Jim wrote: >blind faith is what you're demonstrating in your sources :) If there's no >copies of a text, or no quotes of it in ancient documents, or any reference at >all to it or its contents in ancient documents, you can't "prove" the >existence of the text. Hearsay isn't proof. > >Back then, as now, it was Nigh On Impossible to completely eradicate all >copies of any manuscript--especially documents so Copied and ReCopied as the >New Testament (or the Hebrew Scriptures for that matter--The Dead Sea Scrolls >are proof of that. I never for once suggested that there is no existing copy of the material that had been censored from the Gospel (The Gospel of Mark, I can now say for sure). I also did not say that the Gospel proves that Jesus is a homosexual. What I did say was that certain Gnostic sects USED the Gospel of Mark to prove that Jesus was a homosexual--much in the same way that William Miller USED the Bible to prove that the End of the World was coming on a specific date in the late nineteenth century--and Bishop Clement, the reigning power of the time, excised the suspect passage from the Gospel--and the passage STILL does not appear in the Gospel today. Where the passage DOES appear, along with the Order to have it removed, is in a letter from Bishop Clement to a Theodore. The letter and the passage are both printed in the book "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln (Delacorte Press, 1982), on pages 290-292--and the authors' own sources are duly noted. I just didn't happen to have the book in front of me when I wrote that last post. Incidentally, Baigent and Leigh also wrote a book called "The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception," which tells of the findings of the Scrolls, and in fact agrees with the short account in your last post. As for your assertation that anything radical probably isn't true, I would apply that to the idea that Jesus "rose from the dead," and stick with noted Historians for my own knowledge. I grew up in the Catholic Church, and I left because of the blind faith, and I subsequently began researching the history behind the religion--and I'm not willing to accept any undocumented history from the library any more than from the pulpit. And by the way, the idea that Abraham is a subsequent folk deity based on Brahman is not my own...It's a very well-accepted thesis in the realm of Religious History. Of course it's not provable, but it makes perfect sense in Historical context. NOW--let's talk about Muriel Glass, shall we? Brendan Free web-based email, Forever, From anywhere! http://www.mailexcite.com