I’m an atheist. I was raised religious and still have numerous Christian theists in my life.
The Bible is the best argument against Christianity.
At every turn, and in a myriad of contexts, whether to dunk and prove a point, or to insert a conflicting argument that will actually make a religious person think, knowing the Bible has been of great personal value to me. I’ll make some posts in the coming weeks to discuss some of the points below that I’d like to share more deeply on. This post is trying to make the case that the Bible is the weak spot in the Christian armor. Theists wriggle when you make them explain their own book.
The whole text is daunting. It is supposed to be. The Bible is confusing, disjointed, sometimes scary, violent, and obscene, other times mind numbingly boring. Unapproachable by rank and file Christians without “help interpreting.” Christians of all faiths cherry pick parts to justify their beliefs. “Bible study” is the vehicle that each denomination uses to teach and justify their specific beliefs.
But, whether you are early in deconversion, halfway there, or fully awake, you can look to the Bible and find tons of evidence against any of Christianity being real, grounded in fact, or believable at all. Taken as a whole, and not cherry picking verses, the Bible can be understood, in it’s context.
I challenge any believer or non believer to read the entire Bible, using any realistic, scholarly translation. When something doesn’t fit or doesn’t make sense, research it. It blows my mind how shaky the Bible is while reading any book completely, especially remembering that this is the justification for the entire religion.
Start at the beginning, really studying it, and you will realize modern Christians do like 10% of what “God commanded” in the OT. They offhandedly disregard the rest as old Jewish nonsense and simultaneously use the 10% they do hold on to justify hating anyone that loves someone that’s not approved. I’m not in favor of letting people get away with that. Want to quote Leviticus to justify homophobia? Explain why wearing mixed fabrics, eating shellfish, and getting Jesus tattoos.
The OT is crazy all the way through. If I started listing all the things the OT condones that are objectively immoral by modern standards, it would be its own (very long) post.
Even better, look at the NT. If you are already deconverted, and have people around you that still believe, this is bread and butter. Many of the tactics Christians use to dismiss valid arguments about the OT won’t work on the NT.
Some of my favorites from the NT (feel free to comment with any of your favorites I may have missed):
-
The gospels were written long after Jesus would have lived by people that lived after Jesus died (not the apostles that they’re named after). They were written in a language no apostle would have spoken (Greek instead of Aramaic).
-
The apostles don’t match each other on critical points of the Christ story. Read from crucifixion through the tomb to resurrection in each of the 4 gospels and you will see what I mean. Try to make a list of “facts” from each and compare. Why are they wildly different?
-
Paul: 13 of the 27 books of the NT (nearly half) are attributed to Paul but even Christian scholars have to admit that at least 3, and probably 6 of those 13 are written by someone else claiming to be Paul. The Bible has Jesus dying 33 CE. The writings of Paul are 15 years to 34 years later. Paul’s writings are the foundations of most of modern Christian thinking. Christians gloss over the shaky historicity of Paul’s writings. These books were written specifically to create a religion from the cult that had sprung up around them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline_epistles#Authenticity
-
Revelation: Oft quoted and preached on to instill fear in the audience. Christians completely misunderstand this book in context. First, Revelation is written somewhere 81-96 CE, ~50 years past the crucifixion. The author, John of Patmos, is not an apostle either. Just done guy in exile, named John. It matches a literary style common at the time where apocalypse was the theme. It is a deeply symbolic work and is clearly about the Roman empire, and the writers problems with it, if you give it any serious study. Revelation is not, and cannot be a prophecy for many reasons, the biggest being over kill. Logically read, the earth is totally devastated 3 or 4 times over. By the middle of the book everyone on earth would already be dead. Revelation 6 has the Sun going black and the stars falling from the sky to the earth, by chapter 8 the sea is poison. 22 chapters total and there is enough destruction to kill us all at least 3 or 4 times before the halfway point. Read up on apocalyptic literature of the time. It is all intended to be code so that the author can condemn and talk shit about his enemies in a way that won’t get him killed in court (John of Patmos, the author, is already in enough trouble with Rome at the writing to be living in exile, and yet the work is shit talking against Rome). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalyptic_literature
Thanks for reading. However, I don’t ever want to be confidently incorrect. Please tell me if you disagree with anything and I’d love to hear what others think is important, relevant to this topic. Expand please. Teach me something.
