Re: Six (6) Questions for All Christians PART ONE

Part Two: http://youtube.com/watch?v=fR0bEMxeUjo SOURCES QUESTION 1 "To suggest that Constantine has the ability - or even the inclination - to manipulate the council into believing what it did not already embrace is, at best, a silly notion. At worst, the emperor was merely a speed bump in the the church's march toward a deeper understanding of the nature of Christ. And although Constantine may have called himself 'bishop of the bishops,' the church was going to believe what it knew it must believe - with or without him" (Komoszewski, Sawyer & Wallace, 'Reinventing Jesus', 2006, p215) "In the second century the church may not have had a full-fledged canon of Scripture, but it used a canon of truth (regula fidei) to distinguish orthodoxy from heresy. The canon of Scripture came later as a legitimate and natural development of the canon of truth. We can say without hesitation that in the second century parts of the Eastern and Western church recognized the authority of some books that were to become part of the New Testament. By the early fourth century the authority of these books was without serious debate... Constantine and the Council of Nicea did not impose their views about these documents on the church" (Witherington, 'The Gospel Code', 2004, p125) "The polemics of the second and third centuries clearly demonstrate that various church leaders already had a very strong and clear sense of what was or wasn't in accord with the foundational documents of Christianity and the apostolic tradition" (Ibid., p123) "Constantine put a kibosh on canon development by ordering that 50 copies of the New Testament be made; and once that happened, who would dare add or subtract from what was copied? The thing is, Constantine placed the order but there's no sign he filled out the purchase request. He ordered the copies, not the content" (http://www.tektonics.org/books/dungcontrvw.html, September 4th, 2007) "This is a pre-literate culture, and here's what they did. When Jesus said things, they went and repeated them. When Jesus did things, they went and told other people and other people talked about it. And in the evening they did not watch the show Twenty-four and they did not watch The American Idol. They watched The Jewish Idol, and his name was Jesus. It's an icon; the perfect icon. They got together and told stories, and they could remember details like we never have the capacity to do because we live in a literate culture. We don't even worry about details. We Google it; we find it; it's written" (McKnight, cited at http://www.coffeehousetheology.com/davinci/) QUESTION 2 http://www.tektonics.org/gk/godchangemind.html QUESTION 3 http://www.christian-thinktank.com/fabprof4.html http://www.tektonics.org/gk/jesgen.html QUESTION 4 http://www.tektonics.org/lp/markend.html QUESTION 5 N/A QUESTION 6 N/A