Artifacts of a Life Once Lived

"You are born mortal, you have given birth to mortal beings and have you yourself, a decaying and slack body filled with illnesses, hoped that you had borne something stable and eternal in such a weak material?... The saying inscribed at the site of the Pythian oracle, "Know Yourself", means this: what is a human being? A vessel that can be broken in pieces by any shock at all, by any blow at all. No great storm is required to make you crack; you break up whenever you bump into anything at all. What is a human being? A weak and fragile body, naked, provided by nature with no weapons, needing the help of others, exposed to all the ill-treatments of fate... Woven out of weak and flabby elements, handsome only in the external outlines of the figure; incapable of bearing cold, heat and exertions... Do we then find death something surprising, the death that is the work of one single sobbing breath? The human being considers undying and eternal things in his heart and makes pl

The church and her scriptures: The scriptures are divine. The scriptures are human. These may seem like two mutually exclusive statements. Theologically, we call this idea "confluence." So it is that though the scriptures were written by man with human minds and human pens, the scriptures were given, god-breathed, by the ever moving Spirit of God. This has been the statement of faith (tradition) of the church for two thousand years. As a community, the church body has agreed upon the supra-human origin of the scriptures, this being understood, orthodoxy must claim the authority of the scriptures as final. What exactly comprises the complete canon of the scriptures is another subject altogether, however, again the church has commonly agreed upon the divine origin of the 39 books of the Old Testament as well as the 27 books of the New Testament. Can the divine origin of the scriptures be "proved?" Obviously not. Do the scriptures themselves claim divine origins? Obvio