Mark 8:30-31 commentary: and he began to teach them

30 And he charged them that they should tell no man of him. 31 And he began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.

Notice the foretelling here of the gospel and the forth telling in these verses;

1 Corinthians 15:1 ¶ Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand; 2 By which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain. 3 For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; 4 And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures:

The apostles were dull in their thinking because, like a modern Christian, their thinking had been corrupted by all of the false things they had been taught by Biblically illiterate preachers and commentators who had rejected READING the Bible in preference for reading about the Bible. By not permitting God to change their hearts through His words they elected to worship intellect and scholarship, theirs and others, including any rabbi, or teacher, whose teaching caught their fancy. Modern Christians are for the most part humanists. It’s amazing what a fundamentalist can accomplish without Christ.

A fundamentalist will mock an evolutionist and say how deluded they are but will, at the same time, lift up a Bible that never existed on earth in one book, that doesn’t now exist on earth, and which no one he knows in the flesh has ever seen; that inerrant, perfect Bible in the original manuscripts. This is a book that the Bible itself never even discusses or places importance on above translations or copies which are “given by inspiration”. In the Scriptures, the word "scriptures" never refers to the original manuscripts. The Bible is not inspired by God. These 40 or so men aren’t writing about someone that inspires them like Hemingway or Faulkner might have done. When you are inspired by something you have no obligation to it to be faithful as it merely provides the spark and the motive for your writing which is generated by your own intellect and emotion. The Bible isn’t God-breathed, as God did not dictate every word as is clear by Job 32:8; Jeremiah 36:32; and 2 Peter 3:15. God gave men wisdom and understanding to write His Bible, and then He preserved it (Psalm 12:6,7).

Modern Christians are practicing atheists because they don’t believe that a living God actually has a hand in Bible preservation. Its only unbelieving scholars that do that, they think. Modern Christians simply don’t believe that God has the power to preserve the Bible that He wants them to have. I wonder how they believe He can save them.

Here is further evidence that people in the Old Testament were not looking forward to the Cross. They didn’t even understand it. They did not understand Isaiah, chapter 53. They did not understand Psalm 22; Zechariah 12:10; Psalm 41:9; Psalm 16:10; Isaiah 7:14; or Isaiah 9:6.