Some of that is very hard to prove. Christ is more widely known in our day than His. He was one of many prophets alive at the time. It doesn't help that the ancients had a different sense of what history should be and what it should convey. Much of it appears more like literature than history.

We do have the account in scripture of the number of people who saw Christ after his death. Given the number of eyewitnesses, it seems we believe other historical accounts with less evidence. I wish more corroborating evidence existed, but it largely doesn't. Whole cultures and civilizations have been conquered, destroyed and ceased to exist in any form. If they had records, they likely perished, too.

Is there a quick reference list of things in Scripture I do and don't have to believe? I was kinda going on the assumption that it was all part and parcel of my Christian life, even the bits I find odd or strange or that other people make fun of...

Catherine,

Evidence for the Resurrection:

1. Peter and his fellow apostles were, in many ways bumbling idiots. Peter couldn't even remember that he had said he would never deny Christ until he had done so three times, and had been a coward before three maids. This Peter, if he had stolen the body would have proudly announced where he had hidden it, though he had given his solemn word to the others.

2. Roman soldiers who fell asleep on the job were, if I understand correctly, punished severely. Could they have been persuaded for a few gold coins to look the other way?

3. The Pharisees, the Chief Priests and the Herodians didn't have the body, or they would have produced it and put an end to this troublesome carpenter's son's rabble.

It may be believed - on some level or another- but whether it represents literal, allegorical, accurate history at all is perennialy open to question. Those who maintain that the entire Bible is literally true include those who will not be seen to be observing the Mosaic dietary lows, and who cough and sputter at the words 'this is by body'. The Missouri Synod Lutherans back in the 70s (teachers and pastors and college professors) were required to sign an oath that every word of the Bible was literally true. Many left, They lost their finest minds.They lost great musicians like Paul Manz, and many scholars who would not assent to such nonsense.

Indeed, Charles -
History's first recorded genocide was that performed by the Jews on the Canaanites and others who preceded them in the Holy Land. They killed every man, woman, and child, even their animals, - and said that God told them to do it. (At present I don't recall book, chapter, and verse, but it's all in there.

It is interesting, though, that Garibaldi was a monarchist and gave Italy its first universal monarchy since the last Caesar who carried any weight. The two Victor Emmanuels were good kings, too. It fell to Victor II to put up with Mussolini, whom he finally fired. What a grateless nation which then got rid of him after the war. This was the evil communist's doing..
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Charles -
I once (back in the 70s?) saw a film called 'the Leopard' which dealt with a noble family in the era of which you speak. It was an uprooting time for all. I believe it was Kirk Douglas who played the elderly count.

Ah, the False Objection to the Dietary Laws!!

Thomas Aquinas Ia IIae (from Mgr. Glenn's Tour of the Summa)

5. Insofar as the Old Law expressed precepts of Natural Law, it was binding on all peoples, Jew and Gentile. But the special prescriptions of the Old Law which were to sanctify the Jews for the coming of Christ through their nation, were binding upon the Jews alone.

As to the veracity of the OT, we have the Catechism, Part 1, Para. 129:

Christians therefore read the Old Testament in the light of Christ crucified and risen. Such typological reading......must not make us forget that the Old Testament retains its intrinsic value as Revelation reaffirmed by the Lord Himself (see Mk 12:29-31)

Jackson, I read something similar. I have read so much my circuits are overloaded. LOL

Charles -
I once (back in the 70s?) saw a film called 'the Leopard' which dealt with a noble family in the era of which you speak. It was an uprooting time for all. I believe it was Kirk Douglas who played the elderly count.

It was Burt Lancaster.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057091/

The Leopard (Il gattopardo, if you read Italian) is a great story.

The liturgical reform is inferior on all counts to the alternative presented in the OP, ".....", which achieves noble simplicity without banality, and exhibits an openness to the the infinite unencumbered by the wordy esotericism of the 1960s and 70s.

Actually, Google doesn't always have answers and even when it does, they are not always correct. I never let my students use Google as a reference source. I didn't mind them looking items up in Google but I insisted they find a corroborating source other than Google.

Pork - don't know what to say. Been vegetarian for nigh on to 30 years now so I wouldn't know how to handle the SAD - standard American diet.

Kind of scary that what we end up discussing is more interesting than liturgical reform and musical form, isn't it? Does anyone else wonder if we will ever return to normal after the crazy Covid year we have been through?

The Red Sea/Reed Sea thing.also seems to assume that the Exodus was originally written in English...at least in the way I always hear it presented.

If they were Hebrews they were in the reign of Akhenaten and not Rameses as many think

Akhenaten was the only pharaoh known to be monotheist, we don't know much about his immediate successors, and Moses was brought up in the family of the pharoah. Tradition says Moses was 80 when he confronted pharoah, having left Egypt at, perhaps, 25. There were only 56 years between the death of Akhenaten and the accession of Rameses the Great. Despite the folk derivation in Exodus, Moses, m's's, could be an Egyptian name, as in Rameses (servant of Ra), but servant of an unnamed god (or God). We may never know - in this life, in the next we may not obsess about these things.

So what we Moderns should believe is that the Jew who wrote about the Captivity was completely and totally ignorant about who was who in Egypt?

Got it.

All that silliness about Moses being a 'type' of Christ, and that passage through water OUT of captivity, and the myth of Passover-------OUT!! All merely fables for old ladies, actually done better by Grimm Bros/Disney.

Got it.

