its almost like the whole thing is an amalgam of thousands of texts edited and repurposed across thousands of years by human beings with various motivations.
The religion of the Israelites wasn’t even monotheistic at first. Yahweh was one of many gods.
And Christianity isn’t technically monotheistic either, as it has the trinity of God, Christ, and the Spooky Spirit… errrm… I mean Holy Ghost.
And trinitarianism specifically is basically just a reason to wage wars. I was raised in a trinitarian denomination and I still mostly consider myself Christian but I can’t reconcile my morals with waging literal wars over fucking metaphysics.
It really is tho. The 3 are the same thing. Different parts/names of one entity. Probably wasn’t originally, but def is now
Depending on the exact denomination of Christian. There is no big difference between how many christians view satan and how polytheistic religions view some of the less nice gods.
Also, he was a war god.
The book of Job is literally written in different parts in entirely different dialects that were spoken hundreds of years apart. The opening and ending is from the older dialect, and written much like a folktale. The middle is newer and written much more like an epic poem.
Even the a single book of the Bible comes from numerous sources.
Not just single books. Single chapters.
And yet they persist, so it’s almost like it’s not quite that simple either, eh? Funny how the devil stays in the details, no matter which side you lean
absolutely correct. humans have been scamming humans since inception, and the best methods last the longest.
♥️
Because it’s all fake. Everyone who actually reads it finds way too many inconsistencies.
That’s because it underwent some serious transformations across the millennia. Yahweh started as a storm god (basically Thor of Canaanite religion). Back then each nation in the religion had their own patron god and guess which god did the Israelites happen to have? Good old storm god Yahweh.
Over centuries the religion evolved and among Israelites Yahweh slowly took on attributes of other gods, mostly El (the all-father and creator of the universe) and Baal. First the other gods were degraded and monotheism was required, even though other gods were known to exist (you might remember the whole “jealous of other gods shtick” even though the rest of the Bible says there’s only one god).
Then the other gods were slowly edited out of the Bible, though some remains persevere (the aforementioned jealousy of other gods, some gods are even mentioned by name). If the gods couldn’t be removed because the story wouldn’t make sense, they were mostly changed into angels or other mythical beings.
It’s pretty funny rereading the Bible with this knowledge, you can clearly recognise which parts were the original Yahweh-the-storm-god and which used to be El-the-actual-creator by how he behaves in the story. When he’s all jealous, rageful and angry, it’s mostly based on the original Yahweh.
Anyway, that’s basically what Old Testament is - a bunch of edits of much older religions. IIRC Yahweh precedes even the Canaanite religion, so it’s a really old and grumpy storm god.
Now, New Testament is something else entirely, that was basically just slapped onto Judaism to have some legitimate and widely recognised vessel. Unlike the other edits, it didn’t evolve naturally over time, it was just violently slapped onto the Old Testament.
Fun fact: try finding Satan anywhere in the old testament. You won’t. Satan has been retrofit on multiple characters, but neither is mentioned directly as Satan, devil or really anything. The most famous one, the snake in the garden? Just a snake (which checks out with older religions where animals had a lot of influence). Then some morons come and say “actually, that snake was the grand adversary.” The concept of a grand adversary wasn’t really common in older religions, there usually wasn’t a Satan-like figure. Compare for example with Greek, Roman or Norse gods.
So, in conclusion, the Bible is a horrible mess of edits that were made so the religion would serve the needs of the time they were introduced in. IIRC the Israelites were having some trouble with their neighbours back when Yahweh got the promotion, so having a strong sense of nationality would really help in keeping the nation together. New Testament is even more obvious because it didn’t even really try to fit with the rest. They just tried to retrofit a few things and called it a day.
Well, this got longer than I planned, but I really like the topic and I don’t think you can do it justice in two paragraphs. If anyone’s interested, do some research, it’s honestly fascinating! For example, what’s the connection between Dionysus and Yahweh? That would be a homework for ya!
I have studied this topic academically, a little bit. My answer:
- The people who wrote the old testament lived in a world that was almost unfathomably dangerous and difficult compared to today’s first world. Death, disease, starvation, natural disasters, the collapse of whole towns and settlements, unexplained daily suffering for which there is not even an explanation let alone a cure, were constantly present. If you’re in that place, and you believe there’s a God who’s in charge of it all, there is absolutely no conclusion to come to other than he’s a real son of a bitch.
