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I am not competent to interpret what Jesus meant, and I won't speculate on it. What I will say is that His audience took him literally, and expected His return before the passing of the present generation. The first letter of the NT to be written, First Thessalonians, attests to this. Paul...

To avoid the impending Ethics Committee debacle! Same reason he won't retake his seat in January. He ran for reelection and won, and will now tell his constituents who voted for him that he's changed his mind.

What's next for Gaetz? He won re-election before he resigned, so he could resume his place in the House in January -- if he wants to. Of course, that would rekindle the House Ethics inquiry, so I don't see it happening. He'd rather turn his back on the seat he was elected to than go through...

I don't assume that. I'm simply suggesting to the "It's God's dictation" crowd that taking dictation and investigative journalism are polar opposites.

I don't question the veracity of his eyewitness accounts in the latter parts of Acts. What has that got to do with his hearsay accounts of Luke's gospel and the rest of Acts? He says he investigated the rest. OK, and perhaps he got 100% of it right, perhaps not -- but if God was affecting him...

Why do you say "Surely" here? Is it incomprehensible to you that Luke did what all historians and investigative journalists do, nothing more? I don't see what his being born again adds to the mix. There are lots of born again historians and writers (I know a few personally); would you give...

I don't have any reason to think Luke was "directed" in his investigative journalism by anything more than a sincere desire to tell the gospel story in a new way. He says "many" attempted this before him (Luke 1:1) -- and no doubt Mark and Q would be on that list (but likely not Matthew) along...

Well, perhaps, but I should point out that Jesus did not argue with the Pharisees about whether it was "work." He had a very different argument against Sabbath grain picking.

I can't show you a specific OT prohibition against plucking grain, but it falls within the NO WORK command. Plucking grain violated the law against work (non-emergency work, anyway) on the Sabbath. Numbers 15:32-36 describes a man put to death for gathering sticks on the Sabbath! Plucking...

This question is for those of you out there who believe that being "inspired" or "God-breathed" is the functional equivalent of God telling the author what to write: What is the point of carefully investigating the facts, as Luke 1:3 declares the author did? Colossal waste of time? Trying to...

I just want to point out that it is possible one or more "gospels" or "epistles" written by one or more of the original Twelve have just not been preserved. (Gospels attributed to Thomas and Philip strike me as spurious, but I can't be sure.) And it is possible that the Matthew (Levi?) of the...

I never suggested otherwise.

Perhaps "fundamentalist" Christian would be a surrogate for what has thus far been called a "conservative" Christian?

There would have been be no plucking grain on the Sabbath (Matt. 12:1-2) if that were true.

That "black and white" view could paint Jesus as a lawbreaker.

True. We can pick lots of snippets from the Sermon on the Mount to get us to the same spot. (My favorite is forgiveness by forgiving in Matt. 6:14 -- arguably yet another path to salvation.)

There is keeping the Law (Pharisaic formalism) and there is keeping the Law (in spirit). Jesus did the latter (and got chastised by the Pharisees for doing it). What do we say about Luke 1:6 then? That it is speaking of the former?

Either way, the Law would be a path (albeit a difficult one) to salvation.

That's what I meant in mentioning resetting of the scoreboard being well attested in the OT.

Paul claimed to be “blameless” under the Law, Phil. 3:6. Luke 1:6 says the same of Zechariah and Elizabeth.