In some remote villages in India they are still telling (sing-chanting) about Alexander the Great's conquest of the place and when he was in their area.. We may reasonably suspect that much of the facts in the telling of these events for over 2500 years now, given human creativity, local pride, and elaboration on facts over time, the tales we hear today are heavily embroidered. I would not be surprised if the same were true of parts of the Bible - particularly those parts which were orally transmitted long before they were written down. This does not at all mean that I question the theological import or the hand of God in the Biblical narrative as we have it.

You mean holy mass of Trent given by God at Pentecost did not encourage Scripture reading? And they didn't understand holy Latin? Is outrage! Heresy.
Anathema!

You have some valid points, Hawkins. Scripture study among the laity is a relatively new development. The Latin church I attended for years before I retired had scripture courses. They were not the best courses, in my opinion, but they did encourage scripture study.

And in my pre-VatII high school religion classes, we were taught a bunch of typology--in American English, no less.

Maybe you were thinking of pre-Vatican I? Pre-Trent?

dad29 - so was I in my parish & school. Seems we both had good parishes. So what?

Scripture either IS (or is NOT) the holy word of God. To undermine the truths of the scriptures by either outright denying what it says or circumventing certain things that aren't proven by historical artifact thousands of years later (Noah and the flood, anyone?) by explaining them away as "containing" truths or generic themes from which we should learn is to call God a liar. It's plain and simple.

You either believe what God said or you don't. I confess I was once drawn in by the idea that the Bible (Old Testament, in particular) wasn't historical fact but rather simply contained broader allegorical ideas from which we should learn. Mercifully, our Lord has cleared the scales from my eyes. Fortunately for me I did my own reading after graduating from Catholic schools.

I believe that the omnipotent (in the true sense of the term) God of the Universe did not need 4 billion years to create the earth as we know it today. He performs miracles left, right, and center every single day and has throughout the entirety of human history. Lets not be so base as to deny Him His omnipotence by saying that he couldn't part a literal sea when whilst incarnate He walked on one. It's honestly insulting.

I think it also rather petty and, frankly, a grave offense, to suggest that our Lord would be so weak as to permit His holy writ to be utterly contaminated by fanciful human invention when retelling the stories of earlier times. If the Holy Ghost could inspire the New Testament to be faithful to His Will, then He certainly was capable of doing the same in the Old.

Let's also not forget that the ancient scriptures are historical documents in their own right. It's fascinating to me that a single parchment fragment from who knows where can have some snippet of a historical detail and scholars accept it and rewrite the history books, whilst hundreds—nay—thousands of ancient manuscripts of various bits of scripture are shredded to bits by "scholars" and not believed. If we had 400 ancient scrolls spread all around the Middle East claiming that such-and-such a war happened, or some king ruled the area for such-and-such a time, it would be accepted as though it were written in stone.

And yet, we have hundreds of ancient copies of scriptures that retell the hundreds of people who witnessed the resurrected Lord and yet people do not believe. What a pity. And an affront to the Almighty.

Charles,

I was once a Protestant, but it was when I became Catholic that I properly understood that one had to accept all of Holy Writ (including the Fathers of the Church) as true.

I think that all Serviam has said is this: Modern Scholarship isn't reason to abandon the truth which God has given us. In this, I completely agree with him.


Now, Protestants like to cite passages out of context, and gloss over what they find inconvenient. To wit: Mary shows up at the creche, but is absent before and afterwards; Christ's words must be taken literally true, except when He says everything he says in John's Gospel's 6th chapter; All Scripture is written for our instruction, but we'll leave out whole books and parts of others which clearly and unambiguously teach what we want not to be there.

The Word of God is only a book after HE is a person.

The people who helped me most when I was a new Catholic were the ones who took seriously my difficult questions, and pointed me to reliable teachers who had, to my surprise, already thought seriously about what I thought was a new problem. They were all tradition-minded Catholics.

I'll double check, but I think the litany is different in the pre-55 and the 62.

The Easter Vigil litany is identical in 1962 as it was in 1954 but in '62 they cut it in half and don't double the invocations; but the words are identical.

Chris, I think the key is that scripture is subject to the interpretation of the Church. It doesn't have an authority greater than tradition or Church teaching. Many parts of scripture are not verifiable and may function as do parables to relate viewpoints, not actual events. As Catholics, we are not sola scriptura people.

I keep in mind that Trent was an over-reaction to Protestantism and Vatican I was an over-reaction to the loss of papal prestige and secular power. Both were capable of creating more problems than they solved. That has nothing to do with liberalism.

dad29 - I don't have access to survey data, or the reports of the surveys, only to quotations from those reports, such as :

This subject was first investigated in G1948a when it was concluded, based on answers to the question “on what occasions do you use the Bible?”, that 24% of Britons did so regularly, the main variation being by denomination of churchgoing
(Anglican churchgoers 19%, Free Church 33%, Roman Catholic 4%)

G1948a, Jul?; GB; 16+; 2,055; f-to-f; Mass-Observation; Daily Graphic 10 Aug 1948, Mass-Observation Archive, U of Sussex, TC 47/12/C.

Article by Clive D Field https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13537903.2014.945735

I know many good priests, Traddy and not-so-Traddy, religious and secular, who continually say, from the pulpit even, "Do NOT trust ANY scriptural commentary or scholarship written after 1950"; some add, "and be very selective about all 20th century scholarship".
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Re. Vernacular liturgy: I think that this is a VERY BAD development: the Western Church is now divided by language; multi-lingual parishes are divided, with ghettos for this language or that, Triduum liturgies are Babel, not Pentecost; my parish and the next one, while using the same Roman Missal, look like two different religions, etc. The unity of cult in the West has been destroyed so completely, that to speak of THE Roman Rite is a lie; in reality, there are as many "Roman Rites" as there are parishes. My opinion and experience.