WALT Jr.
<< Hey Dad,
As for you point about 2 Peter being a forgery, I didn't realize
you wanted to talk about it. Of course if you want to (which I
know you don't) I will be more than happy to, however, you
really need to do more outsiding reading before just accepting
such assertions. >>
DAR
A little, just a little "outsiding reading" (whatever that is) for
Walt Jr. regarding 2 Peter:
*2 Peter
"We should keep in mind that biblical scholarship in general
rejects the tradition that the apostle Peter wrote 1 and 2 Peter.
At any rate, whoever wrote 1 Peter obviously thought that the
second coming was imminent, because he said, "But the end of
all things is AT HAND; be you therefore of sound mind and be
sober in prayer" (4:7). When Jesus didn't come as imminently
as
expected, 2 Peter was written in order to do a little damage
control, just as 2 Thessalonians was written to gloss over the
failure of Paul's prediction that some then living would still be
alive when Jesus returned. Thus, in 2 Peter 3, the writer spoke
about "mockers" who would come in the last days and say,
"Where is the promise of his coming, for from the days that the
fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the
beginning of the creation" (v:4)? So some explanation was
desperately needed to rationalize the problem. Hence, the
writer of 2 Peter said, "Well, one day with the Lord is as a
thousand years and a thousand years as one day" (v:8). Yeah,
right! So here we are "about" 1900 years later listening to
inerrantists... try to explain away this problem by arguing that
"yet a very little, very little while" didn't really mean soon in any
literal sense, because a thousand years to the Lord is as one day
and one day is as a thousand years." I expect that with the
rapid advancement of scientific technology, this excuse is going
to wear very thin over the next 2,000 years. --TILL 10/12/96
****Regarding the testimony of Peter in general:
"Let's keep in mind too that Matthew 26:72 says that Peter
"denied WITH AN OATH, I know not the man." In other
words, Peter denied under oath that he knew Jesus, so all the
talk we hear from biblicists about the "reliability" of the
testimony that Jesus rose from the dead doesn't take into
consideration that they are calling "reliable" the testimony of a
man who, by the admission of the NT, lied under oath." --TILL
Oxford Annotated (quite Christian):
.......At the same time, identification with Peter, or even a
disciple of Peter (like the author of 1 Peter), appears unlikely.
Although the author claims to have written a previous letter
(3.1), 2 Peter does not reflect the social setting of 1 Peter or its
imagery for the new covenant community. Despite the author's
claim to fellowship with Paul (3.15), the reference to the
misinterpretation of Paul's letter's suggest that they had already
been collected and are treated as "scriptures" in some churches
(3.16)--clearly not the case during the lifetime of the apostles.
The author refers to "your apostles" as those that have
transmitted the teaching of the prophets and the Lord, which the
readers must take care to remember correctly (3.2). The
reference to the transfiguration in 1.17-18 assumes an audience
familiar with some form of synoptic gospel tradition.
In addition, 2 Peter has apparently incororated sections of
Jude (compare 2.1-8 with Jude 4-16, and uses the Stoic
philosophical concept of the return to all things to the fire at
the end of the world (3.10). Thus, 2 Peter appears to have been
composed late in the first century or early in the second century
A. D. In this view, it is intended to meet the challenge of
persons who are distorting the true apostolic tradition by
denying that the world will be brought to an end by divine
judgement (2.1-3, 3.3-4).
It should be bourne in mind that in antiquity pseudonymous
authorship was a widely accepted literary convention.
Therefore the use of an apostle's name in reasserting his
teaching was not regarded as dishonest but was merely a way of
reminding the church of what it had received from God through
that apostle."
The Oxford Annotated Bible is written for Christians of most
mainstream protestant churches. My suspicion is that the
Catholics would say about the same thing about 2 Peter. --
Helen
NIELSEN 10/12
"In The New Jerusalem Bible, an excellent British Catholic
translation, the notes to 2 Peter point out that the epistle refers
to events that are clearly later than could have been known by
Peter, the vocabulary is notably different from that of 1
Peter,the whole of ch. 2 is obviously a free repetition of Jude,
and there is no assurance that the letter was accepted at all until
the 3rd cent., and some, according to Origen, Eusebius, and
Jerome, refused to accept it. Most critics nowadays also reject
the Petrine authorship. It is what we would call a forgery, but
the ancients had different conventions about authorship and
pseudonymity.
And, apparently, so do some people today."
"First and Second Peter, the epistles allegedly written by the
great apostle, are recognized forgeries. According to Burton L.
Mack (*Who Wrote the New Testament*, pages 207-213) both
epistles bear the unmistakable marks of second century
authorship and erudition. Mack points out that these epistles fit
well with other Christian literature of the mid-second century,
and scholars have traditionally assigned them a date of between
124 CE and 150 CE. Peter is believed to have died about 67 CE
(*Encyclopaedia Britannica*)." --Louis Cable
"There are also problems with the epistles of Peter. Both
were written in the most elegant Greek in the New Testament,
hardly the language of a Palestinian fisherman. The first one
was written late in the first century in the name of Peter. But
Peter probably died under Nero in 64. The second one was
written in the second century to make an excuse for the non-
arrival of Jesus. In the notes to it in the New Jerusalem Bible,
an excellent translation by British Catholic scholars, it is called
"a forgery." It also plagiarised much of the epistle of Jude." --
Ralph Neilsen
****
DAR
Maybe Walt Jr. would rather talk about singularities. I don't
think he will have a lot of success when he accidentally
wanders into topics that are biblical. Not on this list.
cheers,
Darrel
------------------------
"It will yet be the proud boast of women that they never contributed a
line to the Bible." [George W. Foote]