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Robbing Paul to Pay Peter and James
Article ID: JAP355 | By: James Patrick Holding
Summary:
The apostle Peter once said of Paul’s letters, “[they] contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort” (2 Pet. 3:16; all Scripture quotations from the NIV, except where noted). Although that was written in the first century, more than two thousand years later a trend has emerged that encapsulates Peter’s warning just as readily. A new breed of “ignorant and unstable” people are now distorting Paul’s letters in order to condemn him unjustly.
Seeking to disconnect Paul from the rest of the New Testament, and the early Christian church, a movement designated by the slogan, “Jesus’ Words Only” (JWO) argues that Paul was a turncoat whose letters were inappropriately inserted into the New Testament canon. Strangely, proponents of this view may also argue that God ensured that other parts of the Bible, including the Old Testament, warned us in various coded ways that Paul would appear. The JWO movement’s reasoning is, therefore, that God found it more convenient to drop obscure hints about Paul throughout the text of the rest of the Bible—hints that only they have had the perspicacity to uncover—than to name Paul explicitly as a villain, or else, simply ensure that Paul’s works never made it into the canon in the first place.
A leading voice in the JWO movement is attorney Douglas del Tondo, whose book Jesus’ Words Only (Infinity Publishing, 2006) has served as a flagship piece for many JWO proponents. More recently, controversial dot.com executive Craig Winn has posted an online book titled Questioning Paul,1 which takes many of the same arguments made by del Tondo further, and adds Winn’s own tendentious applications. Both authors make much of what they see as Paul’s unwarranted abrogation of Old Testament law, and detect subtle warnings about Paul all through the rest of the Bible. When Genesis 49:27, for example, speaks of the tribe of Benjamin as a “ravenous wolf,” both authors determine that this is intended as a warning to us about Paul, a Benjamite (Phil. 3:5), appearing as a “ravenous wolf” in the church.
More Here: http://www.equip.org/article/robbing-paul-pay-peter-james/
Apologetic: Do we have JWO members here on CF.net and if so does the source discussion piece properly represent your groups views?
All others: comments are welcome if anyone has encountered JWO adherents.
Article ID: JAP355 | By: James Patrick Holding
Summary:
The apostle Peter once said of Paul’s letters, “[they] contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort” (2 Pet. 3:16; all Scripture quotations from the NIV, except where noted). Although that was written in the first century, more than two thousand years later a trend has emerged that encapsulates Peter’s warning just as readily. A new breed of “ignorant and unstable” people are now distorting Paul’s letters in order to condemn him unjustly.
Seeking to disconnect Paul from the rest of the New Testament, and the early Christian church, a movement designated by the slogan, “Jesus’ Words Only” (JWO) argues that Paul was a turncoat whose letters were inappropriately inserted into the New Testament canon. Strangely, proponents of this view may also argue that God ensured that other parts of the Bible, including the Old Testament, warned us in various coded ways that Paul would appear. The JWO movement’s reasoning is, therefore, that God found it more convenient to drop obscure hints about Paul throughout the text of the rest of the Bible—hints that only they have had the perspicacity to uncover—than to name Paul explicitly as a villain, or else, simply ensure that Paul’s works never made it into the canon in the first place.
A leading voice in the JWO movement is attorney Douglas del Tondo, whose book Jesus’ Words Only (Infinity Publishing, 2006) has served as a flagship piece for many JWO proponents. More recently, controversial dot.com executive Craig Winn has posted an online book titled Questioning Paul,1 which takes many of the same arguments made by del Tondo further, and adds Winn’s own tendentious applications. Both authors make much of what they see as Paul’s unwarranted abrogation of Old Testament law, and detect subtle warnings about Paul all through the rest of the Bible. When Genesis 49:27, for example, speaks of the tribe of Benjamin as a “ravenous wolf,” both authors determine that this is intended as a warning to us about Paul, a Benjamite (Phil. 3:5), appearing as a “ravenous wolf” in the church.
More Here: http://www.equip.org/article/robbing-paul-pay-peter-james/
Apologetic: Do we have JWO members here on CF.net and if so does the source discussion piece properly represent your groups views?
All others: comments are welcome if anyone has encountered JWO adherents.