Looking forward to more posts. My lesbian school age niece has a homophobic classmate who is weaponizing the Bible against her. I’ve given her some back (no bacon or spandex, other Leviticus rules) and welcome more.
If I recall correctly the Bible in no instance gives other humans the right to judge someone else’s sexuality, at least not in the new testament. Maybe in the Torah (aka old testament), but I don’t think Christians want us to actually start taking the Torah literally or we’re all going to have a really bad time, because while it DOES condemn homosexuality in some passages, it ALSO then portrays homosexual pedophilia as ok in another, along with bestiality and ownership over lesser humans, beating women, incest, and murder without trial based on heresy alone.
Maybe this young pup would be best reminded that the verses regarding homosexuality in the NT, are strictly God denying them entry to Heaven, not God telling humans it’s okay to persecute each other over it.
For the record the same New Testament also claims that anyone who’s ever harbored any doubt at any point about anything in God’s story, in their life, no matter when, is denied entry to the same heaven. Soooooo
Don’t even get me started on the bibles insistence that we not worship or cherish worldy things such as gold, while promising us an eternal world free from tribulation, which is paved with gold, where we wear gold crowns on our heads with jewels on them for every soul we’ve converted.
Preach.
For the curious. I’m not giving you the verse. Context is important. At least read the whole chapter. (there are footnotes because this isn’t a propaganda Bible).
- Romans Chapter 1 - Paul is religion building. I bet he’d be fucking stunned it went this far.
- 1 Corinthians Chapter 6 - More religion building. Here’s what we allow and don’t. Probably largely built around what the target audience for means of convincing them to adopt the same rules and come on board (my opinion).
- 1 Timothy Chapter 1 - This one is weak where Paul is just condemning “sodomites” in a letter to Timothy.
Seems like Paul has a problem with gays for whatever reason to me.
Edit: And notice how it is in the first chapter 2 of 3 times. I bet Paul had a list stuck to the wall in the letter writing room. Probably next to some gay pin up art that he hated himself for loving.
- Chapter 1: bait the hook
- Chapter 2: set the hook
- Chapter 3: reel 'em in
- Chapter 4: profit
- Cry while jerking off to men
Cry while jerking off to men
🤣 Damn Paul, way to fuck it up for everyone else for 2000 years!
Same. I’m fascinated when learning about historical aspects of the Bible and Christianity. Having a better understanding of the text (without having to read it) is most welcome. Thanks for this topic.
I used to be an enjoyer of the theory of different works from different groups. I can only remember that the Priestly text was one of them. Quick wiki scan shows also JE. I have to go spend time with my partner , so can’t dig further atm. Does anyone recognize this? I think I read that this concept has been discredited or fell out of favor.
Ok, I stumbled on another part of it in early morning browsing before work. The Q document or “Q Source” (this is not QAnon-related). I think I can find the other letters of the theory from here.
Nevermind. I crossed the sourcing of Synoptic Gospels with the sourcing of Torah (Old Testament) chapters. The latter can be found here.
Still very interesting stuff. Christ-people consider their book to be the word of “god.” This stuff helps portray a book of many selected writings, with competing writings cast aside. Ok, time to get ready for work. Hope you have fun learning about this stuff. I have too many tabs open to read all the links that came up while looking into this.
Oh yeah. The two-source hypothesis. The deeper you get into reading on Biblical sources, the more you read about multiple authors on many sources. There is also the issue of the early works being hand copied by the religious. If you are the only scribe and you personally disagree with whatever you are copying that day, you can change it by leaving a bit out or adding a bit to “clarify.” As archeologists continue to discover newer and older versions of various books, that becomes clearer and clearer.
