Quote:
Originally Posted by jay santos
You're doing a very good job beating up a straw man on this.
ChinoCoug, Robinson, FARMS, and I all believe there is a knowable fact about God's state whether it be spirit or flesh. If that truth was revealed to Paul and taught to early Christians in 50 AD but then modified between 50 and 150 AD by good people who were influenced by Greek philosophy (nothing personal it's just different than what was revealed by God to man), then that is a bad thing for ChinoCoug, Robinson, FARMS, and me. It may be a great thing for you, and that's fine for you to believe that way. But you needn't bash on the intellectual and professional level of those that say it's a bad thing.
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FARMS is trying to develop an empirical, historical explanation for the "Great Apostasy." The problem is it's a distortion of history, and limiting. There may at one time have existed some small inconsequential sect of Hebrew speaking Jews that were not imbued with Greek culture calling themselves Christians. Harold Bloom purports have identified such a thing. But the Jesus of the Gospels, the Christianity of the New testament, was not corrupted by some later encounter with Greek. They ARE Greek, at a cellular level, right down to their DNA. Harold Bloom recognizes this, saying the NT is foreign to him, as a Jew.
Again, it's like saying America was corrupted by some later encounter with Great Britain. Maybe the Pilgrims would say that, but the Pilgrims would not and could not have written the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Fedaralist papers, etc. The irony is that if one were to say that about America, he wouldn't be talking about the same America even the declarant thought he was referencing. He'dr really just be talking about the American wilderness, not America at all.
Especially now that the LDS Church has conceded Lamanites are not American Indians, the Great Apostasy may be the LDS doctrine I find most objectionable. Next to murder, religion's greatest crime is distorting and obscuring the eveidence about human and natural history.