Originally Posted by
Black Jaque Janaviac
These are totally awesome questions guys! I love it.
I will point out that none of the ideas I've expressed on this thread are invented by me. I'm just paraphrasing thoughts and teachings that have been handed down for ages.
Here is how many men far holier than I approach these questions, let's first see if we can agree on some basic principles:
Next:
Look at the very last verse in the Gospel according to John (I'm Catholic, I don't memorize chapter:verse numbers as a general rule). He says something like, Jesus said and did many other things, so much that all the books in the world could not contain them if they were written down. That seems like a clue that if you are operating on the Bible alone, you're going to miss some things. If you think about it, Jesus spend 3 years preaching and traveling with his Apostles. There has to be a TON of stuff that he explained over the campfire as they were hiking between towns (the Gospels allude to this).
Finally lets compare two Gospel stories I hope you're familiar with:
One is where Jesus says, "if your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away." The other passage is where Jesus says "whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood shall have eternal life."
These are both passages that can be understood in wildly different ways. So let's go ask Jesus what He really meant. Not possible? Do you think the 12 Apostles had a chance to ask Him? We don't really have anything written by any of the 12 that elaborate on this, but it seems reasonable that the people most qualified to understand what Jesus meant by these wild statements were those who lived to see Him & the Apostles face to face. If that is the case, then history should record descriptions of early Christians gouging out their eyes and cutting off their hands, as that would have been passed down through oral tradition. I've never heard of such a thing, but I have heard the claim that early Christians were accused of cannibalism. This would suggest that the early Christians were preaching that the Eucharist was Christ's flesh and blood. There is also a guy named St. Ignatius of Antioch who said, "...they do not admit that the Eucharist is the flesh of our savior Jesus Christ..." St. Ignatius was martyred in 107 A.D. and he lived early enough to study under John the Apostle. So doesn't it seem likely that this belief existed from the very beginning of the Church?
Now if you apply the principles outlined in A through F you can see that a given passage can be confusing but by careful historical research you can get some perspective that helps understand what it meant. This is primarily why Catholics and Orthodox do not subscribe to "Bible alone" theories. Now, it is still possible that these teachings are wrong, and something in the historical record is awry. But if you want to deny Christianity based on a very high standard of evidence, then you ought to apply that same high standard of evidence to other parts of history such as the events and statements of Alexander the Great. Much of what is known about him depends on an oral tradition that lasted centuries before anything was written down, yet I know of no worthy historian who denies the existence of Alexander the Great.