Monday, April 24, 2017

EC President Oren Paris III, Woods, others answer to new indictment in kickback scheme | NWADG



Woods, others answer to new indictment in kickback scheme | NWADG:

"Paris is accused of paying kickbacks to Woods while Woods was a legislator and to then-Rep. Micah Neal, also R-Springdale. Neal pleaded guilty to public corruption charges on Jan. 4.

According to the indictment, Paris passed the kickback payments through Shelton. Shelton is a consultant and business partner of Paris. Paris paid Shelton consulting fees from the college, and Shelton would pass money to Woods, the indictment says.

Woods also agreed to encourage other state lawmakers to give money to the college. In all, Ecclesia College obtained more than $700,000 in state General Improvement Fund grants from 2013 through 2014, records show.

In other developments Monday, Paris received permission to travel out of state to meet with private donors to the college as long as he gives federal authorities 14 days notice."



'via Blog this'

Gadarene Swine or Berans - The Internet Is Wide Open for Searching

Whee! Everyone is doing this!
Join the movement!


The latest post in the New Testament text is an example of the flummery being foisted upon us. That is why we must all be Bereans searching the Scriptures rather than Gadarene swine running off the cliff.

I am not sure what the website promotes, but the graphic is good.

If you read the previous post and carefully consider all the evidence, you will see that the modern text of the New Testament rests upon the fraudulent work of one man who really wanted to become famous.

And Tischendorf is justly famous for making his two miraculous discoveries the norm for the New Testament text - and even better for the apostates - demolishing the concept of a fixed New Testament text.

You Don't Believe This! Sehr komisch!
Tischendorf reported in his 1865 book Wann Wurden Unsere Evangelen Verfasst, translated to English in 1866 as When Were Our Gospels Written in the section "The Discovery of the Sinaitic Manuscript" that he found, in a trash basket, forty-three sheets of parchment of an ancient copy of the Greek Old Testament, reporting that the monks were using the trash to start fires. And Tischendorf, horrified, asked if he could have them. 

Do most people warm their libraries by burning animals skins - parchment? I wonder if Tischendorf's adventures inspired the literary career of a CPH editor, famous for posting thank-you comments when he plagiarized the blogs of Lutheran friends and The Catholic Encyclopedia.


Questioning Tischendorf's fable punctures
the great deception, so keep your voices down.


Your Modern Translation Is Based Upon the Tischendorf Deception
Tischendorf, Wescott and Hort worked together to make the two fake discoveries the basis for the New Testament text, so verses magically disappear from the Greek text and never make it to the English text. In some cases, the missing verses appear in small italic print at the bottom of the page.

The German Bibles still say "nach Luther" after Luther's version, even today, but the English versions are in a rush to avoid mentioning any flavor of the KJV.

That means your beloved

  1. NIV
  2. RSV
  3. New RSV
  4. New NIV
  5. ESV
  6. The Message
  7. Etc. etc. etc.

is based on the Tischendorf lie. What should astound us is the logic - that this recent find should displace the thousands of examples of the traditional text.

Those unfamiliar with NT scholarship, as it styles itself, should realize that certain theories mesh well with the Tischendorf myths. One is that the Gospel of Mark is the earliest Gospel - and the most reliable. Matthew and Luke used Mark and the never-discovered Q to form their Gospels. What a miracle! I should write Q on pigskin and discover it. No one can even define Q, but it is just as handy as the magical characters kids invent to place the blame for missing toys, broken windows, and other misdemeanors. 


The late Nils A. Dahl, Yale University,
studied under Bultmann, Mowinkel, etc.
He was a kind and gracious man.


The greatest NT scholar I have known was Nils A. Dahl, who studied under all the greats of Europe. Krister Stendahl called Dahl the greatest exegete in the world, no small honor. Dahl said, "No one really knows the way Matthew, Mark, and Luke were written." 

