Solved: Conundrum of Violence, Violent men vs. Meekness!
All my Christian life I have found the idea that Jesus somehow endorses violent human effort (even if metaphorical or spiritual) for His cause as very odd. It contradicts the rest of His teaching, the life He lived, the example He set, and the rest of the New Testament. Typical translations of Mat. 11:12 fit like a gorilla in a tuxedo. You don’t have to be a scholar to know: “something just ain’t right!” The fact that there’s some divergence among translators provides us with its own warning: difficulty ahead. It’s always a mistake to be dogmatic, or to make much of a little, on a point based on an obscure and difficult passage. Recent discoveries of papyri and developments in scholarship have provided a more contextually valid understanding of this difficult verse.
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