Introduction

Coming soon: A Periodical Post of a Discussion Topic

APSE Ministries began as my personal study to address, sometimes even answer, question and concerns I had about my faith, my relationship with God, my experiences with church(es), and how I can better live my life as Jesus would want me to live.  

Questions, questions, questions.  What is Biblical?  How should the Bible be interpreted?  In what historical context was each Book of the Bible written?  Has interpretation changed over the years?  Was there an agenda involved?  Why didn't the apocryphal texts not make the Bible?  Is the Bible supported by history?  Archaeology?  Who made the decisions?  The church?  The church has a pretty sketchy past.  And it DID have an agenda.  But their interpretation led to tradition.  Tradition we now accept as "Biblical."  And that tradition sends a lot o people fleeing from the church, from Jesus.  Good people,  People God created.  People God loves.  People God wants in His Kingdom, on earth as it is in heaven.

Are we sinners if we study the Bible?  Are we sinners if we call tradition to task?  Dare we question the church?  Dare we question "The Book of Order?"  Dare we call a man-made rule non-Biblical?  For Pete's sake, many believe the Bible, hence God and Jesus, is pro-slavery, pro-racist, pro-misogyny.   Would an almighty God create man and woman for such a world?  

Hypocrisy.  Slavery.  Misogyny.  Homosexuality.  Racism.   Who was Jesus?  Who was Paul?  

All among topics that will be listed in the coming days with appropriate pages referenced to help in your study.

Personal study.  Group study.  Group discussion.  I have my beliefs jaded by my own life experiences, opinions, and prejudices.  I am not trying to persuade or convince anyone in their beliefs.  But maybe, just maybe we could all get along better if we looked at what other people think and believe out there.  That's what Jesus wanted.  And that IS Biblical.  John 17:20b-21a  I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them will be as one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.

Archive 1    Is There a Christian Litmus Test?  

I came across a post from a member of the United Methodist Church about what it means to be a Christian.  Are we defined by our beliefs or by our actions?  What did Jesus say?  Since we will delve into the Bible and many sensitive topics I want to start with an overview.  The Litmus Test.  If we check these boxes are we Christians?  If we cannot check all of the boxes are we doomed and automatically tossed from the club?  From the      Referenced Articles The Apostle Paul  page 74.

 Is There a Christian Litmus Test?

Obery Hendricks, Jr.  Christians Against Christianity

Is there a Christian Litmus Test?  A Litmus Test for Politics?  Do these views define a Christian?  Are these the TRUE FAMILY VALUES that define a Christian?  Do you know a church that believes:

It does NOT MATTER how much one attempts to love their neighbor or responds to the needs of the weak and vulnerable.  What matters is that a person is:

1. Anti abortion

2. Anti divorce

3. Anti LGBTQ

4. Anti IVF

Note that NOWHERE does Jesus define or even SUGGEST a dogmatic religious litmus test as requirements for following him, let alone a test to determine if one is fit for heaven.  NOT ONCE did Jesus say that God would judge anyone based on adherence to any particular creed.  In fact, in the entire gospel, Jesus says virtually NOTHING about what to believe.  

What Jesus DID teach were 2 ethical precepts: Love the Lord your God and Love your neighbor as yourself - better stated as TREAT THE PEOPLE’S NEEDS AS HOLY.

Referenced Articles The Apostle Paul  Page 74  What did Jesus say?  Read the Sheep and the Goats.

Archive 2:  Immigration

I heard it again today from a “naturalized citizen”.  “There is a right way to emigrate to the United States.  There is a process.  An immigrant needs to go through the process.  Like I did.” 

The process.  A complex process?  Is it skewed towards white, English speaking, wealthier, more intelligent people?  

Are they refugees?   DO THEY NEED ASYLUM?  

Do we only want to accept rich people who bring wealth to our country?  Do we only want to accept people of the same language, the same culture, the same customs as those of us already here? 

Are we afraid of anyone else and what they will do to our American society?  

Have immigrants of the past not assimilated?  

Were not Jews or perhaps Catholics going to destroy our country?  Irish?  Italian? Eastern Europeans?

What is different today?  (Beyond the obvious one…)

Does a starving person with no hope for survival merit a different means of emigration?

Can you think of any words of Jesus that might apply?

Article 3  Forgive us our debts

The Lord’s Prayer.  Matthew 6:9-13.  It’s recited in many, maybe most, churches weekly in their services.  Many people, including non-Christians, know it by heart.  

Today I want to take a look at verse 12: And forgive us our DEBTS as we forgive our DEBTORS.  

