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By Eileen Fleming (about the author) Page 1 of 8 page(s)
For OpEdNews: Eileen Fleming - Writer
2,000 years
ago, females were not even called as a witness in court, but every July
22, Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans, and Orthodox Christians
celebrate the feast day of Mary Magdalene, who according to the Gospel
of John, was the first witness of the Resurrection appearances of Jesus.
Mary
Magdalene disappeared from the canonical Gospels immediately after she
reported to the male disciples that she had seen Jesus three days after
he had been nailed to and died on a wooden cross; the Roman Empire's
way to rid itself of rebels, dissidents, agitators and any other who
disturbed the status quo of the Roman Military Occupation.
"For
centuries, Mary Magdalene has been misidentified in Western Christian
Tradition as an adulteress and repentant prostitute, although nowhere
does the New Testament identify her as such...in Eastern Christianity she
is referred to as 'Equal to the Apostles'.
"A group of
scholars, the most familiar of whom is Elaine Pagels, have suggested
that for one early group of Christians Mary Magdalene was a leader of
the early Church and maybe even is the unidentified Beloved Disciple,
to whom the Fourth Gospel commonly called Gospel of John is
ascribed.[1]
Jesus is the first known man to blow apart the
societal and religious taboos of speaking with females they were not
related to in public and respecting them as equals; one more example of
how the male disciples would/could not follow Jesus that closely, for
Jesus treated women as fully equal.
To fail to follow what Jesus taught is to be an anti-Christ.
The term "antichrist" only appears five times in the Bible.
However, a cult not based on historical theology has spun an urban legend that seeks Armageddon.
The
term "antichrist" never appears in John's Revelation or Daniel, two
disparate works of literature written three centuries apart and under
very different circumstances, yet a series of pulp fiction and putrid
theology espoused in the "Left Behind" series has rendered its
adherents in the Body of Christ brain dead, for these books have taken
Jesus and left behind everything he was always on about: NONVIOLENT
resistance to all evil, love, forgiveness, compassion for all the
oppressed and righteous rage for hypocrites and the cold hearted.
Most
contemporary Biblical scholars agree that the five canonical verses
that mention the "antichrist" were written to attack the Gnostic
understanding of who Christ was.
A Gnostic relies on intuition
and not on dogma and doctrine. Gnostic's were most certainly free
spirits and most all of the writings we have about Gnostics, have been
the attacks upon them. That all changed in 1946 with the discovery of
the Nag Hamadi Library; and what had been deemed heretical by those in
power in the fourth century can now be read in most every language.
Biblical
scholars today agree that many books of the Bible were written by
others in the name of an apostle, for the quickest way to gain
credibility is to trade on another's reputation.
We may never
know if the author who coined the term "antichrist" was actually the
apostle John who wrote I John and 2 John-the only sources where the
term appears.
John also say's:
"As you have heard that the antichrist is coming; even now many have come..."- I John 2:18
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
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