And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many. ......Matthew 27:51-53 (KJV)Â
These verses bothered me for years, so when they were finally handled in the Way Magazine I took special notice. They were briefly touched on in the Mar/Apr 1982 issue, in the questions and answers section. Then in the next issue, May/June 1982 the GMIR article by Daniel L. McConaughy thoroughly exposed the TWO forgeries that are within these verses. It turns out that twice in later centuries additions were made to fit the current theological errors that had infiltrated the church by that time.
In a nutshell, when the forged additions are removed the verses should read like this:
And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; And the graves were opened; and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many. .......Matthew 27:51-53 (corrected)Â
It reads a little awkward here in my handling, but I did say this was a nutshell version of the answer. It simply means that from the earthquake some of the graves spilled dead bodies out and they were seen in the holy city of Jerusalem, sort of defiling it, and it was pretty shocking. For graves to open in an earthquake is a well known phenomenon. It still happens today, and when it does it's pretty shocking.
How do we know for sure they were forgeries? Needless to say they sure don't fit with anything else written, but Bullinger never mentions a forgery and he believed these verses to be true. -->
The GMIR article goes into all of this. There are no biblical texts surviving that support what this article puts forth, however there IS evidence from other ancient writings where these verses are quoted. Bullinger may have not been aware of them, or may not have felt a need to look at them deeply. Many manuscripts and writings have been discovered since his time.
Bullinger also missed SIT by miles because of an unpleasant experience he had in a charasmatic church where they did SIT indecently and out of order. He reports this somewhere.
Bullinger helped us all out on many occasions, but he was not the last word on restoring the scriptures that were esentially lost at the end of the first century. Bullinger helped to reconstruct an accurate understanding of many ancient scriptures, but not all.
How do we know ANYTHING for sure is a very interesting subject, and one that I have spent a lot of time on, not only in biblical studies, but also in Physics and medical brain science.
Mike, I'm serious about the forgeries. How does one find this stuff out? How did McConaughy find it out? I realize Bullinger didn't know/get everything. But, I love how he hated tradition, don't you?
As far as knowing anything, just because we don't know something, doesn't mean we don't know anything. (I didn't make that up.) I know lots of stuff, but, hey, are you a brain doctor? I don't know nothing about that . . . .
That's an old comedy line that got stuck in my keyboard! ;)-->
I have informally studied and "hung around" with dozens of the world's top brain scientists for 7 years. For many years before that I studied on my own.
I can send you a copy of the GMIR article, or (if there are others interested here) I can scan some of it for posting when I have more time.
All of yor questions are well founded and have been deeply considered by a number of people I have learned from.
are there any patristic citations (e.g.,from the Ante-Nicene Fathers) of those passages provided in this "G'mir" article, attesting to either their presence or absence?
(patristic citations oft prove interesting because the writers had access to versions of NT manuscripts older than those currently available to us).
Evan, I still remember seeing Night of the Living Dead at a midnight show on Broadway when I was too stoned to realize it was a movie and I had my first anxiety attack. I thought it was a heart attack! That poor guy at the end...but the best was Warhol's Frankenstein; ever see that? I can't say I "saw" it, I covered my eyes through most of it.
The real problem with Matthew 27:51-53 is that there is no reason nor evidence to throw it out as forgery. Tell you what you do.. stick it in a search engine like Google and you'll see where Bible believing scholars HAVE to defend it. Why? Because its in the very earliest texts. But don't take my word for it.. go ahead and use Google or Yahoo! or any other search engine you like.
I'm a PFAL grad from 1978 and I don't believe VPW covered this at all. How could he? It doesn't "fit". But then lotsa' things don't "fit". That's why there are over 10,000 Christian denominations. Thought you'd want to know.
Time wouldn't allow me to read all the responses on the search of those verses. I did, however, go to my eBible program which has a good number of commentaries. None of them were insightful. Funny, though. Anyway, interestingly, that word graves is the same word for tombs in Matt. 8:28. You don't have to be dead to come out of them! Hence, a stone, a monument, a memorial,sepulchre, etc. Even in English, in KJV, those verses are so choppy. It's like the saints awoke at the same time Jesus died, but waited for three days before getting up???
