Catholic Heritage Show W/ Dr. Estrada

One of the recent characteristics of Catholic critics of Pope Francis is their disregard for literary context. By literary context, I am referring to the immediate sentences preceding and following a given text of consideration. Time and again, I have seen the critics of Pope Francis excerpt a particular statement without any attention to the literary context. In this episode, I show how this lack of attention to literary context characterized much of the exegesis offered by Gnostic Christian commentators and theologians. Instead, Gnostic Christian thinkers like Ptolemy, Heracleon and other selected key motifs from the New Testament and built out their various theological systems. Their interpretation of New Testament texts was characterized by a focus on motifs and ideas rather than on the literary context which supplied the backdrop for those particular statements on which they directed the focus of their comments. I show how there is a strong similarity in this approach with the criticisms leveled by Engli