And as you point out, once you rule out the Bible as any kind of divine work that has survived the ages (not divine and literally not the same text now as it was when any of it was written), what is left to justify any of Christianity?
This got me on another deep-dive into Wikipedia. What a great topic for unending reading.
There’s so much actual historical review of these topics that christians don’t care about that it blows my mind.
deleted by creator
I learned to read when I was 4 and I read A LOT.
Before I started first grade in elementary school I had already read everything in my parent’s and grandparent’s bookshelves. I was a weird kid.
I remember finding the Bible at my grandma’s place and thinking it would be cool and epic like the books about Greek and Roman pantheons. It was one of the biggest disappointments of my life.
After I had read the book I knew that the whole thing is just a big scam.
This was almost 40 years ago and my opinion remains unchanged.
I also had a pretty early love of reading but not that early for me. I am a bit jealous that you were able to cut through it all so early, to be honest. I read it the first time in my teens and that’s when my faith fell apart.
The gospels say that during the Crucifixion there was a major earthquake, a solar eclipse and hundreds of resurrected people walking around Jerusalem.
And none of that made it into any contemporary sources, except the bible.
This one is actually pretty fun.
So in Luke, which only describes the three hours of darkness seen all around the earth, early copies referred to this being the result of the sun being eclipsed.
This was a huge problem for early commentators, who knew full well that solar eclipses couldn’t happen on a full moon, such as the Passover.
What you might not know though, is that at the time astronomers were aware of saros cycles and could calculate daytime lunar eclipses based on adjacent visible lunar eclipses in the same cycle.
Indeed, there even was a daytime lunar eclipse on Passover of 33 CE. Which lasted three hours and was seen all around the earth (where it was night). In fact, there’s a 1/6 chance of a lunar eclipse on any Passover, and there was another daytime one on the day in 31 CE too.
The next ones in the cycles for these would have been visible in the nighttime during the 50s CE. It was a trivial calculation to count back to know when earlier ones would have occurred.
And indeed, any self-respecting astronomer at the time would have known that the prevailing explanation for why it occurred was that the sun was being eclipsed…by the Earth.
So early copies of Luke describing three hours of darkness during the day because the sun was eclipsed may well have been accurately describing a calculated lunar eclipse post-50s CE, which was then embellished by Matthew and added back into Mark without the problematic ‘eclipsed’ word.
Which might also explain why the author of Luke-Acts has Peter citing Joel’s blood Moon prophecy as fulfilled in Acts 2:20 (even though at the time Peter nor his audience would have had any idea a lunar eclipse had occurred and been visible in other parts of the world).
Removed by mod
Most footnotes of modern translations of 23:45?
Origen even wrote about how he thought enemies of the church were responsible for it saying eclipse in copies.
Removed by mod
The word being translated as “sun was darkened” is ἐκλιπόντος (eklipontos).
The other Synoptics do not use that word.
John, claiming to be based on eyewitness testimony, does not mention anything about darkness at all.
(As I mentioned above, the three hour lunar eclipse which saw the sun’s light reflecting off the moon darkened when the Earth eclipsed the sun - a known mechanism of lunar eclipses at the time - on Passover of 33 CE was not visible in Judea.)
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Always wondered about the two different accounts of Judas’s death: by hanging (Matthew 27:5) or by falling and bursting open (Acts 1:18).
I’m really interested in what these books meant to the people who compiled the bible. Presumably the people who choose these texts could read and understood they didn’t all exactly agree on everything. Your point about revelation for example is obviously silly because of course that’s how it’s written, but the important question is what did it come to mean to the early church? The book clearly isn’t a catechism so discerning what it meant to early Christians takes a lot more effort than simply reading it and even understanding the authors meaning. Most “prophecy” in the bible isn’t written as prophecy and you kinda gotta squint to even agree with Jesus explaining how something is a fulfilled prophecy.
Here’s something I want to know more about too. I started searching and found this first and it’s pretty intriguing.
