Mike

I was going to add this as a late edit to my previous response to you on the canon. This topic of the NT canon bothered me, until I saw how 2 Timothy is structured. I wrote it up and sent it to Walter. He liked it and we conferred often on it over the years. I got ZERO help from VPW; neither in any teachings, nor in face-to-face discussions. I had seen the the NT canon confusion you see in academia, and even in Young's Concordance's article on it, so I asked him about it at the Rock'72 when he parked his camper next to my van. His short answer on this was: "I never teach on the canon. I only teach that Pau's Epistles were assembled in order at a very early date." I worked on the project alone mostly, and showed my results to Walter several times. He said he agreed and had worked it himself.

I worked this canon idea with Walter Cummins from 1972 to about 1978. I have a very large paper folder on the topic. I literally have hundreds of scriptures that touch on the idea of a canon. The biggest is 2 Timothy. Maybe I can digitize some of the papers I wrote then.

How do you see things improving at the Return of Christ, if he is already personally present? Why do you think God hid Jesus from sight in Acts 1 ? What meaning do you attach to 2 Cor 5 ? 15 And that he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them, and rose again. 16 Wherefore henceforth know we no man after the flesh: yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more. 17 Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.

The best I understand it the NT canon was assembled by Paul, Mark, Luke, and John. God gave them revelation for it. Their canon was not recognized for a long time, but God kept giving revelations to whomever He could to preserve and pass on that canon. He had his hand on the process all along. I see the 1942 promise as a major, 2,000 year unique event, as a major intervention by God like what He did for Paul in the Road to Damascus. VPW says this also in "Light Began to Dawn" which is featured in a thread in About the Way. https://www.greasespotcafe.com/ipb/topic/25315-tape-called-light-began-to-dawn-a-partial-transcript-selling-plurality-snt-214/

Luke 24 36 And as they thus spake, Jesus himself stood in the midst of them, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. 37 But they were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit. 38 And he said unto them, Why are ye troubled? and why do thoughts arise in your hearts? 39 Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have. 40 And when he had thus spoken, he shewed them his hands and his feet. 41 And while they yet believed not for joy, and wondered, he said unto them, Have ye here any meat? 42 And they gave him a piece of a broiled fish, and of an honeycomb. 43 And he took it, and did eat before them. */*/*/*/* Here we have the flesh and bones, raised from the dead, Jesus. Notice he didn't say "flesh and blood" because that would not be accurate. You are right, Oldskool, that his body had changed. It was the blood part that changed, not the flesh and bones. He still wanted food. Are these verses new to you?

What ever happened to FIRST getting all that the Word says on one topic, and then seeing what fits with if all? We were taught that as well as says what it means and means what it says. You must gather ALL that it says on one topic to see what it says. You are taking your favorite verses, and building your theory on them, ignoring scriptures that contradict your favored view. Were you aware of that last of the last items in the three accounts of Paul's conversion in Acts 26:19, where Paul says it was a vision?

I mentioned elsewhere that there are 3 separate accounts of the Paul's conversion on the Road to Damascus. The first one is in the narrative, and is at Acts 9:4-16, with Luke as the narrator. The second one is a flashback, with Paul speaking, and is at Acts 22:7-11. Here is the third, at Acts 26:13-20: 13 At midday, O king, I saw in the way a light from heaven, above the brightness of the sun, shining round about me and them which journeyed with me. 14 And when we were all fallen to the earth, I heard a voice speaking unto me, and saying in the Hebrew tongue, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks. 15 And I said, Who art thou, Lord? And he said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest. 16 But rise, and stand upon thy feet: for I have appeared unto thee for this purpose, to make thee a minister and a witness both of these things which thou hast seen, and of those things in the which I will appear unto thee; 17 Delivering thee from the people, and from the Gentiles, unto whom now I send thee, 18 To open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified by faith that is in me. 19 Whereupon, O king Agrippa, I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision: 20 But shewed first unto them of Damascus, and at Jerusalem, and throughout all the coasts of Judaea, and then to the Gentiles, that they should repent and turn to God, and do works meet for repentance. */*/*/*/* What Paul saw was a heavenly vision. It had to be a vision, because the flesh and blood man, Jesus, was hidden from sight in Acts 1 by God, for good reasons. Later Paul teaches that we know not Christ after the flesh, so that we can know him in a BETTER way, with his spirit inside us and growing. Jesus got up from the dead in flesh and bones form, and he is coming back that way: this same Jesus the angels in Acts 1 said is coming back.

