Official explanation: The Holy Spirit narrated to the author. This can be quite removed, some books were written many years after the event, some were passed down.
A few centuries later, the Council of Nicea went through all of these texts and decided, “This is real, we can tell, we’re putting this in the Bible. That… that other stuff is fake, yuck! Gross. Heresy.”
They also resolved a pressing issue for the new church. “Priests, please stop cutting your balls off, that is a metaphor, not literal instruction. Even though He said that they were literal instructions, that was also a metaphor.”
“Oh, just one more thing… you can’t get married. No, He didn’t say that, but we’re inspired by the Magic Bird, so mote it be.”
You probably think I’m joking… but sadly, no.
p.s. the church pays no taxes womp womp
My favorite bit of Christian lore is the time that predestination became a widespread belief. People cursed god and the church and sinned 30x harder, recognizing that if they did it, they were always meant to. In the absence of choice, people found hedonism not just agreeable but compulsory. Then the church solved that issue by telling people that they could actually get into heaven by paying. People got so pissed off that a sect splintered off, and I think that how we got Protestants.
Someone please tell me how many different events I erroneously mixed together.
Luther and Calvin started off with Niecea and Trinity are complete BS mistranslations of original greek, and you can be your own priest = “conscience interpreting Jesus words as meaningful”. It ended up with Trinity is best, and only Calvin was allowed to be his own priest, and you should be killed for having believed the first version. I don’t know about paying for sin, but how else can a pastor get a G6?
Someone please tell me how many different events I erroneously mixed together.
I can for money… Otherwise, enjoy the orgy!
Official explanation: The Holy Spirit narrated to the author.
You mean the four authors who all wrote the same story but slightly different?
Holy spirit talking to people must have been common back then. Strange how it just stopped.
It didn’t stop, we just understand it as psychosis these days.
This is ‘explained’ by Julian Jayne’s idea of the Bicameral Mind.
So, everyone had, until 3000 years ago, schizophrenia induced by gods and were comanded by gods? That’s some wild mental gymnastic he did…
Flagging for best-of-lemmy
Some of the other writings that didn’t make the cut for the canonical bible are wild.
Bet a non canonical bible with only cut content is a way better book.
The Bible: Extended Cut
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The book of Enoch often features in nutty ancient aliens content. Extra terrestrial beings and hand held devices and so on.
It’s important context for the canonical bible. Imagine you find a bunch of scrolls in urns in a cave and it’s basically an anthology of short stories from the star wars realm. You cut out the ones that just seem too crazy and the ones that contradict others, and then call the rest your special nutty history.
thats called the bible with apocrypha, and youre right its way better
Lower-case apocrypha are extra-canonical religious writings, which cover a wide range of ancient texts in Christianity.
“The Apocrypha” is applied to a specific set of books that are accepted in various configurations by the Catholic, Orthodox and Eastern churches but are rejected from the Biblical canon by many Protestant denominations. Those are the ones you can find between the Old and New Testaments in some Bibles.
It’s not at all confusing.
thanks for elaboraring! always nice to get real context, im just yapping from memory :P
Well, he didn’t say you can’t rape little boys…
Wait what? Really? I mean I figured. Just…it was basically like that?
“Oh, just one more thing… you can’t get married. No, He didn’t say that, but we’re inspired by the Magic Bird, so mote it be.”
Didn’t that one come later because certain members of the clergy were having kids and functionally turning their positions into hereditary fiefdoms?
IiRC it was more so that the Church got actual fiefdoms and wanted control so that potential priestly families wouldn’t just distance themselves into secular noble houses, taking lands with them.
Fiefdoms and related duties originated from kings, so the church wanted similar parallel rights over their vassal priests.
FYI, the council of Nicea had nothing to do with biblical canon. That’s a common misconception.
Feel free to correct me with any source! I am interested.