Note these words are often substituted by many churches and in some translations of the Bible.  Debts can be replaced by TRESPASSES, or perhaps SINS.

One of my favorite authors, Obery Henricks, Jr., has an interesting take on this.  He claims the correct translation from the Koine Greek is DEBTS,  And he follows this up by putting Jesus’ teaching in the context of his day.  

The Life of Jesus Bible Study addresses the economy in Jesus’ day.  It greatly influenced Jesus’ teaching.  As in most economies, there is a concentration of wealth in but a few people.  Sometimes a middle class, and always the poor.  (The Poor You Will Always Have With You - See Referenced Articles 2 - The Life of Jesus, page 51.)

The concentration of wealth in Jesus’ time was extreme.  Fully 85 - 95% of Jesus’ peers were poor.  Very poor.  And oppressed.

Jesus was a champion for the poor.  (See The Life of Jesus - Part 2 pages 33b - 38.)  

Debts were oppressive.  Debt was used to rob people of their land.  Rob people of their families.  Rob people of their lives.  Land was taken by the tax collectors and the  “wealthy landowners.”  People literally sold family members and/or themselves to satisfy the debt collectors.  

Read a little.  Research a little.  Is this still going on in the world?  Is this still occuring in the United States?

Article 4:   God's Chosen People

The past week has been riddled with sad news.  The mass shooting at Brown University in Rhode Island.  The murder of Rob and Michele Reiner.  And the slaughter of Jewish persons celebrating Hanukkah in Australia.  

The last event shifted our focus in this week's Bible study topic to the ongoing friction and hostilities of Jewish and Muslim groups.  

Let's start with God's Chosen People.  

We have been looking at the Jewish Laws in Leviticus.  Were these laws sent to Moses via a lightning bolt from God?  Had God chosen this population to be His "favorite?"  Had God been looking for a population to try a grand experiment?  Did he finally find a group willing to accept the challenge?  (If so they tended not to be very good at it given the Old Testament being riddled with backsliding and rejection of Yahweh.)  

Or perhaps we are looking at this a little backwards.  After the difficult life in Egypt, did the wise leaders of the Israelite people choose themselves to be a People of God.  More like we choose to be clean, healthy, holy, by following laws (rules) that help us achieve "righteousness in the eyes of God."

If that is the case, could not other people groups "choose" to be the people of God as well with their own set of laws, their own set of values that help them achieve "righteousness in the eyes of God?"

Hence, we have Christians, Muslims, even Hindu and Buddhists.  Can they all be "God's Chosen People" because they "Chose to be righteous in the eyes of God?"  Can there be more than one "Chosen People?"   Should they respect each other?  Should they get along?  Can they respect each other?  Can they get along?  Is there only one way?  

How does this tie into the tragedy in Australia?  My thought is the use of a strict interpretation of words of the Holy Books of both Judaism and Islam.  Here is a snippet of this week's Bible Study discussion:

So why am I digressing this week?  Australia, unfortunately.  The killing of Jews by a father and his son, evidently influenced by ISIS, a Muslim group.   

The Hebrew Book of Samuel says “Kill them all.” 1 Samuel 15:3 Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’” Guess where the Amalekites lived?  The Negev Desert.  A territory “administered” by Israel.  Guess what that region borders immediately to the East??  Gaza.  And in Gaza that is pretty much what they are doing.  

Does the Q’uran tell Muslims to kill all the Jews?  No.  Jews and Christians are “People of the Book” and are granted special protection under Islamic law as they share a monotheistic heritage.  EXCEPT Q’uran 60:8 states

Allah does not forbid you from dealing kindly and fairly with those who have neither fought nor driven you out of your homes. Surely Allah loves those who are fair.   I guess that throws the “special protection” out the window…

And the Hadith is a different story.  Supposed additional sayings of Muhhamud.  Someday the Muslims will kill all the Jews: “The hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say: “O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.”  

Don’t expect the news headlines to change anytime soon…

Article 5: The Nazi Gospel

It’s kind of personal.  My father fought in WWII.  He fired a coastal battery artillery gun.  What they hit, what he saw, who he killed, he never said.  But his reliance on his cigarettes, I assume he had PTSD.
The way the Neo Nazis have become accepted in the United States today would disgust him, disappoint him, absolutely make his blood boil.

Today’s Nazi leader in the United States is Nick Fuentes.  He had cozied up to Trump.  He has infiltrated MAGA.  He no longer is persona non grata.  
Fuentes hates non-Christians.  Fuentes hates Jews.  “When we take power, they need to be given the death penalty.  Straight up.”  Jews are “perpetrating the lies, (they are) the destruction of the country.”  
Fuentes is a Christian.  He faces the same 2 problems Hitler and the Nazis faced.  
1.  Jesus preached peace and forgiveness.
2.  Jesus was a Jew.