But careers are made on arguments about such theories, which always leave out any suggestion of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

The same argument can be turned around, looking at common elements of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Mark could very well be a harmony and a condensed version of Matthew and Luke, because everything in Mark can be found in Matthew or Luke or both Gospels. There are only two short passages unique to Mark, the seed growing secretly and the streaker.

So, if Mark must be early, simple, and reliable, it also helps to deny the divinity of Christ in the first verse, which is really an introduction to the entire Gospel, a thesis sentence in modern essay writing. If only one tradition, of uncertain origin, offers such a reading, why would the world scholars reject 11 centuries of Greek Christianity, which is where the Christian Church first flourished?

Modern New Testament scholarship has little to do with the content of the Bible, so the Trilateral Commission of Tischendorf-Wescott-Hort goes well with Biblical literature as a creative writing exercise.

When someone argues that his favorite modern translation is superior, as for Mark 1:1. Is the Son of God omitted, as Wescott-Hort argued?

Did that family of translations convert the Virgin Birth of Isaiah 7 become an ordinary pregnancy? The RSV reminds me of ladies shampoos, which I put on the shelf at Walmart. There is not just one brand, like Suave, but various series of sub-brands of Suave, and variations on those sub-brands, so they occupy rows of shampoo in similar, well designed bottles. Any particular preference could be answered by Suave!

RSV
The R stands for Radical. The S represents Standard, after an old favorite the American Standard Bible. The V is a nod to the KJV or Authorized Version, just for laughs. They could not sell many if they said "National Council of Communist Churches" Version.

If they change the R to an E, they have a run of RSVs with a Calvinist editor. But they can extend the RSVs into many sub-categories.

Wendland said this at the WELS convention,
in defence of the New NIV.


New NIV
The New NIV is even more clever than the RSV business. Once the New NIV was in print, the old NIV ceased to exist. I can no longer look up old NIV readings on Biblegateway.com, which is an NIV website.

Moreover, no publishing house is allowed to continue printing NIV materials using the old NIV. They must reprint everything in New NIV, which has supplanted the old NIV using the same name.

Do the denominations receive incentives for bowing at the NIV altar? I am sure of it. WELS used a Wheaton cow, Dr. Moo, to promote the New NIV among the ordination hopefuls. Did any Mordor student even imagine he could go against the favorite error of Wendland? I doubt. it.

Thus Tischendorf-Wescott-Hort are driving the Biblical message among all modern Bibles, with the Bible hucksters remaining studiously silent about the King James family. I am not keen about the Babtist New KJV, but at least it shares the text with the KJV.

So far I have not seen a significant difference in the KJV21 or the Third Millenium Bible - that is - no reason to switch. Yes, I find some opaque terms in the KJV, like chambering, but a little study shows it means bed-hopping, based on the original term. A little more study does not hurt the clergy or the laity.

Sadly - or happily - the laity drive clergy study by asking the basic questions.


A Short Version of the New Testament Text Issues

 Judge them by the fruits of their unholy labor.
They created distrust in the New Testament and empowered
the New NIV to completely subvert Justification by Faith.

Someone asked about the Biblical texts, where a great divide exists, with reliable New Testaments almost gone from the market.

The Old Testament text is carefully controlled by a long history counting the words, even the letters, of each book. As I recall, when the Qumran scroll of Isaiah was examined, it was not different from ones that were 800 years younger, except for "holy" being used instead of "holy, holy, holy." A good compilation can be found in Evidence That Demands a Verdict, by Josh McDowell. I am not a big McDowell fan, but this is a good start in looking at false claims about the Bible. I understand a group of people helped him with it, and that is the only way to get a big project done.

The Great Divide - Thanks to Wescott and Hort, Tischendorf
The new attitude fostered by the apostates was this - we have thousands of Byzantine Greek NT documents, so we cannot trust them - too traditional. We must find the rare exceptions and use those.

Wescott and Hort invented rules for judging the New Testament text, pulled right out of their English bowlers. Here is a tirade directed against critics of Wescott and Hort. The defense is mostly an unsupported attack on the critics, very light on evidence. Reasons for abhorring Wescott and Hort can be found here, a popular report. A clear analytical approach is found in Burgeon, the dean of KJV defenders and of Wescott/Hort despisers. Burgeon - Unholy Hands on the Bible.

