Quote:
Originally Posted by Regens Kuechl
...The Letter of Lentulus...
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True to your papist form, your appeal to extra-Biblical sources are an insult and offense unto the LORD. If the Good Lord wanted that extra stuff to be included in His Holy Word, He would have inspired the authors accordingly. If we were to follow your lead and accept any old thing written about our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, we'd be forced to consider such offensive tails as the Attempted Lesbianizing of Jesus' Mother as expressed in
The Protoevangelium of James. This letter attempts to convince the gullible papist of an attempt made upon Mary's hetero-honor following the birth of Jesus whereby the midwife exclaims to Salome the wonderful news of the Messiah's birth. Salome says, "As the Lord my God lives, unless I thrust in my finger, and search the parts, I will not believe that a virgin has brought forth." At least in this story Jesus punishes the wench by burning her hand until she repents, then he miraculously heals it. There are certain facts we know about the birth of our Lord, like a star that stood directly above the place where the Infant Savior lay (Matthew 2:9). If you've ever tried to stand under a star, you'd know how difficult that is, but the idea that Salome would question Mary's virginity and then shove her fingers inside to confirm it is pure foolishness.
Or we might consider the
Infancy Gospel of Thomas to believe young Jesus was naught but an imp, a mischievous young fellow with a bit of a temper who uses his supernatural power to wither irritating playmates on the spot. Anyone familiar with the Twilight Zone would naturally think of Billy Mummy's character, the tyrannical monster child who could do evil things by the power of his mind in the episode
It's A Good Life. We know
Jesus to be of strong conviction, but this is just mean.
We might be compelled to take seriously the
Gospel According to Peter, in which Jesus emerges from the Tomb on Easter morning as tall as a mountain, supported by two angels of roughly the same size. Behind them, from the tomb, there supposedly emerges the cross. Bizarrely, the cross then has a conversation with God in Heaven. It's one thing to note that Jesus was temporarily dead, that the woman (John 20:1) or women (Matthew 28:1; Mark 16:1; Luke 24:10) who came to the tomb saw the single angel (Matthew 28:2-7) and yet angels (John 20:12) sitting on the stone (Matthew 28:2) and yet miraculously sitting on each end of the bed (John 20:12), but a giant cross talking with God is just silly. Why should we believe it?
By all counts the strangest of your extra-Biblical stories of our Lord is found in
The Questions of Mary, now lost but quoted once by an early Church Father. According to this tale, Jesus took Mary alone up onto a mountain, and as she watched, he pulled a woman from his side and began to have sex with her. What happens next is even stranger, as it involves a case of divine coitus interruptus and the consumption of semen. Mary, not surprisingly, faints on the spot. We can believe Jesus brings forth a magic coin from the mouth of a fish (Matthew 17:27). We can believe Jesus curses a fig tree for not bearing fruit off season (Mark 11:13; 21). We can believe Jesus' paternal grandfather was Jacob (Matthew 1:6-16) and yet it was Heli (Luke 3:21-31) in a most moral, heterosexual, miraculous way, but to believe He had sex with a rib-woman in front of a whore is pure fantasy.
I don't know why you papists insist on believing such foolishness. Just because something is written down doesn't mean it's true, you know.