The solution: Rewrite the Bible.  You can’t change the words?  You sure can.  And the Nazis did.  
The leader:  Walter Grundmann.  An early Nazi party member.  In 1940 they published their new Bible: The Message of God.  
Gone were the references to Jews.  The Old Testament?  Gone.  References to Jesus’ Jewishness?  Gone.  References to Jesus’ message of peace?  Gone.  Jesus was a militant.  Jesus was an Aryan soldier of dominance.  He wasn’t a Jew at all.
The Jews?  Quite simply, they were Jesus killers.
Paul’s letters?  Gone.  He was a Jew.  Except for Romans 13, the oft misinterpreted and misquoted chapter that demands allegiance to the Government because they were appointed by God.  
The opposition to Grundmann?  That would be Martin Niemoeller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  Bonhoeffer paid for his opposition to the Nazi Bible with his life.  He never would support the killing of 6 million Jews.  But he was all in on mandatory conversion of every Jew to Christianity.

The question is: Who is Fuentes' “Grundmann?”  Who is going to re-write the Bible for him?  Or is he simply going to use Grundmann’s Bible?  Or has he already done it himself?
Fuentes already denies the holocaust - the death toll of Jews was greatly exagerated.  He grudgingly accepted the 6 million number in a recent interview, but I’ll bet he doesn’t believe it.  

This is dangerous territory we are allowing fellow Americans to dabble in.  Denial.  Lies.  Deception. Power.  Control.  
We need to heed these quotes:
General Dwight D. Eisenhower:  “Get it all on record now - get the films - get the witnesses - because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.”

Dr. Douglas Kelley, the psychiatrist who studied the Nazi leadership after WWII:  (There) “are people who exist in every country of the world. Their personality patterns are not obscure. But they are people who have peculiar drives, people who want to be in power, and you say that they don’t exist here, and I would say that I am quite certain that there are people even in America who would willingly climb over the corpses of half of the American public if they could gain control of the other half, and these are the people who today are just talking—who are utilizing the rights of democracy in anti-democratic fashion.”

“After the war, the German people said, 'We didn't know there were concentration camps, didn’t know they were killing the Jews.' They were silent. They were lying like hell.”

Becky Maness Poteat:  The story is told of a church in Germany near the train tracks where trains took thousands to the death camps daily. On Sundays when the trains passed, church members complained that they had to force themselves to blot out the cries of those in the trains by singing extra loudly. They knew. The ash from the crematoriums settled on their homes nearby. The Germans knew.

Article 6:  The Thirteenth Amendment

The amendment provided that “[n]either slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” 

Those words sadly removed the intent of the entire amendment.  Slavery was simply replaced with debt peonage, a concept far worse than slavery.  

A slave was sold for $900.  Not an insignificant sum.  A slave owner had a major investment in his slave, and had cause to keep him/her relatively healthy.

Debt peonage meant trumping up a phony charge on a black person, taking them to court, perhaps bribing a justice of the peace, or paying a small fine meant the black person now had to work for the patron until the debt was paid.  That could last forever.

Hence, a “slave” could be bought for as little as $10-15.  No need to clothe or feed him.  If he died you simply got another for $10 or $15.  

Pure evil.

For a more in depth article on Dept Peonage see Tallapoosa Peonage Case 1903 and Alabama Literacy Test for voting the APSE page  Slavery    A study of slavery and how the Bible addresses the issue.  

Archive 7  A Prayer for Nancy Guthrie, a Prayer for Immigrants, a Prayer for America

President Trump has seen the photos of the potential suspect in the presumed Nancy Guthrie abduction. His reaction was one of “pure disgust.”

That was the reaction we have had for days. And perhaps it has been on his mind as well.

Savannah Guthrie presents as a kind, warm-hearted, compassionate woman. I think she is a terrific part of a strong Today Show team.

Our hearts are aching. The uncertainty is frustrating.

Then again… This scenario has been playing out for months. Years. As kids and family members have been snapped up from schools, grocery stores, public streets. The abductors usually wear masks as well.

Family members have been sent away, sometimes out of the country. Often without meds. Often tearing people away from necessary medical treatments. People lost. Children torn from parents. Fathers, mothers, grandparents torn from the family.

There is no outcry from the White House. This is a policy. And those who oppose this policy are insurrectionists.

Does it matter if a person abducted is not famous? Does it matter if the person is an immigrant? Does it matter if the person is here illegally? Is their pain any less than the Guthries?