History appears to have been a powerful influence on John, including the then-recent Jewish uprising against Rome (66-70 CE), which led to the destruction of Jerusalem by victorious Roman armies. “We can’t understand this book,” said Pagels of Revelation, “unless we know it is war literature.”
and
Revelation, the final book in the New Testament, was “squeezed into the canon in the fourth century,”
A few fun NT details…
- “Marriage is between a man and woman” in Mark with a composition dated post 70 CE due to its inclusion of prophecy of the fall of the temple postdates the emperor of Rome (Nero) marrying two men in the 60s CE, once as ‘wife’ and then as ‘husband’ - so gay marriage would have been very top of mind when the gospel was written. What does not post-date it was Jesus, who would have had to have been making special mention decades before relevant to current events and then people would have had to remember as relevant for decades.
- Paul in Romans 8 swears to the Holy Spirit he’s telling the truth. He has a habit of swearing that, such as in Gal 1:20 or 2 Cor 11:31 (both chapters where he’s discussing a different gospel being followed). But Romans 8 is entirely missing from Marcion’s copy, which may be the earliest extant form of the letter. Someone seems to have been blaspheming that holy spirit…
- Even more hilarious is ‘Paul’ swearing (to Jesus Christ in some versions) that he’s telling the truth in 1 Timothy 2:7, given over 70% of polled scholars think the letter is a forgery.
The Bible is actually a pretty fun subject to research secularly.
Very interesting and unexpected stuff too. For example, the only other recorded interpretation of the sower parable from the first few centuries is the following:
[…] the seeds scattered from the unportrayable one upon the world, through which the whole cosmical system is completed; for through these also it began to exist. And this, he says, is what has been declared: "The sower went forth to sow. […]
- Pseudo-Hippolytus Refutations 5.3
Elsewhere this same group describes the seeds in more detail, connected this time to the “smallest seed” parable:
That which is, he says, nothing, and which consists of nothing, inasmuch as it is indivisible — (I mean) a point — will become through its own reflective power a certain incomprehensible magnitude. This, he says, is the kingdom of heaven, the grain of mustard seed […]
- Pseudo-Hippolytus Refutations 5.4
The important context to know is that 50 years before Jesus is born Lucretius writes a popular poem on Epicurean physics in Latin, using the word ‘seed’ in place of the Greek atomos (indivisible).
Which says things like this:
Especially since this world is the product of Nature, the happenstance Of the seeds of things colliding into each other by pure chance In every possible way, no aim in view, at random, blind, Till sooner or later certain seeds suddenly combined So that they lay the warp to weave the cloth of mighty things: Of earth, of sea, of sky, of all the species of living beings.
- De Rerum Natura book 2
For those who know the sower parable well, look at Leucretius’s specific wording regarding failed biological reproduction:
For a woman prevents pregnancy this way, resisting it, When she grinds her buttocks against the man’s member as it thrusts, Gyrating, her whole body turned to jelly with her lust. By doing this, she turns the furrow away from the straight and true Path of the ploughshare, and the seed falls by the wayside too.
- De Rerum Natura book 4
So 80 years later in Galilee a dude is publicly talking about the smallest seed growing into a place of rest and about how out of randomly scattered seeds only the ones to survive reproduce and the ones falling by the wayside of the path do not. This guy somehow allegedly upsets the Sanhedrin so much they ask the Roman state to execute him.
Then decades later Paul, known to have been persecuting Christians, is in Greece where he has no authority telling people to ignore other versions of Jesus, initially talking about sown seeds in the context of the human body in 1 Cor 15 where he discussed a first and last Adam (a concept shared by the group I quoted from above), but then later in 2 Cor 9 is describing sown seeds in the context of proselytizing and collections.
Decades after that you have the gospel of Mark describing a public telling of a parable about sown seeds that suddenly has a jump in place and time to a private explanation where it’s clarified that the parable is about proselytizing - a jump Mark never returns from even though we’re clearly back at the public shore in 4:35-36.
