1 John 2:18Quote:
Originally Posted by NorrinRadd
" . . .the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have appeared, . . ."
That he is just one of the "antichrists" as there are many!!
BU
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1 John 2:18Quote:
Originally Posted by NorrinRadd
" . . .the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have appeared, . . ."
That he is just one of the "antichrists" as there are many!!
BU
Going back to the OP, the idea of anything being "semi-official" within Protestantism doesn't make a lot of sense for obvious reasons.
Depends on the kind of Protestantism. Anglicans, Reformed, Lutherans, and Baptists (& probably others) have all issued Confessions of Faith, catechisms, and other credal documents.Quote:
Originally Posted by KingsGambit
There might be less inter-Church consensus between the various Protestant communions, but not none. And all of them share to some degree in a common Protestant tradition.
Besides, there can be real communion of hearts even where there is no or little agreement in doctrine and discipline. Communion of hearts is arguably far more important, and a far more fundamental kind of union between Protestants, than agreement in doctrine.
And who could forget Alexander Hislop's Two Babylons. Talk about shoddy research for its time but it had an impact.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sparko
I forced myself to read it as far as "IHS stands for Isis Horus and Set" - At that point it just became (I don't think there's a word for what it became.)Quote:
Originally Posted by Sparko
Top tier entertainment?Quote:
Originally Posted by tabibito
more a matter of whatever it is that leaves a person aghast and disgusted with a dash of outraged.Quote:
Originally Posted by Chrawnus
It still sells - and has been translated into German, French, Spanish, and (most recently ?) Russian.Quote:
Originally Posted by ReformedApologist
None of which stops it being…not exactly good scholarship. Thanks to AH, a lot of people have wildly inaccurate notions about Ancient Mesopotamian religion/culture. Thanks in large part to the popularisation of “best bits” of it by Jack Chick.
Well, Isis and Horus and Seb, actually. “Seb” is a misreading of “Geb”, a correction not made until roughly 1915 (AFAIK). Set the brother/murderer of Osiris is not mentioned by Hislop by name - though he refers to him indirectly when talking about the god “Bar” in Egypt - “Bar” = the Syrian storm-god Baal, who was syncretised with Egyptian Set.Quote:
Originally Posted by Chrawnus
It’s an……interesting……book: basically a brief for the prosecution against the CC. What sets it apart from most books of that sort is, that Hislop (a minister of the Free Kirk of Scotland, so a most thorough Protestant) sought to show that the Papacy was Babylon the Great (as per Rev 17) by using the description of BtG as “mystery” to identify the religion of BtG with the religion of the Babylon of the OT, by identifying the cup in the hand of BtG in Rev 17.4 with the cup in Jer. 51.7.
His thesis is basically that the religion of OT Babylon was inherited by Rome, and became the religion of BtG AKA the Papacy. The Papacy observes Christmas Day - therefore, the Babylonians must have. The 1862 edition of the book was the last to appear in his lifetime, and by 1862, although a good start had been made on working out how to read and translate the cuneiform texts then available, and although the language then called Assyrian (now called Akkadian) had been identified as distinct from Hebrew, Hislop refers almost not at all to texts in (what is now called) Akkadian, and continually refers to Akkadian as “Chaldee”, which for his purposes seems to include Aramaic (then commonly called Chaldee) & Hebrew. The language now known as Sumerian was hardly recognised in 1862, and was referred to as “Chaldean”, which does not help. Hislop had no way of knowing that in Ancient Mesopotamia both Akkadian & Sumerian were used, nor that the two languages were unrelated. So when he argued from the etymology of the language he called Chaldee, he came up with very strange results.
For instance, he takes “Osiris”, seemingly a Greek version of Egyptian *Wsr*, “Mighty”, and reads it as “He-Siri”, “The Seed” - that is, the (supposed) “Babylonian Messiah”, a figure supposed to be a satanic decoy from the genuine Messiah. The idea that Babylonian religion was a diabolical travesty of Christianity, is one of the main ideas of the book. Arguments from (almost always dodgy) etymology are a major form of proof of his argument.
If a Gaelic-speaking Scot got it into his head that Scotland was the Israel of the Bible, and brought forth the following details:
”coats of skins” = kilts
”coat of many colours” = tartan plaid
pouch for the Urim and Thummim = sporran
the dancing of Miriam & the worshippers of the Golden Calf = a ceilidh
twelve tribes = twelve clans
Shem = the personal name Seumas
King David of Scotland = King David of Israel
Leviathan = Loch Ness Monster
The name Levi-athan proves that Nessie was looked after by the Levites.
Chaldeans = Culdees
”whisky” is an Anglicisation of *uisge beatha*, “water of life” - so references to the “water of life” = whisky
the Assyrian army commander named Tartan, who came to Ashdod.
- he would be making his case in much the same way as Hislop does.
Since all false religion throughout the world is the fault of Nimrod the supposed founder of the Tower of Babel, all religions and cultures are treated as variants of the Babylonian Mystery Religion, and details from them, are treated as evidence for it, and are used to fill in the gaps in what was known about it. This also means that lots of deities can be identified with each other, and with Hislop’s three principal “stars” Nimrod, Semiramis, and Tammuz. If by any ingenuity X can be identified with Y, all details about X are transferred to Y. By this method, Mr Spock the Vulcan would be the same person as Dr Spock the paediatrician, and the paediatrician would therefore have pointy ears, be born on Vulcan, & serve on the Enterprise as First Officer under Captain James T. Kirk.
It’s entertaining “from a certain point of view”. As long as one has a weird sense of humour. A monument of misapplied ingenuity, IMO.
I have family members that subscribe to this. I have found it to be dodgy at best. The research to develop this theory has been flawed. This same kind of approach has been used to bolster many of the KJVO arguments.