(it says canon for some reason)
If you read through the list of canons you linked, none of them mentions a list of books that are to be considered part of the bible. The “canons” listed are basically just rules about different things in the church and were put in place to address splits that were forming as the church grew. The books of the bible were not in any way decided at Nicaea.
If you would like to read more and/or correct me on anything, I’m pulling from https://www.britannica.com/event/First-Council-of-Nicaea-325 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_Nicaea
The Council of Nicaea did not decide the books of the canon, it decided on whether Jesus was equal to God or not…
there’s a whole section of the library called fiction
it’s going to blow your mind
To be fair, the “You can’t get married” issue happened seven hundred years later under Gregory the Seventh, and at the time, the other patriarchs who remained following the rise of Islam thought the Archbishop of Rome, the Pope, was nuts too. Which is why Coptic and Greek Orthodox priests can marry, along with Protestant priests. All arguing “Christ never said you needed to absolutely forgoe sex, that was Paul and Peter.”
“This can be quite removed”
What? I’m not sober so it’s very possible I’m just bring stupid and not understanding the words, they just make no sense to me at the moment and I can’t figure out what you were trying to write (in the case of me not being dumb right now).
“Quite removed” in terms of time.
It means that the church failed to destroy records about how the stuff they peddle wasn’t written anywhere near the events they supposedly describe. You’re supposed to spend years studying the book upon threat of physical violence or death until you reach a point where you’re too invested in the mythos to bother questioning it. You’re supposed to NOT study all the figures that we have written records of that predate the jesus myth:
The part where Moses writes down his own death and funeral is also pretty trippy.
I also like how John keeps saying “BTW Jesus totally liked me more than the other disciples. Beloved, even.”
My favourite thing about the Bible is that every time it’s been translated the people doing the translations include they’re own nonsense.
My favorite thing about the Bible is that the gospels were written by followers of the disciples, who themselves didn’t know how to read or write, in Aramaic, then translated to Greek, then to Latin, then censored by the council of Nicea, then finally translated into English with the Geneva, then quickly edited by the commission of King James, because the J-Sauce was very socialist and anti-government.
And the atheists who want to quote terrible things mentioned in the bible are pulling from the Old Testament, specifically a book of law written by the King Joshua, 800 years before Jesus, and proclaim that people proclaim it to be the word of God.
So, ok: we have so many translations, literally a mass obliteration of Cathars, as well as other Inquisitions… now, you wanna tell me you know jack shit about the bible and tell me things didn’t happen?
Ok. Cool, bro.
Edit: btw, the two loaves of bread and five fish story was about a 12 year old boy. Jesus didn’t magic shit other than inspiration in that story. Lost in translation/Nicea/government. You may be kept hidden from the teachings, because Jesus was punk fucking rock.
And a King didn’t want you to even know it! That’s my point, good ol’ JKV that every goddamn “scholar” quotes from.
It’s all horseshit.
Thank you for attending my lecture.
So you are MAGA?
Maybe your knowledge of the topic is just horseshit.
Bro I didn’t even read your comment because it was discussing the legitimacy of different interpretations of thousand year old fanfics. It’s meaningless. The book makes some good points about being nice to each other, but it’s not real. It’s literal hallucinations and grifts by people over hundreds of years.
I don’t need to get a PhD on theology to determine that it’s all fucking lies.
And you think this makes me MAGA…? Fuck that’s sad. What a worthless worldview you have.
Funny he mentions MAGA in the context of christ, as they tend to be Christian nationalists.
Who aren’t Christian, btw. I am criticizing logic through facetious statements.
Jokes are funnier when they don’t have to be explained. But hey, breathe through the mouth: it is a valid channel.
Jokes are funnier when they don’t have to be explained
Have you thought that nothing you’ve said is funny?
Jokes are funnier when they don’t have to be explained.
Not commenting on anything for the chain, just this thing. Agree, but personally that’s more on the teller than the listener.
However, I really enjoy explaining my jokes when people ask or people explaining their jokes. At that point it isn’t about laughing but about learning things I missed or alternative viewpoints.
