Are Christians Idol worshippers/polytheists

Ahanu said:
Just to be clear . . . you believe it was a slur on Jesus' legitimacy to call him the son of Mary in Mark 6.3, right?
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Good grief, no! My point was the scribes are very carful in not saying Joseph is the father

Ahanu said:
Well, Jesus could have been literate. If so, to what extent I don't know. Maybe he even knew Greek. At the moment, I'm leaning toward illiteracy.
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OK.

Ahanu said:
Okay. But even so ... their beliefs (whoever they were) are but shadows of the true meaning of Christ's words. When it comes to these obscure passages, only a messenger of God can recognize their true meaning. Muhammad is God's messenger.
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OK, your take, not mine.
 
BigJoeNobody said:
I think you've been reading into too many of the online "Dawah" personalities. As a former Christian, I can tell you that 99% pf Christians I have ever met, consider there to be only 1 God, hence Monotheists. Their concept of 3 in 1 hinges on the idea that the 3 pieces are part of a whole (Think Body, voice, brain)
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OK, I can DEFINITELY answer this.

John 1 is a deliberate mistranslation.

In the beginning was the Logos...

Stop. Logos means "Divine Reason" and is Platonic and Stoic philosophy that Philo Judaeus first called the "son of God" "High Priest of the order of Melchizedek" and it was BORROWED to create the doctrine of a divine Jesus PBUH.

And the Logos was with God(Tontheos), and the Logos was (Theos) A god/divine.

God=Tontheos or "The God"
Logos=theos or "a god/divine"

That's polytheism.
 
The in the beginning logos was added and not part of the original texts...

But why is it you focus so much negativity on others beliefs? Did not Muhammed (pbuh) respect people of the book?
 
wil said:
The in the beginning logos was added and not part of the original texts...

But why is it you focus so much negativity on others beliefs? Did not Muhammed (pbuh) respect people of the book?
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A person asked a question that I knew the answer to, and God+ a god= polytheism, factually speaking.

The second equality is not apparent between God and Jesus PBUH, which is actually throughout the Gospels, to consider Jesus a lesser god IS polytheism and the language in Greek makes it clear.

Nothing negative.
 
Evidently you don't believe in an omniscient G!d, one that can choose to live on earth as man?

Your version of G!d is limited to the possible?
 
wil said:
Evidently you don't believe in an omniscient G!d, one that can choose to live on earth as man?

Your version of G!d is limited to the possible?
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Who are you talking about? My God is God.
 
wil said:
Evidently you don't believe in an omniscient G!d, one that can choose to live on earth as man?

Your version of G!d is limited to the possible?
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I suppose if God wanted to He could certainly become human, but for what?
 
wil said:
So your believe in a G!d with limited powers....one that create man, but not express as man?
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Are you just trying to badger me because I don't believe Jesus is also God? Because he is Jesus PBUH and God is God ALONE, doesn't need to be a human or a Trinity, a word not even in the Bible?
 
Yes...the oldest found texts do not contain the lines...historians, archeologists, and theologians have been doing this research for years...

And no, I am not trying to badger you. I am trying, rather failing to try to help you learn how this forum works, so you can participate more fully.. But I have grown tired of brick walls...

I'll leave it to others and if you are still around in a few weeks I'll attempt discussion again.

Have a wonderful time.
 
Al-Ghazali said:
John 1 is a deliberate mistranslation.
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By whom, everybody?

Al-Ghazali said:
In the beginning was the Logos..."
OK.

Al-Ghazali said:
Stop. Logos means "Divine Reason" and is Platonic and Stoic philosophy that Philo Judaeus first called the "son of God" "High Priest of the order of Melchizedek" and it was BORROWED to create the doctrine of a divine Jesus PBUH.
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Ah, it's not quite so simple as that.

Scholarship into Judaism of the era has revealed that Hebrew mystical speculation was far more profound and nuanced than once thought. And that the author of the gospel was well-founded in such speculation.

For Philo, 'Logos' is offered as a solution to the idea of an absolute, indeterminate and impersonal being. There is a chasm between God and the concrete, physical world. To span this chasm, Philo needs an intermediate agent to bring the Infinite near to the finite. The development of Hebrew angelology was just such a solution to this problem.

But the Logos for John is not the result of intellectual inquiry and metaphysical necessity. For John, everything follows from his meeting with the God-man Jesus. In Philo, the logos is a logical necessity. Philo interprets the Scriptures by means of Plato and Zeno, John interprets the Scriptures by means of his experience of the Son.

In Philo, the Logos explains the creation. In John, on the contrary, the Logos is creator, sustainer and redeemer.

The two points of view are entirely different. John does not deploy 'Logos' as Philo does. Nor as the Greeks do.

For John, the precedent is there in Scripture. There are appearances of the Angel of the Lord, messengers of God who act as His agent in the sensible world. Sometimes separate from the Lord, sometimes identified with Him. (cf Genesis 16:7 and 13; Genesis 32:28 with Hosea 12:4-5.) In Exodus 23:21 God says: "My name is in him." and there is in all traditions the assertion that when the Divine Name is spoken, God is thereby invoked. Where the Divine Name is, there God is.

The description of Wisdom in Proverbs is undoubtedly a poetic personification, that is the nature of the book, but the Angel of the Lord is presented as a real personality.

Most tellingly, the amount of research into the Hebrew word Memra shows significant correspondence between that and the Greek term Logos.

The question then is why did John phrase the opening of his gospel as he did, and why use Logos when he might have used Memra? This clearly was not a mistake, nor a reliance on (for John) an alien, Hellenic term, except that the Greek term is more nuanced towards the point he wants to make than the Hebrew, because the Hebrew terms carries a deal of a priori assumption which would lead the inquirer astray.

The text of John 1:1 has a sordid past and a myriad of interpretations. With the Greek alone, we can create empathic, orthodox, creed-like statements, or we can commit pure and unadulterated heresy. From the point of view of early church history, heresy develops when a misunderstanding arises concerning Greek articles, the predicate nominative, and grammatical word order. The early church heresy of Sabellianism understood John 1:1c to read, "and the Word was the God." The early church heresy of Arianism understood it to read, "and the word was a God." (David A Reed, "How Semetic Was John? Rethinking the Hellenistic Background to John 1:1" Anglican Theological Review, 2003, Vol. 85 Issue 4, p709)
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That John confirms the identity of the Logos as God has been the unanimous declaration of the orthodox Christian church from its inception. The Deity of Christ was held absolute by virtually all the church fathers. It wasn’t until Arius challenged it thast a need for a formal declaration arose.

Current attempts to resurrect the Arian position, by inserting the indefinite article 'a' before 'God' is grammatically improbable and in light of our growing understanding of Hebrew mystical speculation, quite nonsensical to the context of the verse, the text and John's Judaism.

To say a Jew — the likes of John and Paul — is a polytheist is as silly as saying your own namesake Al-Ghazali was a polytheist.

In fact, John, Paul and Al-Ghazali have something in common in that they argued their traditions as distinct and not dependent upon the Hellenic lexical terms which were sometimes erroneously applied.
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