Look back at the eternity that passed before we were born, and mark how utterly it counts to us as nothing. This is a mirror that nature holds up to us, in which we may see the time that shall be after we are dead.

In spite of having no body they stand and move, think and talk; in short, it’s as if their naked souls were walking about clad in the semblance of their bodies.

The Sibyl informs him that it is, in fact, quite simple to get to the world of the dead. The problem is getting back:.

To approach the stories in this way is to rob each author of his own integrity as an author and to deprive him of the meaning that he conveys in his story.

What you can control are your attitudes about the things in your life. And so it is your inner self, your attitudes, that you should be concerned about.

The word “cult” comes from the Latin phrase cultus deorum, which literally means “the care of the gods.” A cultic act is any ritualized practice that is done out of reverence to or worship of the gods. Such activities lay at the heart of pagan religions. Doctrines and ethics did not.

Faith is a mystery and an experience of the divine in the world, not a solution to a set of problems.

What we think of as the twenty-seven books of “the” New Testament emerged out of these conflicts, and it was the side that won the debates over what to believe that decided which books were to be included in the canon of scripture.

7. This is a consensus view among scholars today. For one thing, Matthew used Mark as a source for many of his stories, copying out the Greek word for word in some passages. If our Matthew was a Greek translation of a Hebrew original, it would not be possible to explain the verbatim agreement of Matthew with Mark in the Greek itself.

In terms of the historical record, I should also point out that there is no account in any ancient source whatsoever about King Herod slaughtering children in or around Bethlehem, or anyplace else. No other author, biblical or otherwise, mentions this event. Is it, like John’s account of Jesus’ death, a detail made up by Matthew in order to make some kind of theological point?