There’s something tragically ironic to the notion that the historical Jesus was advocating Leucretius’s concepts of survival of the fittest and naturalism to the point of even using Leucretius’s own language and metaphors, upset conservative religious orthodoxy in his backwoods theocracy doing so such that it cost him his life, and that the later damage control attempting to correct the record back to orthodoxy was what ultimately survived so successfully that it not only was responsible for suppressing Leucretius’s own work for a millennium relegating it to being eaten by worms, but is still actively opposing the idea of natural selection in favor of intelligent design today.
For additional context, here’s a quote attributed to Jesus from the work the group above was following on the topic of intelligent design vs naturalism where the latter is described as the greater wonder:
Jesus said, "If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels.
Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty."
- Gospel of Thomas saying 29
(I also recommend looking at sayings 7-8 that immediately precede the sower parable in that work with all the above in mind.)
As I said, it’s actually way more interesting and nuanced than you’d ever expect when you really dig in.
Wow! I said “teach me something” and you delivered. Thank you. I didn’t know any of this and want to dig in now. Have a good reference for me to start with on the subject of Lucretius?
Honestly the best resource is to read his poem.
This is a very digestible modern translation.
If you want a book more about the context of the work and its rediscovery, The Swerve did win a Pulitzer.
But most summary discussion of Leucretius is focused on the Epicurean philosophy and its attitudes on death and hedonism, and gloss over or even don’t mention things like that it’s the only extant work from antiquity to explicitly describe natural selection:
In the beginning, there were many freaks. Earth undertook Experiments - bizarrely put together, weird of look Hermaphrodites, partaking of both sexes, but neither; some Bereft of feet, or orphaned of their hands, and others dumb, Being devoid of mouth; and others yet, with no eyes, blind. Some had their limbs stuck to the body, tightly in a bind, And couldn’t do anything, or move, and so could not evade Harm, or forage for bare necessities. And the Earth made Other kinds of monsters too, but in vain, since with each, Nature frowned upon their growth; they were not able to reach The flowering of adulthood, nor find food on which to feed, Nor be joined in the act of Venus.
For all creatures need Many different things, we realize, to multiply And to forge out the links of generations: a supply Of food, first, and a means for the engendering seed to flow Throughout the body and out of the lax limbs; and also so The female and the male can mate, a means they can employ In order to impart and to receive their mutual joy.
Then, many kinds of creatures must have vanished with no trace Because they could not reproduce or hammer out their race. For any beast you look upon that drinks life-giving air, Has either wits, or bravery, or fleetness of foot to spare, Ensuring its survival from its genesis to now.
- DRN 5.837-859
Or nearly nailed Mendelian trait inheritance:
Sometimes children take after their grandparents instead, Or great-grandparents, bringing back the features of the dead. This is since parents carry elemental seeds inside – Many and various, mingled many ways – their bodies hide Seeds that are handed, parent to child, all down the family tree. Venus draws features from these out of her shifting lottery – Bringing back an ancestor’s look or voice or hair. Indeed These characteristics are just as much the result of certain seed As are our faces, limbs and bodies. Females can arise From the paternal seed, just as the male offspring, likewise, Can be created from the mother’s flesh. For to comprise A child requires a doubled seed – from father and from mother. And if the child resembles one more closely than the other, That parent gave the greater share – which you can plainly see Whichever gender – male or female – that the child may be.
- DRN 4.1217-1232
They got a number of things wrong as well, but it’s a pretty remarkable work and worth reading through if you have any interest in the history of scientific theory and thought. It’s pretty wild we still learn Aristotle in school (largely the result of the church favoring Plato and Aristotle’s embracing of intelligent design) when the Epicureans had such a better picture in retrospect.
Holy shit. That’s crazy! It sounds like that they had evolution figured out more than halfway, thousands of years before Darwin. I’m reading more now but others won’t and I admit ignorance here. What happened that kept this idea from continuing to grow?
Yeah, it’s pretty wild. I had no idea the theory was that explicit that long ago until digging into this myself, and one of the biggest hurdles in even seriously discussing the more nuanced stuff and the connection of these philosophical ideas with later Christian sects declared heretical is getting past the almost instinctual rejection of the notion that this was understood back then.
