And it came to pass that ABS was among the adoring crowds anxious to hear the good news from the fifth evangelist before whom all of Tradition must genuflect. He was amongst tens of hundreds of adoring acolytes crowded into Saint Therse de Lesieux Catholic Church in Wellington, Florida on August 31, as the chosen one addressed the multitudes from 9:00 am until 2:12 pm.
And he had paid his $26.00 with the solitary goal of publicly challenging the chosen one over his claims about Holy Maundy Thursday, the Last Supper/First Mass, and the putative “Fourth Cup,” which, according to the authoritative CPA (Convert from Protestantism Apologist), is the key to understanding the Bible and its Eucharist Institution accounts.
Dr. Hahn is as wrong about that novel claim as he is popular and deemed authoritative by his uncountable Hahn-Verts – especially those Bishops and Priests who have been converted to his radical exegetical evangelical claims which appear to have some connection to his Presbyterian Seminary (Gordon-Conwell) training in Theonomy (An ideology advocating the application of Mosaic Laws to the society the Christian finds his own self living in).
Bishops and Priests have stood in his presence, apparently in full agreement, as the great communicator casts his eisegetical spell over his adoring acolytes while he presents a new Gospel based, wait until ya get a load of this later on, on a first century Seder Meal.
But, ABS first has to note just how effective a speaker Dr. Hahn is; from his bearing to his enthusiasm to his materials to his entire presentation which mixes intelligence, learning, humor, and even pathos; he had his acolytes eating out of the palms of his hands and nodding their heads in agreement to all of his statements in such fervent unison that they reminded ABS of the flocks of pigeons in Piazza San Marco in Venice racing after the popcorn pitched by tourists.
There can be no doubt that had Dr. Hahn proclaimed - Sam the Sham was the last in a long line of Egyptian Pharoahs then the painting of The Stations of the Cross would have vibrated due to the force of the sound generated by AMENS !!
However, Dr. Hahn made some excellent points, among them the valuable reminder that the words, “New Testament” are the only such words in the new testament and those are said by Jesus which reminds us all that the New Testament is not so much about a book or collection of books but about the action of Christ, the Mass (my paraphrase).
He also made a neat summary of the New Evangelisation by describing it as your story about your Catholic Faith shared with others (paraphrase) after crediting Pope Blessed John Paul II with having had the keen, and right, insight that it was the Baptised who need evangelising – an undeniable truth.
He was also charmingly self-effacive at points - I'm not much but I am all that I think about - and he told genuinely interesting personal vingnetttes that did not cast him in the best of lights and he was, frankly, simply brilliant at presenting the scriptural basis for Confession and illustrating the necessity for it by linking Genesis and the Creation of Adam and Original Sin and dying the death as referring to the loss of Sanctifying Grace and from his own life he supplied the matter that grounded his theological in reality.
Well done, sir; very well done!!!
But – at this is a but bigger than Oprah's – it was his presentation of “The Fourth Cup.”
(the putative Ritualistic Map discovered by Dr. Hahn that helped him to escape the querulous quandary in which he then spiritually existed) that constituted both the major part of his anti-Traditional eisegesis and the dangerous error that he has been successfully spreading with as much success as did Johnny Appleseed accomplish his self-appointed task.
It is worth noting that the presentation I was at contained not a single word of caution from Dr. Hahn that this was merely his own opinion and an opinion not shared by others – you know, such as Doctors of The Catholic Church and The Early Church Fathers and can not be found in any reliable Catholic Commentary (A Lapide, Catena Aurea, Haydock's Commentary, and even Dom Orchard's 1952 Commentary is in opposition to Hahn) , nor is it even hinted at in such sources as Denzinger, Ott, Premm, Spirago-Clarke, Radio Replies, Catholic Evidence Training Outlines (yes, Dr. Hahn wrote the Forward to the 1992 reprint) Liturgical Year etc etc etc
Dr. Hahn's Ritualistic Map that is supposed to lead the believer from naivete and/or theological confusion to the heart of the mattter of The Institution of the Holy Eucharist is a First Century Seder that Jesus supposedly faithfully followed.
No, I am not kidding.
This is the very center – the hearth and heart – of his captious claim (for me, not the Hahn-Verts) that at the Last Supper/First Mass, Jesus and His Apostles celebrated a Seder.
Bullshit.
The Seder (Order) Meal was developed by Rabbinical Judiasm after Titus had destroyed the City of Deicide as this Jewish author confesses:
Almost everyone doing serious work on the early history of Passover traditions, including Joseph Tabory, Israel Yuval, Lawrence Hoffman, and the father-son team of Shmuel and Ze’ev Safrai, has rejected Finkelstein’s claims for the great antiquity of the bulk of the Passover Haggadah. What is particularly significant about this consensus is that these scholars are not radical skeptics. These scholars believe that, generally speaking, we can extract historically reliable information from rabbinic sources. But as demonstrated by the late Baruch Bokser in his book The Origins of the Seder, practically everything preserved in the early rabbinic traditions concerning the Passover Seder brings us back to the time immediately following the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E.12 It’s not that rabbinic literature cannot be trusted to tell us about history in the first century of the Common Era. It’s that rabbinic literature—in the case of the Seder—does not even claim to be telling us how the Seder was performed before the destruction of the Temple.