Cheryl Schatz

Don,

I will get to your post #12 early next week. I will be away from email for a couple of days.

Regarding your question from #13:

“The question I would pose to you is how would the original reader understand this, specifically, what is meant by the twelve?”

While I believe that “the twelve” was a name of the group, I do believe that the people and the disciples considered Matthias to be part of that group so that would mean that at that time there would be twelve in “the twelve”. That is the reason that I believe Paul had such a difficult time with his claim to being a true apostle picked by Jesus as a witness to the resurrection. If the twelfth apostle was already picked then Paul’s claim appeared invalid. There is no doubt that everyone accepted Matthias to be among the twelve apostles. The question that I ask you that I have also asked myself is, “Did Jesus consider Matthias to be among the twelve to be picked by him as an apostle of the resurrection?” This is the question that I have had to answer “No” to because of Paul’s evidence.

I am sorry for being so slow. I really appreciate these discussions. I am and will be slow in answering just because I want to work on getting other articles up as I can and I place that first. By the way the editing work is going well. I have about a solid week left of post production work to do (God-willing) to finish the first DVD on the Trinity. The work on the last DVD should commence in July after we come back from a time away. It is very exciting for me to see everything come together. God-willing everything will be done in time for our September deadline. Next project I am going to try to make sure I don’t have a definite deadline so I can cut down on the 15 hour days I have been putting in. The long hours are getting harder on me as I get older 🙂