{"id":27439,"date":"2015-10-24T11:03:46","date_gmt":"2015-10-24T17:03:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=27439"},"modified":"2015-10-24T11:03:46","modified_gmt":"2015-10-24T17:03:46","slug":"new-testament-276","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2015\/10\/new-testament-276.html","title":{"rendered":"New Testament 276"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Parsons<\/a>
The resurrected John the Baptist confers the Aaronic Priesthood upon Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery near Harmony, Pennsylvania, on 15 May 1829.
Image by Del Parsons, from LDS.org<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

Matthew 21:23-27<\/a><\/p>\n

Mark 11:27-33<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Luke 20:1-8<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Compare John 2:18-22<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

These passages represent the chief priests and scribes of Jerusalem in Jesus\u2019 day as rather cynical political calculators.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

But they also raise another matter: the issue\u00a0of authority. \u00a0Some visions of earliest Christianity suggest (or say outright) that \u201cauthority\u201d meant nothing to Jesus and the primitive \u201cJesus movement,\u201d which was, rather, a loose assemblage of first century counterculturists, sometimes depicted as essentially (I\u2019ll bring them up since I\u2019m not far away from the legendary Haight-Ashbury district) a group of hippie pacifists.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

According to such views, concepts of Christian \u201cpriesthood,\u201d a distinction between the ordained and the unordained, and a hierarchy of ecclesiastical offices \u2014 as these exist in the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox traditions and, more recently, in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints<\/a> \u2014 are products of a later evolution and quite foreign to the teachings and practices of Jesus himself.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

And some Christians, of course, teach the notion of a \u201cpriesthood of all believers,\u201d which, if taken literally, would pretty much dissolve the concept of \u201cpriesthood\u201d altogether \u2014 in much the way that, if everybody is \u201cspecial\u201d and everybody is \u201cabove average,\u201d nobody<\/em> is,<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

But authority clearly meant a great deal to Jesus\u2019s critics. \u00a0And, in these verses, he doesn\u2019t say that it shouldn\u2019t. \u00a0Indeed, he seems to accept their premises: \u00a0John, he implies, had divine authority for his actions, and so does he.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 Matthew 21:23-27 Mark 11:27-33 Luke 20:1-8 Compare John 2:18-22 \u00a0 These passages represent the chief priests and scribes of Jerusalem in Jesus\u2019 day as rather cynical political calculators. \u00a0 But they also raise another matter: the issue\u00a0of authority. \u00a0Some visions of earliest Christianity suggest (or say outright) that \u201cauthority\u201d meant nothing to Jesus and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nNew Testament 276<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"  Matthew 21:23-27 Mark 11:27-33 Luke 20:1-8 Compare John 2:18-22   These passages represent the chief priests and scribes of Jerusalem in\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, 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