Perhaps there is no compassion for “illegals.” But what if a citizen was taken by mistake? Do they warrant some sympathy? If they are returned is it enough to say “Oops, sorry!” What if there is no job when they return? No home to live in. No food. No heat. “Oops, sorry” isn’t very filling.

Jesus wouldn’t have seen a difference. “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

In Jesus’ day the poor and rejected were called “expendables.” Jesus talked about them. A lot. He even said they will be FIRST in the kingdom of heaven.

God, we pray. Bring Nancy back safely.

God, we pray. Restore the VALUES OF JESUS to our government. They aren’t there now.

Archive 8  The Acts of Paul and Thecla - Why didn't it make the canon?

Thecla was a heroine to many women in history.  A saga of a woman who became a devout Christian under the tutelage of the Apostle Paul himself.  

Thecla stood for women's independence, freedom, and ability to function as someone other than "the wife of somebody."   She was very popular among her peers.  Women embraced the "chastity vow" and rejection of marriage that allowed them to live lives independent of the demands of their husbands, often in an arranged marriages, certainly in families of wealth, power and influence.

Did the conflict within Greco-Roman society and later in the male dominated church play a role in the canonization of this book?  Were the authorities concerned about allowing a woman to be such an independent evangelist for Christianity?  Would it upset family structure, the desired birth of children (especially male children), and the structure of the male dominated church?  

Ler's take a look.  

1.  Tertullian says that this (book) was forged by a Presbyter of Asia, who being convicted. "confessed that he did it out of respect for Paul."   

Well, that certainly raises a lot of red flags.  Convicted.  Of what?  Writing down what appears to be very credible oral history of women's roles in the early church?   

Many books of the Bible were writings of oral histories, oral traditions, and oral stories.  There shouldn't be an issue there.

Women had very active roles in the early church, sponsoring "church homes" and evangelizing on the road, albeit always WITH THEIR HUSBANDS.  No woman had gone as far as Thecla is reported to have gone.  

A. Learning at the feet of Paul, the position of the top student.  

B. Declaring celibacy for life, even after Paul realized couples may as well get married.  His thought that Jesus was returning soon to rapture the world so why bother with marriage had not planned out.  To keep Greco-Roman converts "in the club" marriage was back in vogue.   A marriage that a man could control.  A marriage where a woman was basically a baby producer - with the associated health risks.  Thecla gave women an out.  A way to escape a life of bondage or control by a man.

C. Thecla chopped off her hair and traveled as a man.  Still unsafe, but also a sign of real independence that women, for the most, part, did not enjoy.  

D. Thecla demonstrated the skills, knowledge, and physical abilities to do what was reserved for men.  Was this a threat to church leadership?

So the forger wrong?  Or did the forger bring to print a story church leadership wanted to stay hidden in the shadows?  I can see why they might consider that a crime.  

The forger confessed his guilt.

Not surprising.  I assume, even in the church structure there were ways of "making people talk."  Ways of getting this forger to "admit his guilt."

2. Pope Gelasius, in his Decree against apocryphal books, inserted it among them.  Pope Gelasius was a key authority in determining the canonicity of a book, although the canon was fluid for years.  Revelation was the last book added many centuries later.

3.  Regardless, a large part of the history of Thecla was credited and looked upon as genuine among the primitive Christians. Cyprian, Eusebius, Epiphanius, Austin, Gregory Nazianzen, Chrysostom, and Severus Sulpitius, who all lived within the fourth century, mention Thecla, or refer to her history.

4. Basil of Seleucia wrote her acts, suflerings, and victories in verse; and Euagrius Scholasticus, an ecclesiastical historian, about 590, relates that "after the Emperor Zeno had abdicated his empire, and Basilik had taken possession of it, he had a vision of the holy and excellent martyr Thecla, who promired him the restoration of his empire; for which, when it was brought about, he erected and dedicated a most noble and sumptuour temple to this famous martyr Thecla, at Seleucia, a city of Isauria, and bestowed upon it very noble endowments, which (says the author) are preserved even till this day." 

5. Cardinal Baroniur, Locrinus, Archbishop Wake, and others; and also the learned Grabe, who edited the Septuagint, and revived the Acts of Paul and Thecla, consider them as having been written in the Apostolic age as containing nothing superstitious, or disagreeing from the opinions and belief of those times; and, in short, as a genuine and authentic history. 

6. The result:  The Roman Catholic Church honors Thecla as “Equal to an Apostle” and is celebrated on September 23 (September 24 in the Eastern Orthodox Church).

Discussion: How might the church and society be different today if The Act of Paul and Thecla had made the canon of Books that make up the Bible?

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