In other instances, it is not so much that the teaching has been changed, but that it has been lost completely.
This is true of the early Christian view of cosmology. It is peppered throughout the New Testament but has been completely overlooked or forgotten. The result is that many parts of the text are baffling or incomprehensible today.
Here’s one example – the angels. Today angels are golden-haired beauties who save you from car wrecks. In the US there is even a magazine, Angels on Earth, that is devoted to printing readers’ firsthand experiences of encounters with angels. It has a circulation in the hundreds of thousands.
But in the first century CE it was not so. Here is a curious fact: in the New Testament, the apostle Paul never speaks of angels in a favourable way. Examples: “For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come… shall be able to separate us from the love of God” (Romans 8:38–39; biblical quotations are from the Authorised King James Version). “For I think that God hath set forth us the apostles last, as it were appointed to death: for we are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men” (1 Corinthians 4:9; emphasis added in both passages).
In both examples, the angels are not friends of humanity but barriers to God....<<<Read More>>>...