- I definitely believe that Jesus had some kind of genuine religious inspiration, that a lot of what he was teaching was for-real insight about life. The stuff about forgiving your enemies, living for good works through action and how it really doesn’t matter what you say or what team you’re on, trying to build a better life by caring about people around you, taking care of the sick and injured, even if they are beggars or prostitutes or foreigners or otherwise “bad” people in your mind simply because of their circumstances, seems pretty spot on to me. It was 100% at odds with the religion of the day, pretty much as much as it is with modern religion. What Jesus actually said does obviously have “spiritual” and supernatural elements also, but it is also focused to a huge extent on what you as an individual can do, and a sort of alignment towards the greater good and a calling for humanity, as opposed to this wild half-Pagan mythology about a capricious and bad-tempered God who might kill you at any instant.
I like this reasoning a lot, however:
#2. In terms of there being a real-life Y’shua, AFAIK it’s hard to know if such a person ever really existed in the first place, or if they were in fact more of an amalgamated ‘King Arthur’ / ‘Robin Hood’ type, very much inspired by earlier legends & mythology, and greatly elaborated upon in later years, via oral traditions, before finally being documented hither & tither by various writers scattered around the region.
AFAIK there is no archeological evidence whatsoever for that exact person’s existence, and no contemporaneous writing from the time, describing his life.
In a 2011 review of the state of modern scholarship, Bart D. Ehrman wrote, “He certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees.”[13] Richard A. Burridge states: “There are those who argue that Jesus is a figment of the Church’s imagination, that there never was a Jesus at all. I have to say that I do not know any respectable critical scholar who says that any more.”[14] Robert M. Price does not believe that Jesus existed but agrees that this perspective runs against the views of the majority of scholars.[15] James D. G. Dunn calls the theories of Jesus’s non-existence “a thoroughly dead thesis”.[16] Michael Grant (a classicist), “In recent years, ‘no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non historicity of Jesus’ or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary.”[17] Robert E. Van Voorst states that biblical scholars and classical historians regard theories of non-existence of Jesus as effectively refuted.[18] Writing on The Daily Beast, Candida Moss and Joel Baden state that, “there is nigh universal consensus among biblical scholars – the authentic ones, at least – that Jesus was, in fact, a real guy.”[19]
Which is fine as far as it goes, yet does very little if anything to address the body of the above concerns.
While “Jesus” likely had something to do with an actual person who once lived, nailing down the details of his life and history seems highly problematic from a scholarly & historical POV, and as for embellishment, amalgamation and distortion… all such things are highly possible, and even highly likely, AFAIK.
You are thinking about this the wrong way. From the scraps of information that we do have, which includes volumes of work by Jesus’s followers, there are two extremes one could take: we know absolutely nothing about Jesus or whether he even existed, or we know absolutely everything about Jesus. I agree that the later extreme is wrongheaded, but surely treating it as a binary choice so that the only other possibility is that we can say nothing at all about Jesus is also wrongheaded.
You might argue reasonably, of course, that his followers cannot be trusted, so we can learn nothing from their writings. This is not true, however, because if nothing else we can learn from the editorial choices that they made; for example, when a Gospel goes out of is way to explain a detail that would have been embarrassing to contemporaries, this actually provides potential evidence that this detail was true and widely known at the time so that it needed to be explained, because otherwise it would just have been left out.
At the end of the day, scholarship is essentially about weighing probabilities rather than certainties, and good scholars do not pretend otherwise.
You are thinking about this the wrong way.
I consider that a terrible way of framing things, and then to make matters worse, you propose only a binary set of conclusions.
Please do better then that if you want to debate fairly.
Thank you.
It must be very convenient to be able to declare victory in a discussion without hanging to present an actual argument. 😉
Except for the fact that… I did indeed present multiple arguments, and the fact that at no point did I ‘signal victory?’
EDIT: Ruh-roh, downvotes! :D
Maybe he existed… but only as a common human and all the supernatural things were added later.