I realize you personally did not use all those vocabulary words. I was addressing a composite of the very difficult people here. You are far more polite. With you, my problem is volume. I can only handle so much here, and it gets less as I age. */*/*/* I am a life-long fan and reader of Kurt Godel and authors who write about him and logic. His theorems are a little like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in Physics, again a life-long study for me. You can only go so far with logic, and then you are stranded. Another thing that escapes most about logic are the Postulates that underlay a logical discussion. Postulates = Axioms = Fundamentals = Assumptions = Premise = Starting Point That is where we differ on logic, sir. Many here cannot get that. The reason I left and boycotted Raf’s logical PFAL error expose thread 20 years ago was because the Postulates differed from mine too much, and no one could deal with that in their work there. No one could adopt my Postulates, to see what happened if they were adopted. This is how a full logical discussion proceeds. Sometimes the Postulates are tinkered with to see what happens. Non-Euclidean Geometries are the paragon of this. My dodging that thread and occasional debates on other threads was my refusal to adopt their Postulates, and my Postulates refused by them. I spent months at times in the 1970s and 80s playing with Raf’s Postulates on-and-off, doubting some things in TWI. And then fully tinkered with right after 1986, the big meltdown, for a couple years. For the next 8 years I experimented wildly with my Postulates and learned a lot, but I kept checking in regularly with PFAL Postulates also. I have fully sampled the Postulates Raf had going, and that permeate most of GSC today. I had enough of what they taste like to refuse them these past 20 years. No one in this public circle has fully tasted the Postulates I pitch here…. Yet. There was some shallow sampling of them in the field, and barrages of them study sessions, but not in application to people in life year after year, unsupervised. I have seen this stuff work well when a community of believers operate the PFAL principles pretty well, relatively unsupervised. I seek to see that again.

LoL. Yeah, I'm just a raving lunatic with no credibility. Yet, the About the Way forum was inactive for days after this thread and my ravings were moved to Doctrinal. All the big posters followed the thread (and my incredulous ravings) here, and devoted lots of posting time to find ways of demonstrating how illogical and ignorant my posts here are, and burying them in blather. LoL And if that's not enough, now you, WW, start a whole new thread devoted to how incredulous I am with my position. LoL If what I post were all that stupid, why all this attention? You must have a very low opinion of those non-posters who are reading these threads, and you don't want my incredulity overlooked by perceived-to-be stupid innocent readers.

LoL I was joking, and offering you a bone at the same time. It was only a tiny joke, but is getting funnier (for me) as you continue to not see the HUMOR. ALSO, I am genuinely thankful for the memory jog you gave me. I was remembering some of the other ways I used back then to express myself. I am mis-understood here all the time. So_crates being the most egregious recent example. I experiment with ways to express my position. What I bold fonted in your comments above is an example of it too, where you swapped out "replace" and used "supplanted." I don't believe I ever posted what that bolded sentence says. (actually: a fragment of a sentence) What I remembered today was that sometimes I used the word "combo" and in a way that resembles what I bold fonted above. Here is a more accurate depiction of my position: The authority of the PFAL/KJV combo replaces use of the "authoritative" KJV alone. In that sentence I just use the word "replace" in a way I may have used it back when. But of course it was understood wrong, and then remembered wrong. The raw version the KJV is has no authority. I can shamelessly change the KJV text with white-out in my Cambridge Wide Margin, because it is devoid of authority that the originals had. God did not intervene to help make the KJV happen. I am sure He had revelation available, but few could receive it, due to it being against the strong traditions of that time. The the PFAL/KJV combo has the authority of the Author of the originals under it. I think I also may have used the "replace" to describe how God seems to have abandoned His use of the Word He wrote in the stars. After the Maji, I know of no one who can read the stars with the detail and sureness they had to have, in order to commit money, time, and manpower for their journey to Jerusalem, and get the timing right. It looks to me that God replaced the stars with written words around Moses' time, and only had a small group of people (the Maji) maintain an understanding of the Word in the stars. I am still looking for confirmation of this. Way back when, in the Mike Wars I may have sounded more sure about this star replacement. In recent years I have started looking into this replacement of the stars a little deeper. But but the PFAL/KJV combo definitely replaces the traditional authority our culture thought it saw in the KJV alone. These are fine points. I can understand how in the heat of battle others could confuse my position with PFAL replacing the Bible. But now that those battles are over, please consider what I say today as possibly better expressed than my expressions in the heat of battle confusion that may have affected me. If you aren't actively renewing your mind to the Word we were taught, there is no way for you to believe me, short of an intervention by God in your lives. In light of this, I don't care much about my credibility with you folks. I am grateful for the opportunity to fine tune the expression of my position for all here who can read with a mind that is thankful for what we were taught. Maybe someday a few of you can come back to this and see the light in it.

