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    Gospel Red Herring: Spiritualizing the Text
    Gospel Red Herring: Spiritualizing the Text
    Gospel Red Herring: Spiritualizing the Text
    Ebook77 pages1 hour

    Gospel Red Herring: Spiritualizing the Text

    By Ed Hurst

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    About this ebook

    You cannot treat the Bible as you would modern Western writing. The Bible is an Eastern document, and Christianity is an Ancient Near Eastern religion. As such, it is inherently mystical in nature. Such were the Hebrew people who wrote the Old Testament until the rabbis came under Hellenizing influences and adopted a Western analytical outlook. The Pharisees in the Gospels were Hellenized in their intellectual approach, playing legalistic and semantic games with the Old Testament. Much of what Jesus said is recognized by scholars as a call to return to those ancient Hebrew mystical roots. While the Jewish leadership of His day rejected that message, those who accepted Him as their Messiah and Savior did embrace that ancient mystical outlook. Thus, where the New Testament quotes from the Old, you'll see the writers often took a mystical approach. Today you hear warnings from American preachers and Bible teachers that we should not "spiritualize the text" of Scripture, but they are contradicting New Testament practice. This short book surveys about thirty quotes from the Old Testament where they appear in the New Testament, and we show how "spiritualizing the text" is quite common and proper.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEd Hurst
    Release dateFeb 9, 2015
    ISBN9781311510563
    Gospel Red Herring: Spiritualizing the Text
    Author

    Ed Hurst

    Born 18 September 1956 in Seminole, OK. Traveled a great deal in Europe with the US Army, worked a series of odd jobs, and finally in public education. Ordained to the ministry as a Baptist, then with a non-denominational endorsement. Currently semi-retired.

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      Book preview

      Gospel Red Herring - Ed Hurst

      Gospel Red Herring: Spiritualizing the Text

      By Ed Hurst

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2015 by Ed Hurst

      Copyright notice: People of honor need no copyright laws; they are only too happy to give credit where credit is due. Others will ignore copyright laws whenever they please. If you are of the latter, please note what Moses said about dishonorable behavior – be sure your sin will find you out (Numbers 32:23)

      Permission is granted to copy, reproduce and distribute for non-commercial reasons, provided the book remains in its original form.

      Cover Art: Rural church in Bavaria, Germany; public domain image.

      Other books by the same author include The Practice of Christian Mysticism, A Course in Biblical Mysticism and Biblical Morality.

      Gospel Red Herring: Spiritualizing the Text

      Table of Contents

      Introduction

      1. Matthew 1:23

      2. Matthew 2:6

      3. Matthew 2:15

      4. Matthew 2:18

      5. Matthew 3:3

      6. Matthew 4:6

      7. Matthew 4:15-16

      8. Matthew 8:17

      9. Matthew 10:34-39

      10. Matthew 11:10

      11. Matthew 12:18-21

      12. Matthew 13:14-15, 35

      13. Matthew 15:8-9

      14. Matthew 21:5

      15. Matthew 21:42

      16. Matthew 22:44

      17. Mark

      18. Luke 4:1-14

      19. John 6:31

      20. Acts 1:20

      21. Acts 2:17-21

      22. Acts 2:25-28

      23. Acts 8:32-33

      24. Acts 15:16-17

      25. Romans 2:24

      26. Romans 3:10-18

      27. 1 Corinthians 9:9

      28. 1 Corinthians 14:21

      29. Galatians 3:10-12

      30. Hebrews 2:6-8

      31. Hebrews 7:1-2

      32. James 2:23

      Conclusion

      Introduction

      If something grabs your heart and drives you beyond all reason, it may well qualify as a word from God for you.

      In that moment, you realize that God takes you seriously and you feel driven to return the favor. The world fades into insignificance; at the same time, you realize a significant element in that drive to please God is a deep compassion for others. Perhaps you realize that most of the world will not take you seriously, but you can’t let that stop you from pursuing God’s glory.

      In the midst of this, you will also find yourself driven to take the Bible seriously. If the God of the Bible touches you, it’s obvious you need to draw closer to the Bible that tells us of Him. It won’t much matter whether you take any other literature as seriously as you do Scripture, but you won’t be able to treat the Bible with contempt. The difficulty, then, is making sure that you find Him there, not some false image that blinds you to the meaning of what’s written there.

      It should hardly surprise you that those who wrote that material were deeply worried it would be taken wrongly. So far as we can tell, the Apostle John penned the final words of the New Testament that closed the canon of Scripture. His Apocalypse is loaded with sadness tempered by joy at the final end. Most people catch the sense of sorrow at what his flock was going to face, particularly when he was gone, the last living apostle. What most people fail to grasp is the broader context from which this particular morose element arises.

      The First Century church leadership struggled against the Judaizers. This was a group of teachers representing a movement that hoped to recapture for Judaism those who had converted to Christianity. These teachers ranged from pushy, overtly Jewish Pharisees to some very crafty folks pretending to be long-time followers of Christ, but they all had an agenda to bring the church back under Talmudic Law. A primary mark of the pretenders was teaching, either openly or slyly through unspoken assumptions, the same legalistic literary analysis used by the Pharisees. This was the influence of Hellenism and a drastic departure from the Ancient Hebrew way of looking at Scripture.

      In essence, Hellenism is an appeal to objective truth as discoverable by human sensory data and reason. They never claimed it was necessary for every individual human to explore the entire realm of all that men could know. Someone who had done some exploration could save others time by abstracting, summarizing and teaching what they had experienced. This process was formalized in founding schools and collecting philosophers to teach others. The whole thing presumed a collection of rules for reasoning so that results would be fairly consistent. Eventually men would be able to point to an established body of human experience and reasoning as trustworthy, or so the theory goes. We could then devise ways to take advantage of this body of truth and build a better life, solve human problems, and obtain some golden age of human enlightenment.

      This was the propaganda by which Hellenism was sold by the likes of Alexander the Great. It wasn’t mere conquest, but he was spreading a truth that would save mankind from all ills. He was doing everyone a favor. A significant result of his efforts to sell this outlook was the death of mysticism in all forms. It also meant trashing centuries of human study based on a mystical outlook. This gradual shift in intellectual assumptions also meant tossing out the entire intellectual background upon which Scripture stood. Alexander’s conquest was some three centuries before Christ. It

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