Dismissing all that, the two principle arguments against Wescott and Hort are

  1. Their ridiculous rules for judging texts, and 
  2. Their use of the highly suspect Tischendorf finds.
The rules include such absurdities as preferring the shorter version to the longer one. That makes no sense at all, since we all have short and longer versions of events - and even of quotations.

Another rule was against the traditional reading. Any liberal or apostate would appreciate reading that no one really thought Jesus to be the Son of God. That was, according to Harvard, "a late development." Jesus did not teach the Trinity, as my college professor stated, because the Trinitarian formula of the Great Commission was "put on the lips of Jesus by Matthew."

Bethany Greek Class - here is an example.

Note that the opening has brackets: The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, [the Son of God]. That means - with the footnote - that this phrase is disputed.


ΚΑΤΑ ΜΑΡΚΟΝ 1:1-21881 Westcott-Hort New Testament (WHNU)

αρχη του ευαγγελιου ιησου χριστου omitting the Son of God
καθως γεγραπται εν τω ησαια τω προφητη ιδου αποστελλω τον αγγελον μου προ προσωπου σου ος κατασκευασει την οδον σου

ΚΑΤΑ ΜΑΡΚΟΝ 1:1-2SBL Greek New Testament (SBLGNT) Society of Biblical Literature

Ἀρχὴ τοῦ εὐαγγελίου Ἰησοῦ [a]χριστοῦ. omitting the Son of God
[b]Καθὼς γέγραπται ἐν [c]τῷ Ἠσαΐᾳ τῷ προφήτῃ· [d]Ἰδοὺ ἀποστέλλω τὸν ἄγγελόν μου πρὸ προσώπου σου, ὃς κατασκευάσει τὴν ὁδόν [e]σου·

ΚΑΤΑ ΜΑΡΚΟΝ 1:1-21550 Stephanus New Testament (TR1550) Stephanus is the editor of the Byzantine edition.

αρχη του ευαγγελιου ιησου χριστου υιου του θεου - includes the Son of God
ως γεγραπται εν τοις προφηταις ιδου εγω αποστελλω τον αγγελον μου προ προσωπου σου ος κατασκευασει την οδον σου εμπροσθεν σου

The Ending of Mark
The same results can be found with Mark 16:1-20. Biblegateway.com is handy in going through the various English editions, but more importantly the Greek editions. The tradition text includes all 20 verses. The new ones stop at verse 8, which is a grammatical absurdity. The post-positive was never used at the end of a chapter and book. Like ending with a preposition, it is something I have never heard of. 
As the lawyer asked, "Is knowledge of the Biblical languages important for studying the Bible?" After 15 weeks of Greek study, the Bethany students can look at the results and make sense from them. Anyone can, but basic reading skills in Greek really help the brain stay out of panic mode.

Pulling Celebrity out of the Trash

 Tischendorf claimed the oldest Bible
was used to warm the monastic library!
I always burn shoes to start the charcoal in my BBQ.
So beleeevable.

Tischendorf wanted to make his reputation in New Testament manuscripts, and he made himself a hero and celebrity with not one, but two trash tales. I am eternally suspicious of people who find treasure in the trash with improbable tales. Here is someone who agrees with me about the great Tischendorf deception - The Bin of Plenty - and I quote -

