Demonstrators chant:
"'Down with Diotrephes, down with Diotrephes, down with Diotrephes -'" (p. 146)
- so let's see where they are coming from with that one:
9 I wrote to the church, but Diotrephes, who loves to be first, will not welcome us. 10 So when I come, I will call attention to what he is doing, spreading malicious nonsense about us. Not satisfied with that, he even refuses to welcome other believers. He also stops those who want to do so and puts them out of the church.
11 Dear friend, do not imitate what is evil but what is good. Anyone who does what is good is from God. Anyone who does what is evil has not seen God.
- copied from 3 John 9-11
The Johannine Church calls the Petrine Churches "Diotrephes" but demonstrators apply the term to the secular authority, like misapplications of political terms that we are familiar with.
When the Johnny priest approaches on his anti-grav tau cruffix:
"A moan went through the mob, growing almost orgasmic before it died away into silence." (p. 147)
I have heard this when I have been a guest at Evangelical gatherings.
"...was said to have originated with Simon Magus." (ibid.)
The priest quotes:
8 He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.
-copied from 1 John 4:8
- and:
While ye have light, believe in the light, that ye may be the children of light.
-copied from John 12:36
Matuchek tells us that the Johnnies are anti-Semitic, e.g. they quote:
7 For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist.
-copied from 2 John 7
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
It was a long time ago and I might be wrong, but I think the late Fr. Raymond Brown, in his commentaries for John's Gospel and the Johannine Letters, suspected that Diotrephes was not a bad man or a heretic. Rather, he was probably a bishop staying on the alert to people he did not know and speaking as authorized by someone he did not know, refusing to allow them to preach in his church because he was not convinced of their orthodoxy. Iow, Diotrephes might very well had been guilty of nothing worse than excessive caution.
It's only right to recall that the middle and late first century AD was marked by the earliest heresies to trouble Christians. Ranging from Judaizers who insisted on the necessity of circumcision and kosher to various kinds of gnosticism. The leaders of the Church had to be constantly on their guard against erroneous teachers.
Ad astra! Sean
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