Matthew 27:52 (minus v.53) also appears in "The Acts of Pilate". Charles B. Waite in "Christian Religion to the Year Two Hundred") proposed that the citation in "The Acts of Pilate" (verse 52 alone) represents a reading earlier than Matthew, and that Matthew's account contributed a further embellishment (v.53) - which really doesn't appear to add (or subtract) much to the verse anyways...
Paul-Louis Couchoud ("Creation of Christ") proposed that Ignatius (Magn. ix) had in mind Matt.27:52f and that the "saints" raised in Matt.27:52 were the Old Testament prophets.
The notion behind these passages might have been the belief of Christ's descent into Hades following the crucifixion - whose Spirit, upon breaking open the gates of death, liberated the entombed souls within, and led them out like a train into the heavenly spheres.
I would imagine a deity throwing down the gates of the "underworld" might shake up the earth a bit.
It can give you a bigger headache than "Why does a mirror reverse left and right,
but not up and down?"
***
It's an interesting question to study in the sense of: how have various people dealt with this question in the past? In specialized fields, this question can pop up in a limited context, limited to that specific field.
For example, in the field of hair dressing how do you know for sure that Nancy dyes their hair? They say only her hairdresser knows for sure, but how? Well if her hairdresser is the one who dyes it, that might be one way for the hairdresser to know for sure.
But what if Nancy gets it dyed somewhere else? How would her hairdresser know for sure THEN? Now it gets a little more complicated, but if Nancy is getting here hair cut, her hair dresser get's a real close look at her roots. That's a possible way to know FOR SURE, or at least somewhat sure.
But what if Nancy always gers her hair dyed a few hours before getting her hair cut? Now it gets a lot more complicated. Let's throw in the possibility of Nancy having an identical twin sister, Natalie. This twin always gets her hair cut at Nancy's hairdresser whenever Nancy wants to have a six month or year fling with dyed hair. Well, the hairdresser can fingerprint Nancy at every hair cutting session.
How many more permutations of contortion can we come up with to asses the "sureness" her hairdresser can have of Nancy's hair dying proclivities?
***
I've studied (off and on) the field of Quantum Physics for over 40 years. It's been a passion, a life long hobby. It's actually a lot simpler than the hairdesser example.
In 1905, Physics was in a state of chaos. It had been very successful for about a hundred or two hundred years, but towards the ending of the 1800's a bunch of anomalies erupted. Lots of new things were discovered that didn't make any sense, and seemed to defy a bunch of things they PREVIOUSLY were seemingly very sure about. It's a real drama that piled up for many years prior to 1905.
In the next 30 years this field went from a state of total un-surety, to the highest surety level of surety in anything man has ever done, with the help of Einstein and a hundreds others almost as smart as he. Sometimes the surety levels in Quantum Physics can reach a level where a theoretical prediction matches a laboratory measurement to 5 decimal places. In 70 years no theoretical prediction has ever been proved wrong by any laboratory setups. There are still plenty of things that they don't know, but when the CAN crank the equations and they CAN do the experiment, then they always match.
The history of how these ideas went from nothing to something is well documented. Lots of things can be learned from it. Right now brain science is in a state of bewilderment, much like 1905 Physics. Some brain scientists seek insights as to how to move their specialized fields towards surety and understanding by closely studying the success track of Quantum. All this applies to Relativity too, but with fewer laboratory confirmations.
Any field involving people is gobs more complicated, and much less certainty is available. However it's quite interesting to see how, even in the much simpler field of Physics, the concepts of certainty, surety, and sureness can slither away from us.
It's also quite interesting to see how, by careful application of a simple method, SOME surety can emerge.
***
The bottom line on surety is that in the 5-senses realm, it's non-existent. You can calculate some probabilities, some of the time, but you can never know for sure. It's part of the curse of Adam.
Adam handed over his rulership of the earth (5-senses realm) to the devil, and that's who ruled that physical realm legally afterwards. He's called the god of this world, meaning the earthly, senses, physical realm.
The repeating story of the Old testament is: God giving surety (and other things) to His people and in a relatively short time it's gone. It's taken from them in one way or another. One common way is they simply get talked out of it. Sometimes it's very quickly, too.
There's no total certainty in anything gathered via the 5-senses, and that includes Google, and world class experts, and doing it yourself. There might sometimes be a hefty partial certainty, as in probability calculations, but they often don't last long.
Even the first century church had it and lost it.
***
There are two kinds of knowing, though. In addition to the 5-senses a person can gather knowledge via the spirit of God, if they have it. That's the only way to be sure.