Oooohhhh
I mean, yes, obviously. It all of a sudden makes the other commenter’s steadfast insistence against me make sense, if they thought that I meant this person actually existed who could do real life magic tricks and came back from the dead and he still watches to see if you’re masturbating.
Yes, I was talking about the historical figure, not the superhero. I thought that went without saying but maybe not.
(Edit: What the heck, their original argument is clearly saying that they think there’s no evidence that the historical figure existed. But whatever, we got there in the end, I guess.)
(Edit: Also I think it is dishonest of them to edit their comment…
Dude, I did nothing of the kind.
Wow, it’s almost like you managed to copy-paste the known fact that the body of Christian scholars agrees that someone existed, later known as “Jesus,” and then seemingly couldn’t deal with a rebuttal upon your notion of ‘that clearing up everything.’
So now you’re getting weird about the fact that I had to re-do my comment, simply because I responded to the wrong commenter at the time? So, did not see my rebuttal at all? Did you not see my attempt to explain that?
Go ahead, tho-- consider this your opportunity to fairly reply to what I said above. Sound good?
EDIT: Hahaha, instant downvote!
EDIT: Hahaha, instant downvote!
For the record, the downvote was from me, and it was because you are being an ass.
Do you mean, being just like you… my fellow freakazoid? :D
Hahaha, nice!
Yeah, I realized after that you were talking about archaeology up in your original reply to me, not in the pre-editing version of some other comment. Sorry about that, I had already edited my comment to take out the accusation (within 5 minutes of originally posting it.)
I pretty much agree with this comment of yours. I have absolutely no reason why that would mean we have to continue to bicker. I do think that comment is pretty firmly in contradiction to your earlier statements (“King Arthur / Robin Hood”), but whatever, I see no profit at all in us having a dispute about that part of it.
Yes, but why are we ‘bickering’ in the first place, and why the need to accuse me of re-editing a comment? (which never happened)
What you are seemingly trying to tell me here, “PhilipTheBucket,” is that you’re not really able to countenance the actual arguments I’m making above.
Now would you say that’s a fair or unfair statement? If unfair, could you give me some facts & reality-based reasons as to why not?
Maybe he existed… but only as a common human and all the supernatural things were added later
Lets consider that jesus did exist and did someone have a cure for leprosy. Why didn’t he give that cure to everyone??? We still have leprosy today, kinda proves he didnt have the cure. But again lets say he did and he only gave it to a couple people, not a very godly thing to do, to withhold that cure from the entirety of humanity.
Maybe he cured a strong headache (maybe some herbal remedy) but they grew the anecdote and he ended up “curing leprosy”.
As I see it, there’s pretty much a landslide of evidence, from almost every studied angle, that points to what you just postulated.
Whoops; apologies.
I borked up my last reply-comment, and so deleted that, and re-created from scratch.deleted by creator
Which is fine as far as it goes, yet does very little if anything to address the body of the above concerns.
What? Of course it does. A near-unanimous consensus by experts in the field is worth more than whatever you are bringing up in your Lemmy comment.
I mean, it would be possible to lay out logic so compelling that even if experts in the field felt one particular way about it you could make a case otherwise, but weird strawmen like wanting archaeological evidence of Jesus’s specific skeleton or something is not that.
One Theory I like is that the Jesus we know is an amalgamation of multiple Messiah figures that were walking around around that time, one of them was the basis for the religion and then other stories about those other Messiahs were folded in over the years
Almost like every lauded, ‘perfect’ figure across history?
In fact, “The Messiah” is a concept that certainly goes back long before some dude allegedly named “Y’shua” was branded that way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messiah
Now, modern humans being ~300Kyrs old, I would guess that it’s not just an ancient fixation, but even endemic to our very species… our very way of hoping and wanting and longing for a return to ‘the good times,’ directly embodied via mythological figure.
Mais non, mon ami…?
a lot of what he was teaching was for-real insight about life
yaaa cept for the fact that most if not all the things ‘jeebus’ supposedly said were said in older books already. So there is nothing new in the new testament, they stole all of it from older books like code of hammurabi and then invented a character to say the things.
They switched writers.
