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Significance of Source Critical / Textual Critical Comments on 2 Maccabees 12:43-45
Introduction This post is to provide some written responses to a few interesting issues that have arisen in the wake of a recent Purgatory debate (and preparation for that debate). As the post has evolved a bit since its initial posting, I’m going to try to clean it up and make it more user-friendly, as…
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Textual Variant in Cyprian
Someone asked about the textual variant issue in Cyprian that I alluded to during my recent episode on Cyprian and Purgatory (link to video). Here’s the relevant material from a critical edition of Cyprian’s letters. First the main text: As you can see, the editors have used “purged for a long time with fire” (purgari…
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Jacques Le Goff – Reflecting on "The Birth of Purgatory"
In The Medieval Imagination, at p. 86, Jacques Le Goff reflects on his earlier work, The Birth of Purgatory (footnote omitted): Not long ago I completed several years of work on the birth of Purgatory. From the early days of Christianity Christians have shown by their prayers for the dead that they believed in the…
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Sungenis Claims: "the Church did not receive any divine revelation on the nature of Purgatory"
In a recent (2009) response to Dr. White, Robert Sungenis made some interesting admissions regarding the absence of knowledge of what Purgatory is in Roman Catholic theology: Since the Church did not receive any divine revelation on the nature of Purgatory, and since the Church declined to make any official statements on its nature, it…
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Response to Heschmeyer's Purgatory Thought Experiments
Joe Heschmeyer at Shameless Popery has provided some “thought experiments” regarding purgatory (link to his post). Heschmeyer has two similar experiments – in both cases an object is dropped and broken. Heschmeyer asks whether the object’s owner can forgive the breaker of the object and still demand that the person who broke it clean up…