Apologies, I’m going to do something that I think is kind of a jerk move and paste my standard argument for a very specific point. It’s a jerk move because I see that you wrote a genuine reply and I appreciate that. I don’t know enough about the specific points that you raised to discuss them directly, so I’m falling back on my broader thinking. To that end, I’m truly trying to contribute to the discussion (even though I’m pasting a repeated(-by-me) blurb; see my sibling post; I’m pretty into this topic). I respect your views even if we disagree, so long as you don’t try to impose them on others, which I’m not saying you do / did.
Jesus is an ahistorical figure who was originally crucified in the firmament above the earth. Notice no mention of an earthly ministry in the Pauline epistles; Paul is arguing for salvation from a heavenly figure. In his letters, Jesus is still to be revealed, rather than returning. Only decades later did the stories about a human man get written.
The Didache was most likely part of the letter written by the “pillars in Jerusalem” (James the Just, Peter, and John) after their meeting with Paul. This was the meeting to discuss the matter of preaching to gentiles and whether circumcision ought to be required for christian converts. It contains many of the tenets later ascribed to Jesus, but doesn’t associate him with teaching them.
The reason the earthly story was embraced by the church was to stop people like Paul from having visions of Christ that the church couldn’t control. By pointing to a real guy on earth, they could control the message. Otherwise, any yokel on the street could teach that Jesus revealed new teachings and the church risked being undermined.
Marcion was probably the first to create a collection of writings associated with christianity: he collected some of Paul’s letters and had his own gospel. It was thought that he had a shortened version of Luke (as testified by Eusebius and Tertullian). Marcion, however, claimed that his gospel had been “judaized”; this suggests that his shorter version was the original gospel before others modified it.
Acts was written as a direct response to Marcion’s scripture. It was written to harmonize Paul’s high-jacking of the religion by making he and Peter appear to be in alignment when actually he was at odds with the leaders in Jerusalem.
The Jerusalem pillars (James, Peter, John), were strict adherents of Judaism, whereas Paul taught that Jesus made the Law / Torah unnecessary. They were almost certainly Essenes, one of the three flavors of Judaism at the time (the other two were the Pharisees and Sadducees mentioned in the new testament). John the Baptist was clearly also an Essene. He’s said to wear camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist and ate locusts and honey. His practice of baptism also aligns with daily ritual water immersion believed to be a core practice of the Essenes.
This is a very long way of saying that Jesus first appeared in visions and spoke to the early leaders without walking on earth. It’s a fringe belief about which I was quite skeptical, but damn if the evidence doesn’t line up. See Robert Price, Earl Doherty, and Elbe Spurling for more info. Elbe’s online book is free and contains a huge amount of historical information about the region at the.
So Christians don’t know jack shit either since every historical fact is lost in translation or just corrupted and misconstrued for a personal agenda.
The “Christians” who didn’t study the Bible don’t follow the teachings of Jesus.
Jesus was punk rock and worthy of study. Buddhism fell in the same hole.
You are buying into and, sure, trying your best to reject the propaganda. But you are buying into the “official story” just the same as the “Christians” you disdain.
Study the Bible, and then when some evangelical asshole wants to tell them that you will burn in eternity in Hell, you can correct them: Hell is simply destruction, literally what atheists consider death to be.
But Jesus was way cool, and not as magical as the GOVERNMENTS that killed him for insurrection want us to believe.
Damn, I need to attend your lecture. You know so much that I don’t.
Ask away, my man. Look at the rest of the thread because some of us are having some deep dives into the topic.
In regards to the 12 year old boy, the people were complaining about hunger. Jesus gave a sermon saying we should share food.
The 12 year old offered 2 fish and 5 loaves of bread, which was his paycheck, to a disciple. The disciple asked Jesus, “Wtf am I supposed to do with this?”
“Disperse it.”