I guess they did some market research between the two testaments
“nobody shares my kinks”
My take is that it’s a reflection of the Israelite people. It’s easy to be all fire and brimstone when you can back it up with military force. Suspiciously that all went away after they got conquered…
Yahweh was originally a Levant god of war.
Fiction usually has highs and lows. Unfortunately all the authors wrote under pseudonyms, and multiple editors went through the plagiarized stories, some books were left out, and the consistency is just a mess. Not to mention the terrible translations. Your local Library most certainly has better Fiction books that are very well written and highly entertaining.
Because god was pregnant with jesus so she was all crazy lol
Because they’re completely different gods. The old testament is only a part of christianity because in order to gain some legitimacy for their early church, they decided that their new god must be the same dude as the the god of the people that they were living among.
But in reality, they are very different books, written in very different times, by two very different religious cultures.
Also, the old testament god is not a single god.
It started as a god among other equally powerful and important gods and was later turned (by the writers) into the most important god.
Then it turned into god and satan as being similar in power.
Nowadays, the majority of church people flip the switch whenever they want a bi-theism (god vs satan) or a monotheism (god is all powerful and even satan can’t act with god’s explicit orders).
Similar thing with free will.
You have free will until you don’t have and you have no free will until it is convenient to say you actually have.
Yeah, they are “very different books” each individually comprised of “very different books,” and all of the other books that eventually got left out are a lot of the best parts. I haven’t read them, but it feels like how my friend used to describe the Star Wars extended universe books.
It’s all fiction. Different fiction from different people at different points in history. It was even re-written at certain points in history, to conform with (then current) ideas and morality.
Why doesn’t it all make sense put together? It’s fiction written by many, very different types of people with completely different ideas.
Because the people who wrote the old testament wanted to scare people into subservience
And those who wrote the new testament thought positive reinforcement was better
IIRC that’s not actually positive reinforcement. Common mistake to make though
Why Hulk can defeat Wolverine in one comic but in the next one gets obliterated by someone weaker?
I don’t see how hulk can defeat wolverine.
Hulk’s power level has no upper limit. Wolverine can heal, sure. But if Hulk smashes him down to atoms, and smashes those atoms together, it’s gonna be a long healing process.
Never heard of that. Hulk is very strong for sure but wolverine is also “very strong”.I don’t think smashing something to atoms is only a matter of force It should also be abiut size
The old guys message wasn’t working anymore, the age of Pharos and godkings was done. You couldn’t just mass execute people anymore, everyone was really woke and PC.
The ruling class needed to revamp the religious arm of the machine that enslaves us all to get with the times or there were going to keep being problems.
You know how corporate media are, it’s easier to sell a sequel.
You know what, we’re going for a kind of apple vibe, we’re literally just going to call this thing “THE BOOK”.
Everyone will step into line after we nail a few to boards and stuff
The old guys message wasn’t working anymore
The new testament is just old testament fan fiction. By that reasoning all these newer religions like Mormonism are fan fiction based on other fan fiction… and Im sure I dont have to tell anyone how loony tunes Mormonism is.
I feel like y’all are forgetting about all the heinous shit God does in the new testament. Just because he’s not all up front fire and brimstone about it doesn’t mean he isn’t still an evil bastard in the new book
Spoken like someone who mixes their fabrics and eats shellfish.
🤘😈🤘
Let’s not forget that prior to Jesus any punishments were over when you died. Permanent Hell was a new testament thing.
Could you link something cause when I Google any combination of “new testament god angry/vengeful” I’m not getting allot besides religious sites sane washing it.
I’m not gonna link a source, but here’s some chapters from the good book itself:
Acts 5, God kills Ananias and Sapphira for withholding too much of their taxes. Seems like an overreaction for the new forgiving, loving, kind God.
Acts 12, God strikes down King Herod for accepting praise or some shit, which is similar to the egotistical, vengeful, immature punishments the God of the old testament frequently handed out.
