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Granted at that time 'education' wasn't up to standards of today. But in any case the literature of the time fell in nicely with what people could take in and process. For how else could understanding be transmitted? For one thing the writers never spoke down to their audience. In fact they respected them.
I'm just saying that a benevolent, interventionist, omnipotent god has far better methods at his disposal. There is no "how else" for such a deity. Causing humans to be born with both his revelation and the correct understanding of it "baked in" to their brains for example.
I flog this point mostly because bibliolaters (and I used to be one) have a tendency to think there's nothing that could possibly top the verbal, plenary inspiration of scriptures, when in fact, scriptures demonstrably suck as a reliable means of conveying critically important information. Elevating the scriptures as they do is a failure of imagination to say the least. The Bible is a tangible thing they can lay claim to. If everyone knew and understood the mind of god they wouldn't be "special" anymore; they wouldn't have "good" news that they imagine would be valuable and interesting to bestow. They wouldn't be able to claim to care about "lost souls" because there wouldn't BE any.
I may agree with many about how the writings were manipulated, what their source material was, etc., but it is sheer folly to think Jesus never existed at all. What one may conclude about Him is certainly up for grabs--but to see some sort of "plot" to get this wrapped up in a tidy package? That's not logical. It assumes the authors were smart enough to attempt it, but too stupid to get the stories straight. That has no ring of truth for me.
Doubting the existence of Jesus does not demand conspiracy theories.
There is of course the historical Jesus, and the Biblical miracle working son-of-god Jesus, so we have to be clear who we are doubting. Some doubt the Biblical Jesus or at least his divinity, others doubt that he was a single historical figure. Some, like myself, doubt both. But it doesn't take accusing the gospel writers of conspiracy to do that. Indeed, given the span of years in the writing of the various gospels it renders that sort of collaboration impossible, at least at the level of author. Conspiracy at the level of church councils where decisions are made to push or discredit certain manuscripts is somewhat more plausible but even that is probably just normal Machiavellian political give-and-take.
It is hard to remember here in the Information Age that most people were not illiterate and fewer had the wealth needed to own books or the leisure needed to study them in what few libraries there were. My guess is that the gospels (official canon or not) were written separately, or at most, with the author of one being aware of one or more others, and that what the church councils decided was "official" at a much later date just represented what books had circulated and been popular and accepted out in the churches. It is likely that some editorial liberties were taken to knock of even worse rough edges than we are now aware of. After all, it's not like today where someone would have the ability to carefully compare the first and second "edition" and point out the differences. Or that anyone would have wanted to. Skepticism was not exactly a virtue in those days, and it's not a virtue in some quarters even today.
My personal preference is to put the NT in rough chronological order of authorship and observe how the Jesus character evolved from Paul's earliest writings about a celestial / spiritual being -- maybe even exclusively noncorporeal -- and his overt rejection of and pushback against the authority and testimony of alleged eyewitnesses still living at the time such as Peter and the other apostles, and an appeal instead to a personal vision given to him direct from god. The gospels were IMO likely written to establish Jesus as a flesh and blood (god-)man and putting them first in the collected books of the NT was designed to create a confirmation bias in that direction.
It is not hard for me to suspect that Jesus was either an outright invention or a composite character, although of course it presents no problem for me if he was a historical figure. It is even easier for me to doubt the fantastic stories about miracles and resurrection. And I have never had to resort to dark conspiracy theories. There is plenty of evidence pointing in the direction of the Jesus legends growing quite organically. No back-room maneuvering required.
Quotations from Clement match fairly well to what was said in Gospels. So chances are what we have is what originally was written down. There is a strong oral tradition present in the Gospels. The editing is very minor and based on mistranslations of individual words.
Your proof?
Were you there? Have you spoken to eye witnesses? Was Clement there?
Oral traditions are notorious for getting it wrong, especially when someone decides that there version makes more sense than what they are told, instant change.
Have you examined the agenda of those who "wrote down" these supposed traditions?
Sorry, but you are now trying to argue the point of the OP by "spiritualizing" what God wanted or not. That is a christian fundamentalist argument. I don't see the books being about what God wanted.