In the Advanced Class we were taught 16 keys to walking in the Spirit. Key #4 tells us" "Study the Word much. What we can know by the five sense God expects us to know."
God expects us to gather what partial sureness we can gather by physically reading the written Word of God, and then we can expect Him to reveal to us sure knowledge.
By getting His written Word into our hands we can study it to the best of our ability. It's just extremely important to make "sure" we get His ACCURATE written Word into our hands. This is a catch-22 now. How are we to find the sure written Word?
The only way around this physical handicap is if God gives it to us . God must give us His intact, accurate Word or we can't operate Key #4. If it's not intact, we're right back into the catch-22 in that how "sure" can we be of our reconstruction job. It's got to be the whole package of His Word planted close to us and easy to get at.
After we get this highest possible quality 5-senses knowledge into our minds, saturating our minds to the best of our abilities, then we have done our part in obtaining surety. We've satisfied the requirements of Key #4. Then God can directly reveal to us the spiritual knowledge of complete surety.
***
It's only by revelation (written and then direct) from the True God that we can ever know anything for sure, both 5-senses knowing and spiritual knowing.
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waysider
Film at 11:00! The suspense is killing me./s
Oakspear
if you don't believe that the bible is godbreathed, then there's no problem
Mike
Here is a rough OCR version of the article: Early Patristic Evidence for the Forgery of Matthew 27:52b and 53 Daniel L. McConaughy Seventh Way Corps Way Magazine May
Posted Images
Mike
WELCOME irisheyes.
:D-->
I too am Irish.
:)-->
I wrish I could see you in person now.
:o-->
Here are the verses in question:
And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many. ......Matthew 27:51-53 (KJV)Â
These verses bothered me for years, so when they were finally handled in the Way Magazine I took special notice. They were briefly touched on in the Mar/Apr 1982 issue, in the questions and answers section. Then in the next issue, May/June 1982 the GMIR article by Daniel L. McConaughy thoroughly exposed the TWO forgeries that are within these verses. It turns out that twice in later centuries additions were made to fit the current theological errors that had infiltrated the church by that time.
In a nutshell, when the forged additions are removed the verses should read like this:
And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; And the graves were opened; and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many. .......Matthew 27:51-53 (corrected)Â
It reads a little awkward here in my handling, but I did say this was a nutshell version of the answer. It simply means that from the earthquake some of the graves spilled dead bodies out and they were seen in the holy city of Jerusalem, sort of defiling it, and it was pretty shocking. For graves to open in an earthquake is a well known phenomenon. It still happens today, and when it does it's pretty shocking.
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irisheyes
How do we know for sure they were forgeries? Needless to say they sure don't fit with anything else written, but Bullinger never mentions a forgery and he believed these verses to be true.
-->
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Mike
The GMIR article goes into all of this. There are no biblical texts surviving that support what this article puts forth, however there IS evidence from other ancient writings where these verses are quoted. Bullinger may have not been aware of them, or may not have felt a need to look at them deeply. Many manuscripts and writings have been discovered since his time.
Bullinger also missed SIT by miles because of an unpleasant experience he had in a charasmatic church where they did SIT indecently and out of order. He reports this somewhere.
Bullinger helped us all out on many occasions, but he was not the last word on restoring the scriptures that were esentially lost at the end of the first century. Bullinger helped to reconstruct an accurate understanding of many ancient scriptures, but not all.
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Mike
How do we know ANYTHING for sure is a very interesting subject, and one that I have spent a lot of time on, not only in biblical studies, but also in Physics and medical brain science.
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irisheyes
Mike, I'm serious about the forgeries. How does one find this stuff out? How did McConaughy find it out? I realize Bullinger didn't know/get everything. But, I love how he hated tradition, don't you?
As far as knowing anything, just because we don't know something, doesn't mean we don't know anything. (I didn't make that up.) I know lots of stuff, but, hey, are you a brain doctor? I don't know nothing about that . . . .
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Mike
...no I'm not a doctor,
but I DO look like one
and I'd like to say...
...no wait!
That's an old comedy line that got stuck in my keyboard!
;)-->
I have informally studied and "hung around" with dozens of the world's top brain scientists for 7 years. For many years before that I studied on my own.
I can send you a copy of the GMIR article, or (if there are others interested here) I can scan some of it for posting when I have more time.
