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Road to Damascus
The vision of Jesus that changed Paul from a Pharisaic Jew to a Christian Jew happened, says Luke’s Acts of the Apostles, on the road to Damascus. That event is so important that Luke records it three times for maximum emphasis: first, as it happens (9:1-19); next, as Paul tells it to the Roman officer in Jerusalem (22:3-21); and, finally, as Paul tells it to the Jewish king, Agrippa II at Caesarea Maritima (26:1-18). But that triple account, written around 50 years after Paul’s death, has two major historical problems.
The first problem is that, according to Acts, Paul is travelling to Damascus empowered with authority from the high-priest to arrest dissident Christian Jews and bring them back to Jerusalem for punishment. But, whatever about high-priestly power in Judea, it could never have been exercised across Roman provincial borders as far away as Damascus. On the other hand, Paul himself tells the Galatians that after that vocational vision, “I went away at once into Arabia, and afterwards I returned to Damascus” (Galatians 1:11-17). Paul’s vision, in the city of Damascus is much more likely as venue than on the road to Damascus.
Persecutor and persecuted were probably members of the Damascus synagogue where Paul had most likely received his previous Pharisaic education.
The second problem is that Luke’s triple version describes Paul as seeing “a light” and hearing “a voice” (9:3-4; 22:6-7; 36:13-14). According to Acts, Paul does not see Jesus’ face but only hears Jesus’s voice.
On the other hand, Paul himself insists that his sight of the heavenly Jesus makes him equal in authority with the Twelve Apostles who saw the earthly Jesus. As he argues in his first letter to the Corinthians: “Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” (9:1). And later: “Last of all, as to one untimely born, he was seen also by me. For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God” (15:8-9).
One major conclusion from those divergent accounts is that Acts never gives Paul the title of an apostle sent by and therefore subordinate only to God and Christ. Paul is, for Acts, a messenger sent by and therefore subordinate to Jerusalem and Antioch. His call was emphatically inferior to that of the Twelve Apostles.
For Acts, only those first 12 were “apostles” and Judas’ replacement had to be “one of the males [Greek andres] who have accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day when he was taken up from us” (Acts 1:21-22). Acts not only excludes Paul from ever being an apostle, it insures there will never be any more apostles and, above all else, not any women apostles.
The other major conclusion is just as important. Paul already knew enough about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus to persecute his followers for proclaiming its implications to their fellow Jews at Damascus. In Christian gospel, Christian art and Christian mysticism, the risen Christ always retains the wounds of historical crucifixion even or especially on his glorified and transcendental body. Those wounds do not heal or fade. They are forever there.
originally posted by: Raggedyman
The church is not Christs body, we are His bride, His Gospel
my wife is my sacred holy mother,
(in Freudian theory) the complex of emotions aroused in a young child, typically around the age of four, by an unconscious sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex and wish to exclude the parent of the same sex. (The term was originally applied to boys, the equivalent in girls being called the Electra complex .).
originally posted by: dfnj2015
a reply to: LABTECH767
I totally understand and get what you are saying. It's the ritual that is a little weird for me.
Originally posted bydfnj2015
I understand the importance of having rituals and having people experience being sacred. But there is something just really odd for me with the idea of taking the sacrament of receiving consecrated bread and wine. The bread has been referred to as the body of Christ. And the wine has been referred to as the blood of Christ. I once worked with engineer from Indonesia, he was probably a Muslim, and he referred to Christians as "blood drinkers". The idea of drinking blood is a little weird.
Matthew 7
9 Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?
Originally posted 3NL1GHT3N3D1
I believe the spoken Word (body/bread) can be compared to a projection. The information is there but only when it is spoken (projected) can others see and experience it, so in that sense I believe the spoken Word represents the physical world around us, it is there for us to learn from just like with words being spoken.
Originally posted 3NL1GHT3N3D1
Only when you take in the Word (bread/physical nature) do you receive nourishment and only when you receive that nourishment can the Spirit (blood) flow through you and give you life. Once you stop eating, the life (Spirit) will leave your body and that is what we call death.
Matthew 4:4
“Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God”
Originally posted 3NL1GHT3N3D1
The church (or "body of Christ") is supposedly who has the answers but very few realize that the church has taken the place of the true body which is the physical universe. The church is a bastardization of the true place of communion which is the world we all inhabit. They have corrupted the Word and changed it into something it was never meant to be.