If that is your point, it's reasonable. In that case, don't mock people for using these resources, which you only see as "not necessary".
If I were Satan and wanted to corrupt all modern translations, I'd certainly target the resources used by translators. Hence the United Bible Societies version of the New Testament, which explains much of the New Testament issues in modern translations vs the KJV... I understand your skepticism.
But caution does not mean outright rejection, or you end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I’ll mock whoever I deem worthy of mockery. Drive-by pretentiousness is high on that list.
Did you possibly mistake my nuance for a sign of retreat? Did you sound charge a little too early? Extra-Biblical sources are not necessary. So those who try and make them necessary are deceiving themselves and possibly others.
It is a pseudo-intellectual who tries to puff himself up with arcane knowledge, who bypasses the simple truths in plain view in order to thrash around in the dark trying to find some sort of hidden revelation to make themselves feel smarter.
Jerry Clower talked about people educated beyond their intelligence. Those people are a danger to themselves and others. Those people need to stick to the text, which is clearly beyond them as it’s written.
Those people, in their arrogant sophistry, get enraged when they realize their drivel not only isn’t impressing anyone, it’s not even fooling anyone. Those people think these works of men who they don’t know and whose fruit they can not test, makes them wise.
Meanwhile we’re told that our faith is foolish and will confound the wise.
I defy all aspiring priests. I oppose all would be gate keepers. I battle anyone who implies God can’t accurately communicate His Word to us. And I will mercilessly mock anyone so myopic as to claim they worship a God they only know through a book they don’t trust.
What kind of brain dead idiot says something that stupid? What kind of fool thinks modern day scholars are prophets who can divinely reveal the obscured truths that God failed to deliver to us?
If your faith rests in any way on the works of man then you don’t have a faith. You have a whimsically fantastical self-help book and a series of quite pointless dictionaries and lexicons, since they elucidate dead languages from a book that isn’t real.
You want mockery? There are men on this forum who treat their faith like a Dungeons and Dragons game themed buffet. They’ll take a little mysticism, they’ll have a side of mumbo-jumbo they don’t understand and maybe finish it off with a course of masturbatory pontificating and voila! An entertaining diversion from reality.
Meanwhile, no one here can either define marriage, astounding considering all of the Immaculate Dictionaries floating around basking in beams of soft light, or tell us how to form one according to scripture. But by Harvard University Press we can form Greek grammar. And what a relief because otherwise we would never know what God’s Word meant! Hopefully one day a benevolent academic will enlighten us on how to avoid committing adultery and our religion will finally be completed!
You know what, I don’t have to mock anyone. The whole thing is so ridiculous there’s no option but to laugh. Yes, let’s all read dictionaries. The best to understand one book is to read a completely different one after all. I mean it would be bat shit crazy to do anything else.
