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| Mirthless Mark and Matt the Fatt have worked with ELCA Bishop Liz since 2013. |
Two concepts unite ELCA with the LCMS, WELS, ELS, and the CLC (sic).
1. The entire world is justified without faith - Objective Justification.
2. Any Bible will do - except the King James Version.
ELDONA disagrees with OJ, but remains indifferent about Bibles.
Calvinists have no trouble with the proliferation of Bibles, because they teach the Word of God is dead, unless someone makes it germane and appealing.
The abandonment of the KJV is the direct result of loss of faith in the power and efficacy of the Word. Once the self-appointed text experts explained how many errors there were in the Bible manuscripts, the worn path to false religion was beaten into a four-lane highway - going only one way - to apostasy.
Professor Kurt Marquart gave a lecture where he admitted to thousands of errors in the Traditional - or Majority Text. But he also added that the vast majority of these were simply copying errors.
All printed and copied works have errors, some so subtle that no one catches them until the mistakes are distributed far and wide. Pretending that was not so, the self-appointed text experts decided they could distill the original text from studying the tea leaves of text criticism. (Example - I started the previous sentence with Pretty because the first four letters are the same as Pretending. I did not make this mistake on purpose, so I had to think about what I was trying to say when typing fast. Scholars could have argued for centuries - "He probably meant "Pity." Or another - "That may have been a slang term long ago. We know he was always playing with words. Anyway, scholars are divided."
Because one manuscript drops the ending of Mark - compared to almost all the 7,000 with Mark 16:9-20 - rationalists jumped on the idea that the so-called primitive Gospel of Mark did not originally have or know of a resurrection of Christ.
Consider this - Gospel lessons are often marked in Bibles. I used a pulpit Bible that marked the selections of the Church Years Sundays - and the endings. A small phrase showed the ending so the minister would not go on and on.
So the Easter Sunday Gospel in Greek would be Mark 16:1-8, with the end of the lesson marked as telos, the Greek word for end.
The sleepy copyist could have omitted verses 9-20, so it was not the end of the lesson but the end of the book as he nodded off. Or it was torn off.
But - the ESV and NIV bracket 9-20, suggesting that passage does not belong and was not written by Mark.
The domains of Mirthless Mark and Matt the Fatt make big money from using the modern Bibles in their materials and selling them.
