This is the truth behind the Zirconia diamond. To the unfortunate untrained eye, they look the same as the real diamond. According to St. Irenaeus (a disciple of Polycarp who was a disciple of the Apostle John) False teaching rarely looks obvious so that it can be detected easily. Satan is much more clever than that! Indeed, false teaching will always look like the "real" thing! Irenaeus continues by saying that many times the counterfeit looks "more true than the truth itself".
It is the New Year 2021, over 2,000 years since the incarnation, life, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. Most bibles we read today are translations and not the original language because most of us including myself will not be able to understand, much less read, Greek or Hebrew.
Like most everything new, it is a natural tendency for man to admire and dwell in the "hope" of something better than the past. In much the same way, man is normally attracted to novel things whether it be concrete objects like the latest smart phone or 4K TV, or abstract concepts like the latest bywords, wise quotations and philosophical concepts.
Unfortunately, this kind of mindset is quite detrimental to the reading and understanding of Scripture. If we are to honestly interpret Scripture, we cannot interpret it for ourselves alone. Otherwise, such an attitude started by Martin Luther's Sola Scriptura doctrine is what has divided, even cannibalized, the concept of Scripture and the "church" or the one body, one faith, one Lord and one baptism that Christ and Paul envisioned. To date, there are more than 30,000 Christian denominations in the United States alone. This implies over 30,000 variations in the interpretation of Scripture and logically, because God is intelligent, a great communicator and his gospel is revealed to "babes" and not to the wise of this world, there should be ONLY ONE correct interpretation. Otherwise, our concept of God is terribly damaged and our faith follows next.
Translations ALWAYS introduce corruption of the original meaning.
Most Christians are NOT at all aware that most probably, in the current 21st century generations, most of our understanding of Scripture has deviated very far from the gospel that Jesus Christ and the Apostles and Paul intended to teach and pass on forward to the present time. Most Christians do not realize that most of the modern denominations today were created by people who based their "new" doctrine on some English translation of the Bible (the original Bible was written in Hebrew and Greek), many of these by biased translators and using words whose meaning has changed over time.
One great example is the word "atonement", because of the Roman patriarchs' (Anselm of Canterbury, 11th century) concept of atonement propagated and translated over the past 1,000 years has been a "satisfactory payment for sins committed". So most Christians today believe (as they have been largely taught even by scholarly commentaries) that Christ died to pay the penalty for man's sin. In other words, Christians today believe that Christ was "punished" for man's transgressions, so that man can have a pass to eternal life. In the English translations particularly, we have some logical reason to interpret it this way, but did you know that the first century church had NO SUCH TEACHING??? In fact, such teaching is not in the Bible unless "inferential interpretation" is used.
The only way we can be close to the original gospel as Christ and the Apostles intended it to be taught is to journey into a study of what the first century Christians believed and practiced. Fortunately, there are voluminous documentation for this. This is where "Old" or "primitive" or "ancient" becoming the correct and only acceptable mindset is of utmost importance. This year we start a journey which we started late last year to return to the "faith of our fathers" to find out not only what the first Christians believed and practiced but to be honest with ourselves to junk our beliefs that are not consistent with theirs.
Why is this important? Because it may mean eternal life or death to some, or even many, of us!!! Of course! Wrong Bible interpretation could mean wrong gospel, wrong gospel means wrong faith and wrong faith means "being saved by faith" is NOT applicable to you! We cannot be saved by grace through WRONG faith. That does not at all make any sense!
By the way, the etymology of the word "atonement" came from the Middle English "at one". It did not mean payment. It correctly meant AGREEMENT or RECONCILATION. More about this and other key doctrinal topics
in later posts.
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