Yesterday a former Presbyterian told me that he loved the Presbyterian church but remembers the exact moment he couldn't continue there; it was when he realized that their doctrine would consign little children in New Guinea to hell (which was their motivation for sending missionaries there). That church is not generally considered "fundamentalist" and would hold their beliefs more loosely, but still believe in hell which means there is some aspect of "what god wants" in their reading of scripture. I would regard them as middle-of-the-road, and liberal relative to outright fundamentalism.
While I will grant you that the more liberal you are theologically the less you will look for a literal interventionist god providing actual instructions (or as the fundamentalists would probably characterize it, you would regard the Ten Commandments increasingly as the Ten Suggestions), I don't believe that most of Christendom is at least officially devoid of a desire to divine the Will of God from the Word of God.
I will grant you that whatever value the Bible actually has is as a record of human musings about the nature of god and spirituality, which might provide us with some food for thought about how he we might personally choose to relate to such things. But in this space I typically have to engage with some flavor of Holy Bible = God's Will and I would guess in the time I've spent here ... maybe 2 or 3 years?? ... I have met only a couple of other theists willing to regard scripture as you do. That doesn't mean it's that rare out in the world, especially unofficially at the level of typical pew warmers who I suspect don't fully understand or think through the implications of the "officially approved" doctrines of their churches. But here, it's what I normally have to deal with.
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Originally Posted by Wardendresden
From a purely spiritual point of view, God is not IN the Bible. The Bible deals with stories of men WITNESSING about their OWN faith. From that standpoint people with a spiritual interest can learn. Unfortunately, too many drown in elevating the writings beyond what they were intended to be. And some of the authors used tactics similar to those used by "bible-believers" today.
I question that the Bible was never intended by its original authors to convey their version of theological correctness. And that some of the authors used tactics similar to those of modern "bible believers" I think underscores that.
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Originally Posted by Wardendresden
It's okay not to "believe." And there is nothing wrong with belief either. Where it gets ugly is when those writings become some sort of untouchable rule book. That's the failing I see for too many christians. They make their own lives miserable and seem to enjoy attempting to make everyone else's lives miserable as well.
Yesterday a former Presbyterian told me that he loved the Presbyterian church but remembers the exact moment he couldn't continue there; it was when he realized that their doctrine would consign little children in New Guinea to hell (which was their motivation for sending missionaries there). That church is not generally considered "fundamentalist" and would hold their beliefs more loosely, but still believe in hell which means there is some aspect of "what god wants" in their reading of scripture. I would regard them as middle-of-the-road, and liberal relative to outright fundamentalism.
No early Jews understood "hell" as it has been imposed upon Christianity by Teutonic mythology. The German secular word hel was used by early translators to place some really bad thoughts about hell into our bibles. The German word actually means concealed or covered. Jews saw death as sheol which KJV translators took to mean both grave and hell. Ask any fundamentalist and he will tell you hell and grave do not mean the same thing, but the less educated translators of the KJV used the exact same Hebrew word to mean both.
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Originally Posted by mordant
While I will grant you that the more liberal you are theologically the less you will look for a literal interventionist god providing actual instructions (or as the fundamentalists would probably characterize it, you would regard the Ten Commandments increasingly as the Ten Suggestions), I don't believe that most of Christendom is at least officially devoid of a desire to divine the Will of God from the Word of God.
If Christians wanted to DO the will of God as much as they wish to KNOW the will of God, they would know it.
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Originally Posted by mordant
I will grant you that whatever value the Bible actually has is as a record of human musings about the nature of god and spirituality, which might provide us with some food for thought about how he we might personally choose to relate to such things. But in this space I typically have to engage with some flavor of Holy Bible = God's Will and I would guess in the time I've spent here ... maybe 2 or 3 years?? ... I have met only a couple of other theists willing to regard scripture as you do. That doesn't mean it's that rare out in the world, especially unofficially at the level of typical pew warmers who I suspect don't fully understand or think through the implications of the "officially approved" doctrines of their churches. But here, it's what I normally have to deal with.
Pastors and preachers who have been to other than right-wing theological seminaries do know the implications of the mixed bag of scripture we have. But they haven't shared it with those in the pew for fear of losing their position. And after all, for a professional, it's all about packing the pews and filling the coffers not "rightly dividing the word of truth," which sometimes calls for a "We just don't have a certain answer with regard to these particular verses."