5000 men, meaning 5000 families as children and women were being counted, ran to their pantries, inspired by the boy, to grab what they could find. Shit that was just sitting on the shelves that they didn’t have the rest of the ingredients to actually use it.
It is a story of an impromptu potluck. The magic was only the words of Jesus and the generosity of that 12 year old boy.
And everyone was fucking fed. That’s properly administrated socialism. Love your neighbor. Government doesn’t even need to be involved.
What do you think about the resurrection of Lazarus?
What do you think about CPR?
I’d think survival would be inconsistent with the amount of time Lazarus was “dead”/needed cpr.
I lean more towards Lazarus being misdiagnosed as dead and Jesus giving Lazarus the ol’ sternum tap to wake him up.
As David Cross said, “They didn’t have science back then so everyone was even stupider…” or something approximating it.
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Wait no I changed mine it’s when they put Jesus in a hole, then put a giant wheel of cheese in front of the hole.
The reason Jesus ain’t come back is he needs our help to eat all that cheese and get out of the hole
[now that I think about it I might be able to start a cult around cheese. I told my wife no more cults, but I didn’t promise. Plus, cheese. Maybe she wants to join this one]
Mine is the part where Moses went up the mountain, tripped balls for a while, write down some laws, came back down and threw a fit because the people had relapsed into their old religion, and smashed the law tablets like a dumbass.
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Can you cite these passages? Because from my memory, when he’s praying alone, the content of his prayer isn’t recorded and that barely happens at all. There are other things that show that the gospels aren’t historical but please stick to the facts
Disclaimer: I’m an agnostic. Also, the Evangelists are supposed to write as if God himself was in control of their writing, so, effectively, it would be God himself writing those words.
Also notable:
The spirit is willing, but the flesh is spongy and bruised
- Brannigan 3:5
Mine is when the Israelites slaughtered entire cities and then they made kids sing about it at Bible Camp.
They still do it to this day
Hey now don’t oversimplify it!
We all know about Joseph Smith and the stones in a hat.
Wait, what?
In case you are unaware of the story of the origins of the Mormon faith that Mormons actually believe, go look up the South Park episode titled All About Mormons. It gives a pretty brief overview of everything, including the stones in the hat.
It’s quite a funny episode, tbh.
Smrt smrt smrt smrt smrrrrrt
The origin of the Mormon religion is practically a parody of itself. It’s also a sterling example of why education is so important in developing people’s critical thinking skills so they aren’t all credulous morons.
There’s this great video of the previous head mormon sticking his head in Joe Smith’s hat.
Dum dum dum dum duuum
My favorite part is how well it can be used to light a fireplace. Just tear out some pages, put some wood over it and light it. Secundair use is rolling paper when you’ve run out.
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No no no, cleaning your ass is what holy water is for. At the entrance of every church they have a bidet for that.
I smoked a bible joint once, it’s still a lot of paper hahs
At hotels, rip out a random page in the middle. If anyone ever reads it they’ll be super annoyed.
Or draw a pentagram on the first page and the text heil Satan
Makes sense
I hate it when I go and do something and then tell someone about it and they are like “no one else was there so it didn’t happen”.
I’m not saying Jesus is real or anything but like, he coulda just don’t stuff and went back to his boyfriends and been like “hey wild shit I prayed and good was like what up”
Just the fact that he needed to talk to him is a problem enough. I was raised with the understanding that they were the same person.
Being, not person. Maybe schizophrenics are actually the closest we got to gods image xD
Maybe they need to be in proximity to update, like no cellular, have to make a physical connection.
There’s a joke about Jesus having FireWire in there somewhere.
God spoke to the writers of the gospels and told them to write down the story.
I mean I have no idea why each version of the same story is different. Maybe different timelines, dimensions?
God works in mysterious ways. 🤷♂️
Different idiots.