Jesus (who is also God) throws some incredibly immature and irresponsible super-powered toddler tantrums, like in Mark 11 where he curses a fig tree for not bearing fruit when he was hungry, even though it was out of season, and in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus forces demons to possess a bunch (like, thousands) of pigs that just happen to be nearby, causing them all to cast themselves off a cliff and die. Jesus suggests/condones rape as a punishment in multiple instances, which is pretty fucked up, but is consistent with the whole “the sexual punishment fits the sexual “crime”” motif you see all throughout the New Testament. Jesus himself isn’t just the peace-loving, love-thy-neighbor hippie they try to portray him as - in Matthew 10 he says “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword”, basically acknowledging and condoning religious violence. Very like, un-kumbayah of him, man.
Pick a page from Revelation, that whole book is basically just God bringing about the apocalyptic end times in increasingly violent and cruel ways, including killing people a second time by tossing them into a lake of fire for not being Christian enough to make it onto his nice list.
The continued existence of hell is a big one for me as well. You’d think a truly loving, kind, and forgiving God would get rid of the eternal damnation spirit torture prison. He also doesn’t end other universally-accepted-as-immoral practices like slavery, but instead doubles down on it in Ephesians, Colossians, and probably a bunch of other places. All in all, the God of the new testament is just as much of a bastard as in the old, he’s just hiding behind the introduction of his new son (who is also a bit of a bastard, but maybe a tad less so, so people accept it) and the weird blood magic ritual sacrifice storyline.
Edit: my claim that the God of the new testament is unchanged from the one in the old is also supported by scripture - James 1 and Hebrews 13 say as much, and even Jesus says he’s not coming to shake things up, that all the old laws (including the fire and brimstone ones) still apply in Matthew 5.
Jesus’ instructions on divorce are pretty unJesus like.
Slightly off topic but DAE find it convenient that Jesus’ first lecture to his new disciples was about divorce? Like hey, guys. Forget fishing and making money and handling business, and dont worry about your wives anymore.
I’ve been out of the church for a while but always imagined Jesus as a current day socialist with feeding the poor & “how you treat the least of me…” stuff. Shame that book is so contradictory.
The entire thing is contradictory, on purpose, to give people excuses to commit atrocities in the name of their “kind and loving” God
It’s because the Old Testament is actually just the Torah, rearranged and edited to fit the beliefs of what was once a sect of Judaism. That sect branched off when they decided that Jesus Christ was their Messiah, then progressively became more open and split away from the rest of Judaism and became their own religion.
That might be a bit oversimplified, but that’s really the gist of it. Jesus made a new covenant with god, which was meant to replace the old one, chronicled in the New Testament; but the old covenant was kept in as background, becoming the Old Testament.
the only “um akshually” I would even bother adding to this is that the Torah / Pentateuch is just the first five books of the Tanakh, which is the best / closest approximation of books that later became the Christian old testament. The Tanakh also includes the Prophets (Nevi’im), and the Writings (Ketuvim). There’s also a few books in there that the council of Nicaea (the council of og old Catholic dudes who decided which books were true or not) chose not to include. Also relevant is the Septuagint which was the first translation from Hebrew into a mainstream language (which at the time was Koine Greek) which is relevant because that specific translation has had a profound effect on translations since, which really hammers in that concept of “a translation of a translation of a translation of-”
Yeahhhh… I took a class on the history of the Bible, but that was about a decade ago, so I’m spotty on some of the details. Thanks for fleshing it out, though - I knew my take was probably missing something!
I’ve been getting back into Christianity lately for a variety of reasons but I’ve also been doing a lot of research into the history and philosophy and whatnot and reconciling:
that outer sphere of what all these different people over the centuries have written and decided to include or exclude from their various compilations and what motivated them morally or especially politically to do so
vs
the inner sphere of my own lived experience with what does and does not make the world a better place and what motivations exist in the modern day to practice or interpret those centuries of texts in one way or another
and honestly it’s actually been really interesting from an academic perspective as well. It’s a fascinating combination of history, language, culture, and even what influences it’s had on the sciences over time like I recently wound up learning some stuff about early geometry and the ways metaphysical interpretation of mathmetical concepts have affected the architecture of churches.
and that actually led me to creating this gif of how Metatron’s Cube is constructed using basic geometric concepts with a compass and straightedge. The animated circles were specifically programmed in FMS logo it was a really fun way to spend my weekend.