They didn’t have the science or experimental evidence to back it up, but luckily the quotes from the material are detailed enough that it’s pretty clear they had a great grasp on the theory itself.
As for what happened to prevent its growth, the answer is religion, and in large part Christianity.
Even at the time, the idea of naturalism/evolution over intelligent design was a minority view with most people favoring Plato’s intelligent design in Timaeus or their respective religious creation myth. With the rise of Neoplatonism in the 2nd century CE, Epicureanism fell further in popularity.
Then after the Roman empire became Christian, differing opinions became much more dangerous. In fact the only surviving copy of this poem was being eaten by worms in a monastery when the secretary of the Pope bribed a monk to liberate it back to his pre-Renaissance book club.
You can see early church authors call out Lucretius and Epicurus by name when they dismiss their ideas, such as Lacanthus from the 3rd century CE, here dismissing the idea things randomly came together without design from atoms:
Thus, because he had taken up a false principle at the commencement, the necessity of the subjects which followed led him to absurdities. For where or from whence are these atoms? Why did no one dream of them besides Leucippus only? From whom Democritus, having received instructions, left to Epicurus the inheritance of his folly. […] In the next place, by what mutual compact, by what discernment, do they meet together, so that anything may be constructed out of them? If they are without intelligence, they cannot come together in such order and arrangement; for nothing but reason can bring to accomplishment anything in accordance with reason. With how many arguments can this trifling be refuted!
- Divine Institutes, Book III (Of the False Wisdom of Philosophers) chapter 17
So if the godly Christian writers are making such compelling arguments against those nearly atheistic philosophers, and heresy is a bad thing to be kept away from the people that it might lead them astray…well those books and ideas need to be shut away.
The hostility towards them was around even in Jesus’s day among Jews. In the late 1st century CE the Talmud had a quote from a Rabbi Elezar saying “why do we study the Torah? To know how to answer the Epicurean.” And over the years the word for Epicurean even ends up becoming the word for ‘atheist.’
So you just had a time when it wasn’t clear what was true and what was false. And rather than keeping both around (like weeds and wheat when you don’t know which is which) people were self-assured that they knew Leucretius was wrong and that their intelligent design ideas were right, and effectively uprooted it from history. Just ever so barely failing to erase it completely.
But yeah, I often think about how the world might look if ideas like light being made up of tiny indivisible parts moving quickly (what Einstein won his Nobel proving) or evolution had been continuously considered for 2,000 years instead of shuttered up and forgotten for 1,600 years until being rediscovered in just the past few centuries.
I suspected it was Christianity that killed it, using the power of Rome. There have been similar knowledge purges in other religions/cultures also. Pretty frequent. It’s this general idea that makes me resent religions and the religious. It was when I started to realize how much religion held society back from progress, and how much it stifled individual freedoms and personal agency that I began to get a bit bitter against it.
I really enjoyed everything you wrote on this post. I’d invite you to make some posts of your own in this community too. I always want to learn more and you sound like you’ve gone down some rabbit holes.
As an aside - here’s a forgotten / unknown classic: Asimov’s Guide to the Bible. Is it good?, haven’t read it.
I got volume 1 and 2 (old and new testament) in the mail the other day. The two of them together is a daunting 1200 pages. The content, so far, seems phenomenal. Asimov writes it as a study companion. Book by book, chapter by chapter, this appears to be his commentary on all of it. What he’s learned about it that he believes is significant. I’ll make a new post after I am enjoying his notes on Genesis so far.
You actually did it? You magnificent bastard, you got his book? 😇
I shamefully haven’t read it. I only realized it existed a few years ago. Thanks for the reminder. I just ordered a used copy online. I’ll report back. Asimov was a genius so I’m incredibly interested to hear his take.
See also: Horus
Ho-r-us?
yeah, you know Hekhen~> Osiris/Isis~> Horus, which literally predates recorded history, the one who was born of a virgin and had 12 disciples, greeted by 3 stars upon birth, yadda yadda yadda
Removed by mod
Thank you for the reply. There is a bunch to unpack here. Give me a day or so. I have more to say here but will consider what you’ve written here for a sec first please.