My favorite part of the Bible is Matthew 21:33-45; basically killing landlords is cool and the people who do the work deserve the reward
33 “Listen to another parable: There was a landowner who planted a vineyard. He put a wall around it, dug a winepress in it and built a watchtower. Then he rented the vineyard to some farmers and moved to another place. 34 When the harvest time approached, he sent his servants to the tenants to collect his fruit.
35 “The tenants seized his servants; they beat one, killed another, and stoned a third. 36 Then he sent other servants to them, more than the first time, and the tenants treated them the same way. 37 Last of all, he sent his son to them. ‘They will respect my son,’ he said.
38 “But when the tenants saw the son, they said to each other, ‘This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him and take his inheritance.’ 39 So they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.
40 “Therefore, when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?”
41 “He will bring those wretches to a wretched end,” they replied, “and he will rent the vineyard to other tenants, who will give him his share of the crop at harvest time.”
42 Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures:
"‘The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; the Lord has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes’[h]?
43 “Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit. 44 Anyone who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; anyone on whom it falls will be crushed.”
45 When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard Jesus’ parables, they knew he was talking about them. 46 They looked for a way to arrest him, but they were afraid of the crowd because the people held that he was a prophet.
Dude, my favorite is 2Kings 2:23:24
“Then he went up from there to Bethel; and as he was going up by the way, young lads came out from the city and mocked him and said to him, ‘Go up, you baldhead; go up, you baldhead!’ When he looked behind him and saw them, he cursed them in the name of the LORD. Then two female bears came out of the woods and tore up forty-two lads of their number.”
God kills 42 kids for calling someone bald LOL
That verse is funny as fuck, definitely up there with some of the best. Along with killing all of the pigs being raised for food in a village, because they were all apparently possessed by an army of demons
It’s less violent, but Jesus killing a fig tree because it wasn’t fig season is also really funny.
“Killing?” Even when mocking an opponent, at least be accurate; the demons possessed the pigs who then rushed into water and drowned themselves: https://biblehub.com/mark/5-13.htm
Then the villagers pleaded with Jesus to leave due to having wrecked their economy. Whether Jesus did it because He’s Jewish/anti-pork or that just happened to be what the demons weirdly chose to do (or if it, uh, happened at all, of course), we may never know… But that is how the account goes, regardless.
I feel like you’re taking a very different lesson from that. He’s saying God is the landlord, and the pharisees are the tenants, and when God sent them person after person to get them to behave right, they mistreated them, and then prophesizes his own death by them. Then he says the Kingdom of God will be taken from them (the bad tenants) and given to the rejected (which is a regular theme for Jesus, chilling with the social rejects and talking shit to the religious leaders).
Basically, he’s not applauding the tenants. He’s saying the Landlord (God) is going to kick them out of his vineyard (his kingdom) for being assholes.
Yeah, but also Jesus, also in Matthew, just 4 chapters later:
“For it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted to them his property. To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. He who had received the five talents went at once and traded with them, and he made five talents more. So also he who had the two talents made two talents more. But he who had received the one talent went and dug in the ground and hid his master’s money. Now after a long time the master of those servants came and settled accounts with them. And he who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five talents more, saying, ‘Master, you delivered to me five talents; here, I have made five talents more.’ His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’ And he also who had the two talents came forward, saying, ‘Master, you delivered to me two talents; here, I have made two talents more.’ His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’ He also who had received the one talent came forward, saying, ‘Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here, you have what is yours.’ But his master answered him, ‘You wicked and slothful servant! You knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I scattered no seed? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and at my coming I should have received what was my own with interest. So take the talent from him and give it to him who has the ten talents. For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’”
Jesus was kind of a dick.
The stories contradict each other to the point that my top guess is they were written by different people. Either that or one person gathered a bunch of different stories attributed to Jesus and just wrote them all down rather than checking if the messages contained within were consistent or not.
I’d bet that that passage was added during the Roman times, between Constantine adopting it and the fall of the western empire, when Rome was crumbling under the weight of its corruption but the beaurocracy still functioned.