All of yor questions are well founded and have been deeply considered by a number of people I have learned from.
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Raf
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TheInvisibleDan
Mike,
are there any patristic citations (e.g.,from the Ante-Nicene Fathers) of those passages provided in this "G'mir" article, attesting to either their presence or absence?
(patristic citations oft prove interesting because the writers had access to versions of NT manuscripts older than those currently available to us).
Danny
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Oakspear
Wierwille sometimes called something a forgery absent evidence if it contradicted what he taught.
Don't know if this was one of those cases
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Tom Strange
hmmmm... what did PFAL teach us about those verses? I can't remember... I wonder who I could ask....
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irisheyes
Raf, hope that popcorn's buttered.
Tom, was that really covered in PFAL?
Anymore insight?
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Raf
It's actually covered in Jesus Christ Our Passover.
As for the popcorn... well, I'll explain later.
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TheEvan
That passage has always conjured up images of "Night of the Living Dead" for me. Can you just imagine?
:D-->
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irisheyes
Evan, I still remember seeing Night of the Living Dead at a midnight show on Broadway when I was too stoned to realize it was a movie and I had my first anxiety attack. I thought it was a heart attack! That poor guy at the end...but the best was Warhol's Frankenstein; ever see that? I can't say I "saw" it, I covered my eyes through most of it.
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TheEvan
Oh gag me with that Warhol Frankenstein. It was horrible. And I saw the dang thing in 3-D
I was ducking falling entrails & such all night.
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Sudo
Irisheyes,
The real problem with Matthew 27:51-53 is that there is no reason nor evidence to throw it out as forgery. Tell you what you do.. stick it in a search engine like Google and you'll see where Bible believing scholars HAVE to defend it. Why? Because its in the very earliest texts. But don't take my word for it.. go ahead and use Google or Yahoo! or any other search engine you like.
I'm a PFAL grad from 1978 and I don't believe VPW covered this at all. How could he? It doesn't "fit". But then lotsa' things don't "fit". That's why there are over 10,000 Christian denominations. Thought you'd want to know.
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Sudo
Evan,
Dittos on Warhol's Frankenstein. It was sado-masochistic, cruel and generally loathsome.
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irisheyes
Dr. Sudo:
Time wouldn't allow me to read all the responses on the search of those verses. I did, however, go to my eBible program which has a good number of commentaries. None of them were insightful. Funny, though. Anyway, interestingly, that word graves is the same word for tombs in Matt. 8:28. You don't have to be dead to come out of them! Hence, a stone, a monument, a memorial,sepulchre, etc. Even in English, in KJV, those verses are so choppy. It's like the saints awoke at the same time Jesus died, but waited for three days before getting up???
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Oakspear
if you don't believe that the bible is godbreathed, then there's no problem
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TheInvisibleDan
Matthew 27:52 (minus v.53) also appears in "The Acts of Pilate". Charles B. Waite in "Christian Religion to the Year Two Hundred") proposed that the citation in "The Acts of Pilate" (verse 52 alone) represents a reading earlier than Matthew, and that Matthew's account contributed a further embellishment (v.53) - which really doesn't appear to add (or subtract) much to the verse anyways...
Paul-Louis Couchoud ("Creation of Christ") proposed that Ignatius (Magn. ix) had in mind Matt.27:52f and that the "saints" raised in Matt.27:52 were the Old Testament prophets.
The notion behind these passages might have been the belief of Christ's descent into Hades following the crucifixion - whose Spirit, upon breaking open the gates of death, liberated the entombed souls within, and led them out like a train into the heavenly spheres.
I would imagine a deity throwing down the gates of the "underworld" might shake up the earth a bit.
Danny
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Mike
But how DO you know anything for SURE?
It's a question few want to bother with.
It can give you a bigger headache than "Why does a mirror reverse left and right,
but not up and down?"
***
It's an interesting question to study in the sense of: how have various people dealt with this question in the past? In specialized fields, this question can pop up in a limited context, limited to that specific field.
For example, in the field of hair dressing how do you know for sure that Nancy dyes their hair? They say only her hairdresser knows for sure, but how? Well if her hairdresser is the one who dyes it, that might be one way for the hairdresser to know for sure.
But what if Nancy gets it dyed somewhere else? How would her hairdresser know for sure THEN? Now it gets a little more complicated, but if Nancy is getting here hair cut, her hair dresser get's a real close look at her roots. That's a possible way to know FOR SURE, or at least somewhat sure.