No, that is not the way it works for me. Not at all. Read the introduction and preface to JCNG. A lot of grads skip that... or totally forgot that.

Close. I have very little faith in TRADITIONAL Christian doctrine. Are you familiar with the chapter in ADAN where it is shown that it was a VISION on the mount of the transfiguration, and not literally Moses and Elijah that Peter and John saw? That labeling of the event as a "vision" was done by Jesus, and it is right there in the text at the end. There are verses scattered about, like in Hebrews maybe, that say Moses had a vision and a voice from the burning bush that were done by an angel. Similarly with Paul. Did you know that the Road to Damascus incident appears in Acts THREE times? First in the narrative, and twice as flashbacks. If you look at all 3, I think you will see Paul say "angel" or "vision" to label the event. Like I say, I am rusty on this, and may have time to get it all out. I'm only just now remembering more details.

I believe those are figures of speech and very important. I am not at all alone in this. Acts 1 is literal; he split; he's coming back.

That quickening spirit is the gift of holy spirit inside us. The man sits at the right had of God and is our mediator. He is coming back because he is absent right now.

He, the flesh and bones man, is absent. The verse you quoted needs work. The preposition "by" could mean a lot of things. Best I see it, on the Road to Damascus God gave Paul a vision of Jesus, much like the visions of Moses and Elijah that Peter and John saw at Jesus' Transfiguration. Similarly, the burning bush Moses talked to was an angel doing the vision, imitating God. I am rusty on these things. I have seen others handle these items well. Maybe I can find my sources on this. Probably Walter C.

Ohh I Know that sin is addresed, and then dismissed at the end of Romans 7 and into the whole next chapter. Our rescue from sin is the FOCUS of the NT. Sin itself should no longer be the focus: "Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy—meditate on these things. The things which you learned and received and heard and saw in me, these do, and the God of peace will be with you."

I vaguely remember this. That vague memory also contains this: that the "we" can get back to the originals and authority is in the context of "the teacher with his students" comprising that "we." But you folks were advocating that the "we" could just as well mean "us GSC posters who seek to destroy this teacher-student relationship by contradicting the teacher." That is where we disagreed way back then, I think. Again quotes, or even just page numbers would help us reconstruct that. The "we" that VPW was referring to was different from the "we" you were referring to in the Orange Book.

Yes, I remember writing like that. I'm pretty sure I don't like using the word "re-issue" any more. Maybe because it has a trace of "replace" in it? It requires too much explaining what I mean by it. In a nutshell I mean God sees the dilemma we are in having the originals lost, and other obfuscating factors like Orientalisms, and things like that. God sees that the God-breathed authority in the Critical Greek texts is wobbly. So, God does a new breathing of His authority into some texts that VPW and many of his helpers were eager to work. That sounds like a "re-issueing" without a replacement. But it is complicated. Anyway, maybe you have a point, the a trace of "replace" (UNINTENDED) can pop up in the word "re-issue" so I slowly stopped using the word. I was unaware of it until now. Again, I don't mind checking the archives. I am all for changing my stated position somewhat, like fine tuning it. At this point I feel that "re-issue" has too much baggage, and requires a lot of contextual support to avoid the taint of "replace." */*/*/* Just thought of something. With the teaching of VPW (and his helpers) what should be in the final form of the collaterals, He effectively replaces the Critical Greek Texts as our most authoritative set of texts with the collaterals. That use of "replace" I like. I may have been writing on that theme at times, and it was read poorly in the heat of battle. Or maybe I wrote it poorly once and that stuck in your craw. If we have time to search out all this in the archives (unlikely) I will be fascinated at seeing the results. I think it will help me make my message more clear.