And guess what, on these threads I'm dealing with the exact same kind of people. But you can be dismissed because you are an "unbeliever." I am thoroughly despised because I hold to the same concept of God and frankly admit Jesus is my own salvation, but I throw into question all that they hold dear about their "unquestionable" thought processes regarding both God and the biblical authors. The Bible is not a perfect rulebook.
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Originally Posted by mordant
I question that the Bible was never intended by its original authors to convey their version of theological correctness. And that some of the authors used tactics similar to those of modern "bible believers" I think underscores that.
You and I can agree there.
I think when we get outside the synoptics we begin to see "church" influence. Paul, in particular, did not seem much interested in spending a lot of time with those who had known Jesus in the flesh. I find that extremely strange for a convert by "revelation," which is how I converted--and I've always spiritually dreamed of doing the Walter Cronkite 1950's show You Are There to talk to those disciples and others who knew Jesus---and not for three short weeks as did Paul.
Paul's writings definitely have impacted how "modern" christianity sees itself and its mission. The problem is Paul's writings frequently twist the teaching of Jesus as recorded in the synoptic gospels. Paul was into believing and Jesus was into doing. Virtually every parable He told was about DOING--and most often doing good toward others--a concept that was as forgotten by the Pharisees as it is by most of Christianity today. DOING good appears to be a side job, rather than the purpose in life that Jesus taught.
The bottom line is that no one can take 2000+ year old middle east writings and dump them into 21st century America without producing great problems in understanding the idioms of those old languages (some of which not even Jewish scholars are able to divine), let alone the failure of translation from Hebrew to Greek to English nor the influence that Greek philosophy had on the NT writers. It became compounded with the earliest church fathers who were even more impacted by Greek culture.
That is why it remains difficult to ascertain many concepts definitively. I like to boil it down to Jesus' instruction to the lawyer that asked Him what the greatest commandment was. Jesus responded with "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind, and the second is like it, love your neighbor as yourself." When Christians keep those two concepts in mind it is very difficult to go astray.
But Christians are still like the Pharisees with two great motivations.
1. Don't do anything wrong that will send you to "hell," and
2. Do things FOR God because "heaven" is the reward.
That's basically what Jesus taught against. One is obedient to God because of keeping those two great commandments, and when they don't follow them they make hell on earth for themselves and others.
Will there be an afterlife? I hope so, but that doesn't impact my love for God one way or another. I'm not looking to serve in order to receive in the afterlife, I'm looking to serve because of how it impacts my life in the here and now. I'm going to leave the afterlife part to God as it is above my pay grade!
I think when we get outside the synoptics we begin to see "church" influence. Paul, in particular, did not seem much interested in spending a lot of time with those who had known Jesus in the flesh. I find that extremely strange for a convert by "revelation" ...
Paul's writings definitely have impacted how "modern" christianity sees itself and its mission. The problem is Paul's writings frequently twist the teaching of Jesus as recorded in the synoptic gospels. Paul was into believing and Jesus was into doing.
Agreed that it is very strange. But it seems less strange to me if you realize that the gospels did not exist when Paul wrote his epistles ... when Paul wrote, there was no gospel to TWIST. In point of fact it can be argued that the gospels "twist" Paul's writings, or at least were designed as a corrective, as they came into existence long after Paul's writings.
What is odd to me is that Paul seemed openly antagonistic to Peter and the other apostles ... took his authority from personal subjective experience (heavenly vision) when he needed only to appeal to the eyewitness accounts available to him. Whether this means (as I believe it does) that there was no historic Jesus or no developed Jesus-myth yet, or that he had a competing narrative of his own, or simply that he was trying to distance himself from a requirement for Christians to keep Jewish law that Peter was apparently advocating ... I don't pretend to know. Maybe all of the above.
Suppose I wanted to eliminate a culture because they were causing trouble. How would I do it?
There's a few ways. I could use the local media to target them, along with the education system, and convince them (and only them) that the world is overpopulated and we need birth control. Exactly, birth control, controlling which groups are in power. By giving the other a guilt complex.
I can also try to brainwash them with symbolic imagery. Make them get sucked into the pop culture mentality. I could also try to take over their church, and distort the message a bit.
