tom baker has some interesting thoughts on this subject
The Church's Biggest Lie
by ProdigalSon 34 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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soontobe
Sorry again, but that isn't true either.
http://www.near-death.com/experiences/origen06.html
No, sorry, you get it wrong. Origen never taught reincarnation.
If you think Origen taught reincarnation, you are free to provide a sample from his writings to back it up. Not some unsourced quote, by the way, as on that webpage you linked (there are fake Origen quotes there). A quote WITH a verifiable source.
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soontobe
Here you go Prodigal Son. Origen on reincarnation:
He shoots it down. Here's the money quote:
...lest I should fall into the dogma of transmigration, which is foreign to the church of God, and not handed down by the Apostles, nor anywhere set forth in the Scriptures.
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Rattigan350
It's not a lie. A lie is only when they know the other side is true. When one knows concrete facts and teaches against it. No one knows what happens after death, so any statement on that subject can not be considered a lie, it is merely speculation. Teaching speculation is not teaching a lie, it is teaching a theory.
It is like when JWs say that Christendom teaches lies such as hellfire and trinity. Well, hellfire and trinity are false, but teaching them are not lies because no one has seen God or the afterlife to know what happens. They are just different interpretations of sacred books. Different interpretations does not make it a lie.
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mP
Soon:
Why do you believe anything Origen says. His name means something of Horus, strange name for a Christian, strange that his Christian parents would give him such a name. You can verify on his wiki article.
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soontobe
mP, what's that got to do with anything I've said?
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mP
@soon
Not much but it seems strange not to mention this. I mean if he was called Ben Satan aka son of Satan people would take notice. Here we have a Christian doctor which some people love to quote but they fail to mention how pagan his name is.
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NeonMadman
We have thousands of New Testment manuscripts dating back as far as the 2nd century, and not one mentions reincarnation anywhere.
Who is "we"? Lol... the Catholic Church? Sorry, but that simply isn't true.
Yes, it simply is true. You are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts. "We" refers to the entire scholarly community. There are almost 6,000 manuscripts or parts of manuscripts of the NT in existence today. The oldest of these is currently the Rylands fragment, a portion of the Gospel of John dating back to about 125 A.D., only 30 years or so after the original was written (see http://carm.org/manuscript-evidence). Some of the manuscripts, to be sure, are held by the Catholic Church, others are in the possession of museums and universities. Most are available for scholarly study. None carries any explicit message endorsing reincarnation.
The New Testament is the most reliable of any document of ancient times in terms of the manuscript evidence for the text. Copies of the NT writings were circulated far and wide, even during the first century. It would have been impossible, even then, to have gathered up all the manuscripts and "changed the Bible" - how much more so 500 years later, when the text had been distributed even further?
We also have the writings of early church Fathers dating back to people who were contemporary with the Apostles, and again, there is no mention of reincarnation.
Sorry again, but that isn't true either.
I stand by my statement. As soontobe pointed out, Origen wrote against reincarnation, not in favor of it. The article you cite doesn't actually provide any quotations from Origen that supposedly advocate reincarnation, but relies on Gnostic sources, and even the quotations from them are not explicit regarding reincarnation. In fact, the Gnostics would have denied reincarnation, since their belief was that the flesh was evil and it was desirable to be freed from the body of flesh, not implanted into a new one after death. Even if you could find an odd Church Father or two who believed in reincarnation - and I don't think you can - that's still a long way from supporting the claim that " At the beginning of the Christian era, reincarnation was one of the pillars of belief." Clearly anyone who held such a belief in the early days of Christianity would have been regarded as a heretic.
Nor does finding a verse or two in the NT that, when taken out of context, might be compatible with the idea of reincarnation, prove your case. If you think text has been removed from the Bible, you need to offer evidence - tell us which manuscripts out of the 6,000 have the missing verses. The articles you have been linking to are long on assertion and very, very short on substantive proof. And make no mistake, in making claims such as this, the burden of proof is on you, not on those who disagree with your assertions.
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NeonMadman
By the way, Origen probably isn't the best source to use in discussing what the early Church Fathers believed. His doctrine was pretty wonky in a number of areas. Some scholars in the area of Patristics consider Origen to have been a heretic.
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soontobe
By the way, Origen probably isn't the best source to use in discussing what the early Church Fathers believed. His doctrine was pretty wonky in a number of areas. Some scholars in the area of Patristics consider Origen to have been a heretic.
Agreed, Neon, 100%, but here the claim was made that he taught reincarnation, as you know. That's a very specific claim. The evidence is that he did the opposite.