This stood out. Above we were discussing the many definitions the phrase "the Bible" can have, so let's be careful. Of course the originals of the Bible were God-breathed, because that is what the collaterals teach. But what happened to the originals (NT mostly)? They were lost. So what DO we have? An intact Bible from AD 800 that is written in Latin. That's a translation of the Greek, which is a translation of the Aramaic, with 800 years of the devil playing the party game "telephone" with it. We have nearly complete Greek and Aramaic Bibles going back to what centuries 4th or 5th? Older than that we have partial books of the Bible. Going back even farther to the early centuries and we have fragments of pages and fragments of verses. The critical Greek texts were relatively modern scholarly attempts to reconstruct the originals, which were THANKFULLY accurate a lot of the time, but way off some of the time. And where they were good and where they were bad was hard to tell, and the reconstructing scholars often disagreed with each other. We were taught that all the punctuation in the ancient surviving manuscripts were DEVOID of AUTHORITY. Well, the same thing holds for many of the verses and words. This means NOT God-breathed any more in many places, many somewhat unknown places. This is a problem. The collaterals being God-breathed solves it neatly. It gives us something solid we never have to question. I need that. Because the collaterals are God-breathed we have a handle on how to spot the accurate sections in the scholarly reconstructions that the Critical Greek Texts are. With the authority of the collaterals we can spot the inaccurate sections in the Critical Greek Texts. We also have a simple handle on the most important figures of speech and Orientalism we need to fully see the originals in the reconstructions. Summary: With the collaterals in hand and mind, the ancient surviving scriptures are cleaned up. Without the collaterals all ancient scripture reconstructions are forever unfinished, corrupted, obfuscated, and not-God breathed in a practical sense. Instead of replacing the ancient scriptures, the collaterals revive them.

Just woke up, and only read this far in your text, so far. Last night you didn't get it when I was joking with you, so I had to tell you it was a joke. And then when I get serious and more open (vulnerable? Rocky?) and you think I'm joking. */*/*/* I was going with your flow, last night WW and you just missed it, and read evil into my posting. So_crates did the same thing, and wildly read evil (error) into my "pitch." Then blew it off as if it was only a minor error on his part. You did the exact same and read "replace" into my pitch years ago, and now can't find ANY quotes? Sloppy criticism of me, both of you, just like sloppy criticism of what we were taught. If I did use the word “replace” that would be TERRIBLY inaccurate compared to how I express the same ideas today, 20 years later. I would actually LOVE to see me quoted saying “replace.” Memory glitches fascinate me. I hang out with brain scientists, and we talk about things like that a lot. I have done experiments on my own memory (long stories) and I may search the archives to see if I said that. The context would explain to me why i said it, IF I said it. But the idea of the collaterals REPLACING the ancient scriptures is CRAZY! The collaterals point to the scriptures on nearly every page…. Sometimes with the heavy implication that we should spend time with them; NEVER to replace them. I may have used the word “replace” referring to something else, and it was read wrong by you and others in the heat of battle. False memories are also fascinating to any fan of brain science. */*/** You wrote: “I don't remember you using the exact word "replace." (You may have, but I didn't note it.) What you DID do is use the CONCEPT "replace" quite clearly. No, I contest this also. I just did above. The collaterals clearly augment the scriptures, and doing away with them is contrary to that. I think you got the target of the word “replace” mixed up in your memory as being the scriptures. OR, you heard someone else mis-characterize me with that word “replace” and ascribed it to me in your mind. FALSE MEMORIES either way. */*/*/* I will read the rest of your post later. Let’s go back to my admitted joke last night. It was actually a veiled way of throwing you a bone like I did with Rocky, and someone else… just yesterday. The joke was that I was implying that most of what you had just posted (and I had missed because of a notification storm) was NOT important to you. Well that is clearly not true to fact. Everything we post here, we think is important. We labor at our keyboards for important things, and even the light hearted breaks we take are calculated. Go back and read again how I put it. I was, in a veiled way, saying I’d answer any one most important objection you had against me, like I did with Rocky and someone else, yesterday. It looks like you may have sensed it in an intuitive way, and came up with this “replace” mem-not. Remember that term I coined back then? A mem-not is a false memory, while mem-rot is a distorted memory. Emotion and the heat of battle also contribute to these common conditions. It happens to me too. Maybe I used “replace” after all and I have a serious mem-rot going. The quotes will tell all. It seemed like you did sense that I was saying “hit me with your best shot” and so you did, with “replace.” I can see how that would bother you, if I did use the word “replace.” The possibility that I used it bothers ME a little. I was also very surprised that your best shot at me was NOT that Tom Strange dual that went on for years, and got quite distorted itself. From your mentioning that dual and “Jesus with the Orange Book in hand” a few times in recent months, I thought for sure that was your best shot, BECAUSE it seemed obvious that you missed me spilling the beans on that one about a year or maybe two years ago. I mentioned my bean spilling briefly recently and you let it fly by. Anyway, in recent years I have felt the heat of the “Mike Wars” diminish enough for me to lighten up a little. I suggest you do the same…. and do your archive search magic on the word “replace” or it’s variants. I may have little to nothing to post today,because I will be visiting friends, so feel free to flood the thread with your findings. Hopefully some will be on topic. LoL