Nineteenth century Biblical scholar Constantin Von Tischendorf, on the other hand, parlayed his trash finding story into celebrity. As a young man, Tischendorf set for himself the rather ambitious goal of reconstructing the original text of the New Testament; he noted to a friend that he would compile this Bible “upon the strictest principles; a text that will approach as closely as possible to the very letter as it proceeded from the hands of the Apostles.” Initially this meant he would simply make copies of the oldest New Testaments he found, mostly in Europe, and bring them together for research. But his thinking on the matter would evolve. 
In 1844, he travelled across North Africa and arrived, eventually, at St. Catherine’s Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula. It was, he later claimed, in the monastery’s library that he noticed a basket full of papers “mouldered by time,” being consigned to flames for the sake of heat. He “rescued” from this trash basket some 86 pages of what turned out to be a fourth century Bible, and brought them back to Leipzig. In an age when fire was a major threat to books, saving one from the flames must have struck Tischendorf as an entirely believable tale — never mind that parchment (which is animal skin, after all) does not burn well enough to be a good source of heat. But aside from that, to accept his rescued-from-refuse claim, a person would have to believe that, after some fifteen hundred years of existence, monks were burning the oldest extant copy of the Bible, in the library, on the very day that a man professed to be searching for things exactly like that just happened to be there. In any event, Tischendorf’s story is somewhat undercut by the fact that he returned years later and stole/borrowed/bought (depending upon who is asked) the rest of the manuscript containing the New Testament. 
It is tempting to think that 19th century folks were more credulous, and believed the story as Tischendorf wrote it. Some did, of course — like some continue to believe Breithaupt. But here is the 1892 judgment of noted Englishman and book collector W. G. Thorpe: “But as to stealing books. The thing is not only sometimes lawful, but even meritorious, and one man will go to heaven for it — in fact, has gone there already. The mode in which Tischendorf ran off with the Codex Sinaiticus…may be described as anything you please, from theft under trust to hocussing and felony; but it succeeded, and all Christendom was glad thereof.” [GJ - Not all of Christendom is glad, but perhaps Thorpe was tweaking the apostates on purpose.]
 What would you give to have your name inscribed in history,
on the title page of a rarely used but incredibly influential book?
Many Lutheran leaders have sold their souls for less
and are soon forgotten,
sinking beneath the waves of ecclesiastical history,
"unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown."

Vaticanus and Tischendorf 

Paul McCain's The Catholic Encyclopedia
The original home of the Vatican Codex is uncertain. Hort thinks it was written at Rome; Rendel Harris, Armitage Robinson, and others attribute it to Asia Minor. A more common opinion maintains that it was written in Egypt. Armitage Robinson believes that both the Vaticanus and the Sinaiticus were originally together in some ancient library.

Tischendorf has a similar story for Vaticanus, which he, Wescott, and Hort made normative (with Sinaiticus) for the New Testament manuscript.

Sinaiticus has the Hebrew letter aleph for its symbol. Vaticanus has B. However, English language Bibles seldom bother with all that. Massive deception is being laid upon all Christians by the Bible boosters who make so much money off the buyers.

Otten is just as guilty as the rest of the apostates, promoting the Beck Bible, which also tips its hat to Tischendorf. Lenski was no better, playing the manuscript game on his own.

Executive Summary
Two schools of Greek New Testament manuscript evidence exist. The earlier school, almost extinct, favors the traditional text, with variant names - Byzantine, Textus Receptus, Erasmus. 

Modern Apostates 
The modern school dominates all the Bible societies, all modern translations, and all Biblical scholars (so-called). They make the fraudulent and mysterious Sinaiticus, the equally fuzzy Vaticanus, and all the strays the norm for the New Testament. They vote on which verses to exclude from the New Testament, like so many drunken frat boys who cannot stand Flounder or Pinto. A small committee makes decisions for millions of people who dream that a Bible society could never be packed with liars, drunks, frauds, and peculators. Have they looked hard at their Council of District Presidents lately?

The Few, The Humble, the Traditionalists
The traditional school is aware of these problem and prefers the King James tradition, which uses the traditional text only.

Tis interesting that ELDONA wavers between the Babtist New KJV and the Calvinist ESV, the second one extruded from the bowels of the National Council of Churches.


Thanks, Mystery Man, for asking about this issue. I had a blast looking up information. Call this an Ichopedia article, not meant to be the final word. Bereans will study this on their own so that they are not quoting me but presenting information from their own research.

But beware, this is addicting, like great coffee brewed from fresh roasted beans.