What is truth? :: essays research papers

What is rectitude? That is the question Pontius Pilate asked rhetorically as he cancelled away from the battered and bloody man standing before him, The Man who was, and still is, the Answer to that question. In todays worldespecially Europe, but also the USA to a lesser but still very significant extentthe very concept of equity itself is being dismissed by many who are caught up in postmodern thinking. This mindset holds that truth is only a construction by the culture or the individual, so that what may be lawful 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 mortal 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 Greek word translated truth 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 religious leaders who criticized his disciples for failing to adhere to one of the many extraneous requirements they had added to Gods Word, he said Thus you subjugate the word of God for the sake of your tradition.What is tradition? That word is translated from paradosis, which appears 13 times in the Greek 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 latter sense, and three times it is used in a positive sense, referring to true teachings, in the NIV, passed on by Paul to others.