Rocky, you don’t get it; what is really important to me. I don’t come here to match wits and be the winner. Nor do I need to convince you, for me to feel I accomplished my mission. I’m also not here to UN-learn what I have committed to. If your definition of me growing is dropping what gives me life and take on a sin focused religion, then forget me learning, please! I wont be doing THAT kind of learning! Part of my mission is to demonstrate that over and over you folks criticize what you don’t understand or remember, and that means you don’t understand the essence of what we were taught in writing. THEREFORE, you aren’t credible critics of it in my eyes. You may have the scoop on the greatest collection of sins and shortcomings of some people, but that kind of religiosity I left WAY behind in the Catholic Church. I wonder if Dana Carvey was RC? I limit myself. I deliberately use filters. We’re supposed to, once we find the truth. I don’t even try to prove that the collaterals are God-breathed. The limited thing I show is that VPW “stated” they were God-breathed, if you put together ALL his words on this topic. Those who claim that VPW didn’t claim they were of God, missed his MANY such claims. I once was posting some 22 of them, but only got to 18, I think. I am interested in learning better ways to express what I have chosen to live by. My approach to TWI people is totally different on this. They already hold the collaterals to be good these days, and have shook off that “old wineskins” baloney. Actually, living it all is even more important to me these days. That’s the best expression of it. It is easier in person than through ASCII text.

Hmmm. There has been a 20 year evolution of my ideas, and a deliberate attempt to explain it better and better. .....AND to many more audiences than just here. Different audiences require different techniques. Maybe I did change my stated position. I'd like to see my quotes from yesteryear. I know this audience here is different from the one in 2003. I do remember needing more shock and awe to fight back against attacks. Things like "tattered remnants" are phrases that were great shock value here, but terrible with other grads. So I pulled way back on that, I know. It's still roughly true, but that phrase is admittedly such a tiny piece of the story that, I did not need it there, like I thought I needed it here and way back then. I don't think much has changed in the ideas. Being obedient to them has grown so I understand them better, and I understand better how others misconstrue them.... or I poorly state them. */*/** It's late, and I am tired. You could have a point. When you did that thread I didn't respond because my ideas have not fundamentally changed. Not that you mention it, I think some ways I express them have changed. I still don't think I actually said REPLACE the Bible. A necessary augmentation, yes. A necessary window to the ancient understanding, yes. A product of God working in lots of people to get it printed and distributed lovngly, yes. But it can't REPLACE the Bible. The Bible is it's main focus. The collaterals, that is. Yes, I'd like to see the context of any quotes you have of me saying REPLACE. Yes, this is an outrageously wonderful thing, that God gave us a window to His Word.

But I was serious about "on topic."

I was joking with you. LoL