Edit: Well I couldn’t sleep so I came back to it. See below:
A truthful thoughtful response.
I am a progressive Christian who has read the Bible through many times. I was a pastor for many years, though am no longer.
I have criticisms’a’plenty for “progressive Christianity.” In my old age I’ve come to blame progressive Christians for perpetuating a problem. I do understand it though and have empathy. My own brother is a progressive Christian. It’s better than evangelical or fundamentalist for sure. “Pastor” means nothing to me though. I’ve known a bunch of pastors that didn’t know jack shit but thought they knew everything. So color me skeptical on your actual, factual knowledge of the Bible.
…The Old Testament is its own thing…I’m going to leave that there for now…
So, I win? The Old Testament is nonsense, right?
The gospels, are not historical accounts…they’re not meant to be an impartial…each author had a specific goal…four different answers
Aren’t you making my point for me here?
This isn’t unusual, especially in ancient writings, but even in modern history, differing recorded accounts doesn’t mean the event didn’t transpire.
Yeah yeah. There probably was a person named Jesus who thought he was god and was crucified. I give you that. I think that is not enough to base an entire faith on.
As for the gospels being written in Greek, that’s entirely normal.
What? For scholars maybe but this is Judean Jews. Would any of the apostles have spoken Greek? It was written in Greek to give it legitimacy among the rest of the cult at the time probably. Who knows. Why did it take so long to write it down also, if there are all these Greek speaking Judeans running around?
there is no scholarly consensus…It is hardly impossible
You are making my point again. It does actually seem impossible, to me.
Paul…hijacked nascent Christianity to create a cult…
I think now that Paul probably saved the early cult of Christianity from extinction. He bound it with common laws and goals and packaged it for the masses. Added salvation and strapped hell to the penalty for disobedience making the religion infectious.
We clearly disagree on Paul, I think, and his motivations. Seems like you agree with me more than you think though.
Absolutely, I appreciate your thoughtful response. Like I said, not trying to convert or even win an argument, per se. I just wanted to point out that there are intelligent, thoughtful people who’ve thoroughly studied and read the Bible and still believe it to be true.
There are a lot of ways to read and understand the Bible. How many western evangelicals interpret and teach the Bible is ignorant and deeply messed up. There’s a massive history here going back to the “Great Awakening” which allowed foolish but persuasive men to largely define what American Christianity would be for nearly 300 years. Just because it’s the dominant view in America doesn’t make it right.
I think you will eventually realize that Christianity is all nonsense friend. That is for the best in my opinion. I have only an objective lens on the Bible. It fails chapter by chapter, book by book, in my opinion. There is nothing there worthy to build your own morality, faith, or life on.
Click on those links. Read the forwards and footnotes.
Start at the beginning, really studying it, and you will realize modern Christians do like 10% of what “God commanded” in the OT. They offhandedly disregard the rest as old Jewish nonsense and simultaneously use the 10% they do hold on to justify hating anyone that loves someone that’s not approved. I’m not in favor of letting people get away with that. Want to quote Leviticus to justify homophobia? Explain why wearing mixed fabrics, eating shellfish, and getting Jesus tattoos.
“For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all. 11For he that said, Do not commit adultery, said also, Do not kill. Now if thou commit no adultery, yet if thou kill, thou art become a transgressor of the law. 12So speak ye, and so do, as they that shall be judged by the law of liberty. 13For he shall have judgment without mercy, that hath shewed no mercy; and mercy rejoiceth against judgment.”
James 2:10
What that means to me is that anyone who claims the old law for judgement must adhere to all of it. There are 613 laws of Moses. I think it’s fair to say that there are no Christians today following all of those laws. So when they condemn someone for homosexuality, they’re condemning themselves according to the teachings of Jesus. Jesus was super cool like that though. His entire message can be boiled down to "love God, love your neighbor, stop being a judgy asshole ". It’s crazy to me how many self-proclaimed Christians miss the last 2 parts of his simple 3 part message.
