Spiritual Sperm?
Spiritual Sperm?
Here I am going to present and comment on a paper which was first published by Clifton Emahiser in September, 2006.
In my opinion, one important aspect of our New Testament commentaries here at Christogenea is a constant endeavor to illustrate the differences of Biblical Christianity, as it is evident in both the writings of the Old Testament prophets and the New Testament apostles, with the interpretations of Scripture which were accepted and institutionalized after Christianity had emerged from persecution in the 4th century, as a Roman-government approved Church began to take form. To a great degree, these interpretations are still found throughout the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox as well as all of the Protestant churches.
While I am only offering a hypothesis, it is very likely that these differences resulted because Christianity was persecuted by Jews for several centuries, and by the Romans often at the instigation of the Jews, at the same time that it was being infiltrated by Judaizers, which is evident throughout the New Testament epistles and Acts of the Apostles. During this period of persecution, the Judaizers sought to corrupt Christianity, and as Judaic thought gained more and more traction on a persecuted Christianity, there is an evident transition which occurred within the first century of the dissemination of the gospel. The spread of the gospel began as a message to the scattered twelve tribes of Israel and ended by adopting what we may call replacement theology, which is the misguided concept that somehow mere “gentiles”, people of other races and nations, had replaced the actual children of Israel as the object of the promises of God. This happened during a murky period of Christian history from about 100 AD up to the time of Justin Martyr, a period about which little is known. But the apostles, as well as the prophets, had taught that the twelve tribes of Israel which were scattered abroad, and had already become many nations, were being called to Christ. But the Judaic form of Christianity which took root in Palestine and in Alexandria and which ultimately became dominant had taught that anyone who was baptized and believed in Jesus somehow became one of the children of a “new” Israel, which was the ecclesia, and later, the Church.
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