Search not the Book of Mormon for truly great allegory.

[jay santos]

Originally Posted by SeattleUte

This is as ignorant as if someone were to say that Anglican culture hijacked America. In fact, the analogy between early Amricans educated by and drawing on an Anglo-Saxon tradition spanning thousands of years (back to the Greeks, actually) in founding the American Republic, including writing its seminal documents in their native English, and Jews educated by Greeks and drawing on an ancient Greek tradition spanning thousand of years in founding Christianity, including writing the Gospels, the Epistles of Paul, etc. in their native Greek toungue, is quite precise. Christianity absent the Greek is as unthinkable as America absent the English.

In the West, Greece was not just the mother country, it was the very embodiment of culture and education clear to the fall of Rome. Most of the great historians in antiquity through the Roman period wrote in Greek, were Greeks or Greek educated. Greek culture and eductation made Christianty possible and literally created it. So you have the Gospels written in Greek, with Christ ostensibly quoting from a Greek Bible, and a Hellenized Jew (Paul) paraphrasing Plato and Aristotle in generating the concepts of body and soul, spirit, the atonement, etc.

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.