-Caveat Lector-
Freemasons the Jesus Seminar in the Southern Baptist Convention
Lamentation is often heard concerning the apostate condition of this
denomination. However, there seems to be a good reason for the choice of
paths which the SBC is travelling, namely important statistics regarding the
membership of Freemasons in the SBC, as published by Biblical Discernment
Ministries:
"U.S. membership [in the Masons] is claimed at about three million, with
about five million worldwide... The official magazine of Masonry in the U.S.
is titled New Age. Some church denominations are also led by avowed Masons
(e.g., a 1991 survey by the Southern Baptist Convention Sunday School Board
found that 14% of SBC pastors and 18% of SBC deacon board chairs are Masons.
It is also estimated that SBC members comprise 37% of total U.S. lodge
membership.)" 37% of 3,000,000 would have been 1,110,000 Masons who held
membership in the SBC. This estimate was for 1991. How many are there today?
Also, how many Masons attend SBC churches but do not hold formal
memberships? And how many Masons belong to other Christian denominations? (A
Mason once informed us that the Masons encourage their members to go to
church.)
In 1993, Foundation Magazine carried an article exposing the failure of the
SBC to deal with the problem of Masonic members. The response of the 1993
convention to a document titled "A Study Of Freemasonry" was approval of the
following recommendation, which represents the present compromised position
of the SBC:
"In light of the fact that many tenets and teachings of Freemasonry are not
compatible with Christianity and Southern Baptist doctrine, while others are
compatible with Christianity and Southern Baptist doctrine, we therefore
recommend that consistent with our denomination's deep convictions regarding
the priesthood of the believer and the autonomy of the local church,
membership in a Masonic Order be a matter of personal conscience. Therefore,
we exhort Southern Baptists to prayerfully and carefully evaluate
Freemasonry in the light of the Lordship of Christ, the teachings of the
Scripture, and the findings of this report, as led by the Holy Spirit of
God."
THE JESUS SEMINAR
Considering that over 1 million Freemasons belong to the Southern Baptist
Convention, and many hold positions of authority, it is not surprising that
a Jesus Seminar leader would be invited to address an SBC congregation. For
details of this landmark event, please refer to David Cloud's Way of Life
Literature report: Christ-Denier Speaks at Southern Baptist Church.
Presently there are an abundance of books in bookstores which promote the
thesis of the Jesus Seminar: that the true message of Jesus Christ was
suppressed by the early Church but has been preserved in non-canonical works
written by Gnostics ~ especially the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were discovered
in Qumran in 1945, and the Nag Hammadi Library, discovered in Egypt in 1947.
The majority of books promoting these heretical manuscripts are of Masonic
origin: The Hiram Key; The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception; The Message of the
Sphinx; Holy Blood, Holy Grail; and Bloodline of the Holy Grail. (1)
The Introduction to a popular volume of the Nag Hammadi Library rejects the
inspiration of two gospels that have been a part of the traditional
Christian canon:
"The Jewish Christianity of the first generation in Galilee that developed
the collection of sayings imbedded in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke may
well have been considered heretical even by Paul and the Hellenists, and the
feeling may have been mutual."
The Gospel of Mark is also suspect, according to the Masonic authors of Holy
Blood, Holy Grail, subsequent to the recovery in 1958 of the Gnostic Secret
Gospel of Mark near Jerusalem. (2)
Since its inception in 1985, the Jesus Seminar has been preoccupied with
discrediting Jesus Christ as revealed in the Christian Scriptures and
seeking to discover "the historical Jesus" in the Gnostic scriptures. With
three Gospels of the New Testament now discredited, Jesus Seminar scholars
have turned to a new gospel which presents "another Jesus" who preaches
"another Gospel."
A survey of the Jesus Seminar, available at the University of California at
Santa Barbara web site, mentions their "scholarly" translation of a new
version which includes the "recent archeological discovery" - the Gospel of
Thomas:
"Part of the project was also the preparation of a new translation of the
gospels, prepared by a group within the Seminar, known as "the Scholars
Version." This translation, and the work of the Jesus Seminar as a whole,
includes the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas, preserved in a Coptic version
as part of the Nag Hammadi Codices discovered in Upper Egypt in 1945...The
results of all this work appeared in 1993: The Five Gospels: The Search for
the Authentic Words of Jesus, by Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the
Jesus Seminar, published by Macmillan in New York."
Gnosis means
