The Befuddlement of Serapion
August 2, 2017 at 11:21 pm
(This post was last modified: August 3, 2017 at 12:59 am by Minimalist.)
In Bart Ehrman’s book: Forged: Writing in the Name of God, he recounts a tale about the Gospel of Peter as told by that noted church liar Eusebius in the 4th century. This begins on page 62. To summarize, Eusebius tells the story of the Bishop of Antioch, a man named Serapion. Eusebius of course is someone who always has to be looked at with skepticism as his attachment to the truth is sometimes tenuous. Still, it is hard to see what motivation he would have to misrepresent this tale.
So somewhere near the end of the 2d century/ beginning of the 3d Serapion mediated some sort of a dispute in the church of Rhossos, a nearby town. He was told that the dispute centered around the gospel that the church was using and, some might think oddly for c 200 AD, he did not seem to know of mark, matthew, luke and john. The gospel they were using was the gospel of peter.
Ehrman writes:
After he wipes his dick off, Ehrman notes that Serapion did something which most modern jesus freaks avoid like the plague. He read the offending book.
Ehrman goes off on whatever point he wanted to make but I was taken by the idea that a bishop, upon coming into contact with a new ‘gospel’ reads it, accepts the naming convention of Peter as being correct and finds the vast majority of it entirely acceptable. YET HE BANS IT BECAUSE IT DOES NOT CONFORM TO THE DOCTRINE WHICH HE BELIEVES IN! Now think about that for a moment. He’s holding a book which he believes to be the writing of fucking peter himself. For the most part the book is completely orthodox except for a couple of minor fuckups yet he is such an indoctrinated tool that he thinks the ‘apostle’ is wrong and he is right. What kind of brass cojones does it take to have such arrogance? I see this in some of our more retarded jesus freaks around here. They are so fucking indoctrinated that the concept that their particular vision of their bullshit might be incorrect never occurs to them.
So somewhere near the end of the 2d century/ beginning of the 3d Serapion mediated some sort of a dispute in the church of Rhossos, a nearby town. He was told that the dispute centered around the gospel that the church was using and, some might think oddly for c 200 AD, he did not seem to know of mark, matthew, luke and john. The gospel they were using was the gospel of peter.
Ehrman writes:
Quote: Serapion’s response was that Peter, of course, was a disciple of Jesus; any Gospel that he wrote must be perfectly acceptable. On these grounds he allowed the parishioners in Rhossus to continue using it.So Serapion was perfectly content to accept the book as something written by “peter” ( a supposedly illiterate fisherman from the hills of Galilee!) but then he finds that it contains heresies. What is a poor bishop to do? ( Aside from fucking an altar boy or two?)
But he did so without reading the book himself. When he returned to Antioch, he learned from several informers that the Gospel in fact was a problem—it contained heretical teachings. In particular, it was used by a group of Christians known as docetists.
After he wipes his dick off, Ehrman notes that Serapion did something which most modern jesus freaks avoid like the plague. He read the offending book.
Quote:When Serapion received word that the Gospel he had previously approved might contain docetic teachings, he was naturally disturbed, and so he procured a copy to read. Sure enough, he came to think that even though most of the account was perfectly “orthodox” (a “right teaching”), some parts were not. Serapion decided that the book was forged, and he wrote a letter to the Christians of Rhossus disallowing its use.
Ehrman goes off on whatever point he wanted to make but I was taken by the idea that a bishop, upon coming into contact with a new ‘gospel’ reads it, accepts the naming convention of Peter as being correct and finds the vast majority of it entirely acceptable. YET HE BANS IT BECAUSE IT DOES NOT CONFORM TO THE DOCTRINE WHICH HE BELIEVES IN! Now think about that for a moment. He’s holding a book which he believes to be the writing of fucking peter himself. For the most part the book is completely orthodox except for a couple of minor fuckups yet he is such an indoctrinated tool that he thinks the ‘apostle’ is wrong and he is right. What kind of brass cojones does it take to have such arrogance? I see this in some of our more retarded jesus freaks around here. They are so fucking indoctrinated that the concept that their particular vision of their bullshit might be incorrect never occurs to them.