But what if Nancy always gers her hair dyed a few hours before getting her hair cut? Now it gets a lot more complicated. Let's throw in the possibility of Nancy having an identical twin sister, Natalie. This twin always gets her hair cut at Nancy's hairdresser whenever Nancy wants to have a six month or year fling with dyed hair. Well, the hairdresser can fingerprint Nancy at every hair cutting session.
How many more permutations of contortion can we come up with to asses the "sureness" her hairdresser can have of Nancy's hair dying proclivities?
***
I've studied (off and on) the field of Quantum Physics for over 40 years. It's been a passion, a life long hobby. It's actually a lot simpler than the hairdesser example.
In 1905, Physics was in a state of chaos. It had been very successful for about a hundred or two hundred years, but towards the ending of the 1800's a bunch of anomalies erupted. Lots of new things were discovered that didn't make any sense, and seemed to defy a bunch of things they PREVIOUSLY were seemingly very sure about. It's a real drama that piled up for many years prior to 1905.
In the next 30 years this field went from a state of total un-surety, to the highest surety level of surety in anything man has ever done, with the help of Einstein and a hundreds others almost as smart as he. Sometimes the surety levels in Quantum Physics can reach a level where a theoretical prediction matches a laboratory measurement to 5 decimal places. In 70 years no theoretical prediction has ever been proved wrong by any laboratory setups. There are still plenty of things that they don't know, but when the CAN crank the equations and they CAN do the experiment, then they always match.
The history of how these ideas went from nothing to something is well documented. Lots of things can be learned from it. Right now brain science is in a state of bewilderment, much like 1905 Physics. Some brain scientists seek insights as to how to move their specialized fields towards surety and understanding by closely studying the success track of Quantum. All this applies to Relativity too, but with fewer laboratory confirmations.
Any field involving people is gobs more complicated, and much less certainty is available. However it's quite interesting to see how, even in the much simpler field of Physics, the concepts of certainty, surety, and sureness can slither away from us.
It's also quite interesting to see how, by careful application of a simple method, SOME surety can emerge.
***
The bottom line on surety is that in the 5-senses realm, it's non-existent. You can calculate some probabilities, some of the time, but you can never know for sure. It's part of the curse of Adam.
Adam handed over his rulership of the earth (5-senses realm) to the devil, and that's who ruled that physical realm legally afterwards. He's called the god of this world, meaning the earthly, senses, physical realm.
The repeating story of the Old testament is: God giving surety (and other things) to His people and in a relatively short time it's gone. It's taken from them in one way or another. One common way is they simply get talked out of it. Sometimes it's very quickly, too.
There's no total certainty in anything gathered via the 5-senses, and that includes Google, and world class experts, and doing it yourself. There might sometimes be a hefty partial certainty, as in probability calculations, but they often don't last long.
Even the first century church had it and lost it.
***
There are two kinds of knowing, though. In addition to the 5-senses a person can gather knowledge via the spirit of God, if they have it. That's the only way to be sure.
In the Advanced Class we were taught 16 keys to walking in the Spirit. Key #4 tells us" "Study the Word much. What we can know by the five sense God expects us to know."
God expects us to gather what partial sureness we can gather by physically reading the written Word of God, and then we can expect Him to reveal to us sure knowledge.
By getting His written Word into our hands we can study it to the best of our ability. It's just extremely important to make "sure" we get His ACCURATE written Word into our hands. This is a catch-22 now. How are we to find the sure written Word?
The only way around this physical handicap is if God gives it to us . God must give us His intact, accurate Word or we can't operate Key #4. If it's not intact, we're right back into the catch-22 in that how "sure" can we be of our reconstruction job. It's got to be the whole package of His Word planted close to us and easy to get at.
After we get this highest possible quality 5-senses knowledge into our minds, saturating our minds to the best of our abilities, then we have done our part in obtaining surety. We've satisfied the requirements of Key #4. Then God can directly reveal to us the spiritual knowledge of complete surety.
***
It's only by revelation (written and then direct) from the True God that we can ever know anything for sure, both 5-senses knowing and spiritual knowing.
.
.
.
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irisheyes
Oh, please . . . . How do you know it's revelation?
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Raf
Hang on, irisheyes. It gets better.
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Tom Strange
Raf... you want some milk duds?
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