The “Year of St. Joseph” just ended, but if you’re still wanting to dig deeper in the life of St. Joseph… or maybe make up for not doing as much as you wish you had during the Year of St. Joseph… check out the latest episode of Catholic Answers Focus:
For more on this, I’ve written a book on St. Joseph that you may find helpful as well. (Psst… if you’ve already read the book, please rate and review it on Amazon).
Great video!
For those who love to meditate on the things of God, St. Joseph is a gold mine. Please consider more video’s or blog posts on him.
Do you still write on this site? It’s just that I commented something in your Post “From Abel to Zechariah: Did Christ Confirm the Protestant Canon?”
@The Truth Seeker I just replied – copied the reply here as well to try to make sure you see it:
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Checkout this article: https://historicalchristian.faith/statements/canon_abel_to_zechariah/
It’s an exhaustive look at this argument, showing both all possible interpretations and the historical interpretation by church fathers across history.
Geoff’s comment refers to the rabbinic name conflation theory, which is one of the four possible resolutions for premise 1 (linking the son of Jehoida with the son of Berechiah) in that article.
However, there are a few issues with that theory:
– What authority do the post-Christian rabbis have over Christianity? Their interpretive methods are very much so NOT Christian. Much of their interpretive methodology descends from Rabbi Akiba (~130 AD), who persecuted Christians, loathed Jesus, and identified Simon Bar Kokhba the Messiah.
– To resolve this issue (that post-Christian rabbis have no authority over Christianity), the argument points to Mark 2:26 and the prefix on Psalm 34 to prove that this interpretive method was used by Christians as well. However as the historicalchristian.faith website shows, there are far simpler, alternative explanations for Mark 2:26 and the prefix on Psalm 34, and there is no reason to read back this “rabbinic name conflation” interpretive theory onto those passages.
– So there’s no concrete proof that Christians ever used this interpretive method, just a speculation that they might have (in a couple passages that have numerous alternative explanations)
So the theory remains a possibility, but frankly not one the evidence is in favor of – it’s a fringe theory. It’s mainly been pushed by Steve Christie (author of Why Protestant Bibles are Smaller) and his youtube friend, a Goy for Jesus in their video here: https://youtu.be/JFsEqwsingU?t=720
Geoff’s comment then attempts to extrapolate on what Jesus could possibly mean in this passage by “Abel to Zechariah”, if he wasn’t referring to the boundaries of the canon. His speculations display an ignorance on the history of this question.
Both premise 1 and the conclusion of the historicalchristian.faith article touch on this.
In Premise 1, if you click on all the historical church fathers who identified the Zechariah as the father of John the Baptist, you will see that they think Jesus is simply making a statement of all the prophets murdered from the beginning of time to the present time – i.e., the time Jesus is making his statements. They tend to focus on Jesus’ statement “whom YOU murdered”, with the “you” meaning his present audience. Jesus is accusing his audience of murdering the most recent prophet, the father of John the Baptist.
In the Conclusion, you will why all the historical church fathers thought Jesus was referring to Zechariah the son of Jehoiada. Some thought Jesus was denoting all holy martyrs of both lay (Abel) and priestly (Zechariah) orders, some thought Jesus was merely giving the most heinous examples of the ‘murder of the prophets’ in scripture, and others thought Jesus named Abel and Zechariah because the requiring of vengeance is mentioned only concerning them in the scriptures. The first person in all of history to interpret this passage as the boundary of the canon of scripture was Johann Gottfried Eichhorn in AD 1780 – notably ONLY after 2 Chronicles became standardized at the back of the Hebrew Scriptures when the printing press was invented. Nobody in all of church history thought of that before then (see premise 2).
Hope that helps.
– Hieronymus
Be like Joseph: marry a pregnant woman and raise someone else’s child.
You could do better, like Derek Prince did, and raise eight adopted children.