RE: Ask a Traditional Catholic
July 7, 2015 at 9:17 pm
(This post was last modified: July 7, 2015 at 9:48 pm by Metis.)
(July 7, 2015 at 7:46 pm)Randy Carson Wrote: Rather than respond to ALL of the nonsense in your post, I'm going to direct you to a great article by Tim Staples which not only corrects your numerous errors regarding Mary and Joseph but utterly destroys James White at the same time.
Kind of a two-fer for me.
When Were Joseph and Mary Married?
By Tim Staples
http://www.catholic.com/blog/tim-staples...ry-married
Seems a bit of a cop out to me Randy, you ignore almost all of what I write and instead decide to zoom in on one point and provide a link instead of an explanation. I might be willing to trawl through the text to find your points, in this case ones I already knew, but many of the members are viewing this on smartphones and other devices this is very inconvenient to do on. You'll get a far better response if you can condense it into readable chunks. Part of being an apologist is adapting your evangelistic techniques to the environment right?
Anyway...I find a few faults with this.
1. As someone who can read Koine Greek, the entire babble there about the reading of apolusai is quite misleading, more points with which to furnish my claim that Catholicisim encourages deception. I can't stand this in Christian apologetics between denominations, unless you're debating an Greek Orthodox Hieromonk Mystic most of your debating partners are not going to be able to check these points and will either have to defer or ask someone else, usually someone strongly aligned to a specific denomination and interpretation, to give their version. Even the clergy who go in for Masters in divinity don't always learn Koine Greek, they often do what amounts to a crash course in depth comparable to learning how to order soup in French(most non-Greek Orthodox M.Div students I know usually choose Latin or Hebrew instead for their primary language if it is part of their program), it's such a specialist debating point and actually irrelevant in this context. Smoke and mirrors to detract focus.
Let me give you a comparison. In Victorian England the Betrothal was a legal contract, one which if the man reneged upon his promise he would face retribution and punishment from the legal system. There were no inheritance rights in a betrothal, but there was certainly financial and provisional obligations.
To "send away", apolusai, refers to that, to back out before sealing the pact of marriage fully. I suppose it could be construed in the right sentence to mean divorce but this article you share insists it means this in all cases, which it simply does not. I wouldn't mind so much if it admitted this was a potential interpretation, but not saying "this is all it can mean". It's like saying "that's rubbish" can only ever refer to a literal pile of trash.
2. The guy who wrote this clearly has not read Leviticus, "ratified the marriage"? In Rabbinical post-temple Judaism to a degree this may have some truth, but it was all about the physical act under the temple Mosaic law.
3. This is not something a Christian apologist would raise, but I find the focus upon the tense of the exchange between Gabriel and Mary interesting. The Gospels are not a videotape of what happened, they are accounts of things that had occurred in the already distant (I'll be very generous and say between 50-150+ years to cover all the Gospels) past. Supposing the claims of the synoptic gospels actually being penned by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are true, which almost all modern biblical scholarship rejects,...but just supposing they were, these men were babies or not yet even conceived when Mary had this conversation.
Focusing on the tense used by someone in a conversation that occurred at very least fifty years ago, and possibly before you were even born? Now if this was the Gospel according to Mary I would be more inclined to consider this point, but it's the Gospel according to Luke.
Are you going to answer all my points, or just hope I forget about them while reading another one of these tracts?
I'm not sure why you think I would care about James White being destroyed; he makes a few valid points on a few theological topics, I still think he's wrong about the bigger picture. I actually have seen James White being put into a difficult corner in a live debate myself, but this tract was far from that. Talk about cherry picking quotes.