Lastly, if none of this worked, I could destroy records. Finding theirs might be difficult, but I could likely destroy my own, and launch a denial campaign. X Person doesn't exist, he's not in our history. Yeah, except history is usually written by the winners. And it is easier to confirm something than deny it. A large group of people gets riled up, naturally they must have a leader or founder, since it is too organized to happen just by itself.
Like it happened to much of Confucian records over the centuries, like it happened to any records not in favor of Shih Huangdi, the First Emperor of China (for that matter, we don't actually know that he is the first, just that history of any leaders before him outside myth were suppressed). This is the tactic of those in power everywhere. The atchaeology community (run mostly by Muslims, whose history began at 6000 BC), refuses to allow any history to exist before that point. What, you thought history had no politics?
Oh yea, and this. Islam is actively suppressing archaeology below the dome of the rock. If people do find stuff there, it's deemed inadmissible because it was pulled off site. And they won't let anyone enter to do it on site.
Suppose I wanted to eliminate a culture because they were causing trouble. How would I do it?
There's a few ways. I could use the local media to target them, along with the education system, and convince them (and only them) that the world is overpopulated and we need birth control. Exactly, birth control, controlling which groups are in power. By giving the other a guilt complex.
I can also try to brainwash them with symbolic imagery. Make them get sucked into the pop culture mentality. I could also try to take over their church, and distort the message a bit.
Lastly, if none of this worked, I could destroy records. Finding theirs might be difficult, but I could likely destroy my own, and launch a denial campaign. X Person doesn't exist, he's not in our history. Yeah, except history is usually written by the winners. And it is easier to confirm something than deny it. A large group of people gets riled up, naturally they must have a leader or founder, since it is too organized to happen just by itself.
Like it happened to much of Confucian records over the centuries, like it happened to any records not in favor of Shih Huangdi, the First Emperor of China (for that matter, we don't actually know that he is the first, just that history of any leaders before him outside myth were suppressed). This is the tactic of those in power everywhere. The atchaeology community (run mostly by Muslims, whose history began at 6000 BC), refuses to allow any history to exist before that point. What, you thought history had no politics?
Oh yea, and this. Islam is actively suppressing archaeology below the dome of the rock. If people do find stuff there, it's deemed inadmissible because it was pulled off site. And they won't let anyone enter to do it on site.
Well that's what happened with the Bible. The Bibles we have are based on the Masoretic texts the oldest of which came about between roughly the seventh and tenth centuries C.E. But scholars have in the last century or so uncovered Syriac and Greek texts, including the Samaritan Pentateuch which are much older and differ significantly in places from what we read in English Bibles. Moreover, in just about every case the more ancient manuscripts found have been shorter in length, proving that additional material was the way the early christians "changed" history.
Quote:
The MT is widely used as the basis for translations of the Old Testament in Protestant Bibles, and in recent years (since 1943) also for some Catholic Bibles, although the Eastern Orthodox churches continue to use the Septuagint, as they hold it to be divinely inspired. In modern times the Dead Sea Scrolls have shown the MT to be nearly identical to some texts of the Tanakh dating from 200 BCE but different from others.
Wikipedia
Isaiah was one text that has been almost unchanged. On the other hand the Jeremiah found with the Dead Sea Scrolls is roughly one-seventh shorter than what we see in English.
American fundamentalists have a different way of "controlling" history. When new writings are uncovered, such as the Gospel of Judas, they are dismissed as simply inapplicable to spiritual understanding. So they neither bother to read nor analyze what was written.
171 O people of the Scripture (Christians)! Do not exceed the limits in your religion, nor say of Allah aught but the truth.
The Messiah 'ÃŽsa (Jesus), son of Maryam (Mary), was (no more than) a Messenger of Allah and His Word, ("Be!" - and he was)
which He bestowed on Maryam (Mary) and a spirit (Ruh ) created by Him;
so believe in Allah and His Messengers.
Say not: "Three (trinity)!" Cease! (it is) better for you. For Allah is (the only) One Ilah (God),
glory be to Him (Far Exalted is He) above having a son.
To Him belongs all that is in the heavens and all that is in the earth. And Allah is All-Sufficient as a Disposer of affairs.
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