The Catholic Book Club discussion

What was the purpose of Clement's letter. Do you feel you got a good understanding of the letter from Bennett's excerpts?

fascinating to me, so early, to see Clement clearly aware of "what has been said by Him through us," and exercising papal authority toward the church in relatively far-away Corinth.

Jill wrote: "fascinating to me, so early, to see Clement clearly aware of "what has been said by Him through us," and exercising papal authority toward the church in relatively far-away Corinth."

I had the same thought.

I have probably run across this quote from Tacitus before, but had forgotten, “Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus. . . .”

Those who deny the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth really have a huge amount of both church and secular testimony to overcome.

Edited to correct Auto-correct. While doing so I was struck by how sad it is that auto-correct doesn't recognize Pontius as a legitimate word in its own right.

John wrote: "I have probably run across this quote from Tacitus before, but had forgotten, “at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontiac Pilatus..."

Of course you mean Pontius :-)

John wrote: "Those who deny the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth really have a huge amount of both church and secular testimony to overcome."

Denying the existence of Jesus was typical at the end of the 19th century. Today almost nobody dares to do that. What they do is deny that he was God, asserting that his miracles and prophecies were invented by his disciples after the fact. That's why they tried to push the origin of the Gospels as far as possible, even to the second century, but this has also fallen in discredit, so that now the usually accepted dates are not so far away from the traditional ones of the Catholic Church.

The "historical Jesus" deniers are still with us if not so prominent. But it tends to oscillate between "he never existed" and "he was just a teacher of some kind."

Even worse, Mary, I have confronted more than a few who insist the Bible is just one big fairy tale!

Manuel wrote: "John wrote: "I have probably run across this quote from Tacitus before, but had forgotten, “at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontiac Pilatus..."

Of course you mean Pontius :-)

John wrote: ..."


Arrrgh, auto-correct.