But you will never hear me identify with any denomination, because it is not God’s will. All you brothers and sisters standing on street corners wasting time protesting homosexual marriage or abortion, your efforts are in vain. Your signs should say “God hates denominations!” Yes, I said it, God hates what we are doing in the world. Why are you trying to make world policy reflect Christianity when you can’t even get your own house together you are screaming about the speck in the world’s eye and you can’t even see the plank in your own.  Jesus tells us that it will be better for the world on judgment day than it will for us, who have seen the light and messed it up Matthew 11:20-24. Let the world be the world and focus your efforts inward to healing the damage you’ve done to ourselves!

You Are Broken

Body of Christ, you are broken and you are too blind to see it. You tore out your eyes and cannot see that what you do displeases God. You have ripped out your ears so you cannot hear Jesus crying for your actions. You have taken your hands and thrown them in to the pits of hell where you can not get them back to undo the mess you’ve made of His church. Listen to me, why has Jesus last prayer gone unanswered? Why are we not one like He and the Father are one. The church in the deepest possible way is a metaphor for Jesus relationship to the Father, we were supposed to be perfect unity. The same language that is used of Jesus relationship to the Father is used of the Church. Ultimately, the design of man and woman as a marriage is a metaphor for the perfect Echad union of the Godhaed and the relationship of Christ to the church is that of man and woman marriage like we see in Eph 6. Listen to my words, why do you think homosexuality and other sexual sins are such a big deal if not because they violate God’s plan for man and woman and spit on that metaphor he gave us of being an Echad like the Father, Son and Spirit are an Echad. Further more what the church is doing by not being ONE is a WORSE insult to the Echad than any sexual immorality of the world.

Paul tells us that we are the one body, united by One faith, one baptism and one Spirit. But we have taken Jesus body and crucified it all over again and split into our thousands of sects and divisions. WAKE UP! WAKE UP! Body of Christ, revival is brought by bringing unity to the body not by preaching that you are the only one who knows the true way to salvation. Before the world can see the light, Jesus has to rise from his tomb and how can he do that if his body is broken in thousands of pieces and everyone wants to be an eye or a foot and not do the job he was given.

Listen to this message! Your relationship with God is directly and intimately connected to your relationship to PEOPLE! Jesus said the greatest commandment is: Love God and the second one just as important as the first, LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR! What is love if not a willingness to act on behalf of another? And who are you supposed to love? Everyone who only uses the KJV? Those who agree with you to worship on Saturday and not Sunday? The Pope? NO!! He says to “love one another as I have loved you” to be willing to DIE for someone else, people you hardly know like your neighbor, people you don’t like such as your ENEMIES! You have to love EVERY singly person in this world.

But you don’t. You split up the body over petty secondary issues that don’t even matter in eternity. WHO CARES IF YOU TAKE COMUNIION WITH GRAPE JUICE AND NOT WINE!? If Jesus is in you and Jesus is in me, you are my brother and you must love me and I must love you! Stop it, just stop it with your denominations and factions and cutting Jesus in a million pieces and refusing to listen to Jesus begging you to just act like one body.

The way we are acting is petty, it is stupid and it is not God’s will.

Closing prayer

God it is my earnest prayer that we realize that we are all part of the same family and it was the will of the enemy to turn Your Kingdom against itself so that it cannot stand and it is our Job as the official vehicles of God to FIX THIS MESS! God, we are one body and we need to realize that we are on the same team. Please help us stop making mountains out of mole hills  and to be holy and obey your commands. Help us to get back to biblical standards. Thank you Lord in the name of the only begotten God Jesus.

The vehicle through which the Kingdom of God advances is the people of God. The Lord as one of his final commandments to us says, “Go therefore into all nations baptizing them in the name of the Father, and the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Teach them to obey all that I have commanded you. Know that I am with you until the very end of time.” Here, in what we call the “great commission” Jesus gives us the commandment to go out in his name and begin the progressive reconquering of the nations of the world in to the Kingdom of God.

This fact is nothing unique to the New Testament, in fact the Kingdom has always been advanced through people in the Old and New Testament. But why? Where is God in this process, why is it not He himself who comes into the lives of his creation to take back the Kingdom? See, God was there in the beginning, with man in Eden. The Kingdom was perfection and God walked with man. Adam Sinned and God removed Himself from the Kingdom he intended to make the world into. I believe God hides himself from humanity in effect to protect us because he is perfection and we are sinners. But see, God tries all through history to be with humans. He is with us in the beginning, we sinned. He speaks to the people at Sinai and they are afraid of his voice, they ask Moses to be the mediator between them and God. He establishes new mediators in the Judges and speaks through them, but the people are not satisfied with God being their king, they want a man a visible form of the invisible source of authority. So gives them the land but they have to take it by force from the Canaanites it is through war that Joshua advances the kingdom. When the Judges are not enough God gives them a king for their kingdom. He gives them Saul, Saul goes his own way so He gives them David. David pleases the Lord and it is through His line that God promises the one person who will advance the kingdom more than any man.

And after a long time of the earthly kingdom Israel messes up and it gets taken away time and time again. So we come to that ultimate king that God promised would come through David. This time God the Son himself comes in the form of a man. He made the ultimate compromise in our desire to have a man as our mediator between He and us, He willing became a subject of creation… Jesus main message is for readiness of the coming Kingdom of God. And what do we do? We hear his teachings and that is too radical for us, so we crucify Him and He rises from the dead.

One cannot help but feel that in Jesus words of the great commission God finally has reached his wits end and can no longer reach out to tell us of the great Kingdom He is making out of the earth. He says to the handful of people who did comprehend the message, “You got it, now take it and go forth. Give it to the rest of the world.” But because God knows our weakness He did not just leave us to spread the Kingdom without His power. So the third person of the Trinity also comes to us, and in yet another compromise He does not live in the splendid palace of the temple that He had once called home in the Kingdom of Israel. No, this time his home becomes the hearts of dirty man, cleansed by the blood of Christ out vessel is capable of holding the image of deity which the third person holds. We can be home to the Spirit without exploding from His holiness. And so the promise is given that as we go forth acting in place of Christ to spread the Kingdom to our fellow man it will not be us, but Him in us preaching, teaching and performing all forms of signs. Indeed the main act-or of the book of Acts is the Holy Spirit with Christians as His vehicle.

And so, it is said that the major vehicle for the advancement of the Kingdom is the people of God. Those who the Spirit lives within are capable of bringing forth the Kingdom by being in a witness to the entire world of the truth of the Gospel. Now, our warfare is spiritual, prayer and fasting is the weapons we use to take territory the same way Joshua did; through brutal war against the things that stand between us and the fresh territory of our neighbors, friends, relatives and so on.

So, ask yourself… what territory have you captured for the Kingdom? If you have the Spirit in you, are you being a good vehicle for Him? Who in your life can you share the Gospel with today and maybe change their life and advance the Kingdom of God? Remember that if it is He driving your car, you cannot fail in your attempts to extend the Kingdom.

Thanks for reading.
God bless you
-PX

A graphic to speak about an old personal problem that plagues dozens of people every week.