What is truth? :: essays research papers

What is rectitude? That is the question Pontius Pilate asked rhetorically as he turned away from the strike and bloody man standing before him, The Man who was, and still is, the solution to that question. In todays worldespecially Europe, but in like manner the USA to a lesser but still very satisfying extentthe very concept of faithfulness itself is being dismissed by many who are caught up in postmodern thinking. This mindset holds that faithfulness is precisely a construction by the culture or the individual, so that what may be current for one is not true for another. Thus, truth is relative. Necessarily, the meaning of words is not fixed, but a function of interpretation, so that each person can construct his own meanings for them. Adhering to that fallacy leads only to external chaos and internal emptiness.What is truth? An English dictionary says That which is in accordance with fact or reality that which actually is. In Scripture, the Hellenic word translated trut h is aletheia, which means the revealed reality, or the essence, of something. That is, what you see is what you get.In Matthew 151-9 and Mark 71-13, Jesus contrasted truth with tradition. Replying to the hypocritical Jewish ghostly leaders who criticized his disciples for failing to adhere to one of the many extraneous requirements they had added to divinity fudges Word, he said Thus you nullify the word of idol for the sake of your tradition.What is tradition? That word is translated from paradosis, which appears 13 times in the classic text. It simply means delivering over from one to another. The context determines whether what was delivered was truth or whether it was the ideas of men that oppose the truth. Ten times it is used in the last mentioned sense, and three times it is used in a positive sense, referring to true teachings, in the NIV, passed on by Paul to others.