Let's close the "Biblical basis for humans becoming angels" question

Question

What Bible verses suggest that humans can become angels?

The question was originally a Truth question, "Can humans become angels?" and it attracted Truth answers. Years later, in an effort to bring it into accord with current site guidelines, it was edited to be a Biblical basis question. The edit negates most of the current answers. I see three possible courses of action:

1. Close the question. (If we do this, I think it should be edited back to its original title so as not to confuse people about why it was closed.)

2. Delete the "no" answers.

3. Clarify/amend site policy so that "there is none"/"not much" is an accepted answer to "What is the Biblical basis for X?" questions.

I don't like options 2 or 3. I think closing is the best route. New questions asking for the Biblical basis "for" and "against" humans becoming angels would be acceptable.

Answer 1

Certainly there's a mess to clean up due to more stringent standards on the site now than when it was new.

Retrofitting old questions to new standards clearly creates problems of its own due to answers that were based on the earlier form of the question.

Over on the Judaism StackExchange, I edited a question I had asked when an answer pointed out a major error in my question. But since it had already been answered in its original form, and that answer had already received an upvote, a mod there reverted it. You can see the question, answers, and comment trains here, and the mod's comment about reverting my edit here. So it appears that editing questions into a form that makes previous, already upvoted answers obsolete is something of a no-no on StackExchange.

However, the "humans becoming angels" issue is clearly a burning question for many people. There are various permutations of it here, some closed, some still open. So it would be unfortunate for it not to be represented here, and open for answers.

Speaking for myself, I put considerable effort into the answer I posted to that question. Most of the Bible references came from the linked article, but I wrote new text, fixed some references, and changed some references to ones that I thought were better. The reason I did all that is that I did not find any of the previous answers satisfactory--and I am perhaps in a unique position to provide the Biblical basis on this subject because it is my church and "our" theologian that popularized the idea over two centuries ago, so we have ready answers to that question.

Given all that, if this question were closed, I would feel the need to create a new question that meets current standards, and re-post my answer.

However, it does seem unfortunate that the site is littered with closed questions, some of which are very popular and draw many hits. In fact, the queries posted here show that the top two hit-getters by far are both closed questions. And the question under consideration for closing here has over 20k hits, putting it in the top 100.

I realize I'm a newcomers here. It's not my job to tell you guys what to do. However, I hope there is a way to make sure that some of the most popular and sought-after Q&As don't end out getting closed and orphaned for any new answers when the only real problem is that they weren't asked in the correct form for this site.

Answer 2

On 3, I'm sure that I've seen a discussion before that sometimes it is appropriate to answer in the negative, but I can't find it now. This is the closest, but it's not the same. I'm sure we could find many examples of precedence where negative answers have been well received too.

Some branches of Christianity value tradition just as high as scripture, or perhaps even higher, so sometimes the basis for something won't be Biblical. It would be appropriate to say what the basis is in an answer. But maybe in those cases the question should be edited to change from 'biblical basis' to 'basis'? But, if that were done, someone might want to later specifically ask for the explict biblical basis, such as in these two purgatory questions: 1, 2 (though they were asked in the other order.)

On this specific question, only one answer has been written since I edited the question. It might be best then to revert my edit and close the question. Because despite my changed title, the question is still a verse request one...