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Real peasant brain hours, who's up
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Somewhat unrelated but it's pretty dumb that Revelations was included in the Bible. It was written like 50-100 years after the rest of the new testament and is basically apocalypse fanfiction.
the choosing of the books in the Bible by so-called church fathers was deeply political and based almost exclusively on what values and virtues would create an orthodoxy most likely to preserve the power and primacy of the Roman state.
there's probably a comprehensive book out there, but the first books I read in the general area of the topic were by Elaine Pagels. The Gnostic Gospels, about the significance of the Nag Hammadi Library find (originally published in 1979 but I'm sure there are new editions) and her book on The Gospel of Thomas, originally published in 2003. my perspective was also probably influenced by Hecht's "Doubt: A History", which is far more broad of a topic than Christianity.
those will have a lot of names in them of the early orthodox-defining fathers and the murdered "heretics" whose works and histories were eradicated (but sometimes hidden away). we know a lot more about the early church than we did 100 years ago, but precious little has bubbled up into the living Christendom. I think it's a case of anybody who actually gives a shit about truth is driven away from the church, because it's mission is the same as it was 1000 years ago: institutional self preservation as standard bearer of a civic religion at any cost.
I will say, from personal experience, I found the texts from the Gospel of Thomas to be very eye opening and prescient about what sort of people "Christians" would become.
But when Thomas came back to his companions, they asked him: "What did Jesus say to you?" Thomas said to them: "If I tell you one of the words he said to me, you will pick up stones and throw them at me, and fire will come out of the stones (and) burn you up."
My recollections of an early Christianity course I took in college was that:
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You could set a criteria based on historicity that would include most books of the New Testament outside of Revelations.
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There's no real criteria that would include every single book of the New Testament minus Revelations but exclude the Gospel of Thomas.
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Revelations almost didn't make the cut because a lot of church fathers disliked it.
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The Shepherd of Hermas is a book that a lot of church fathers liked but ultimately didn't make the cut.
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I always heard that Revelations was literally like a coded message between Christians during the persecution under Nero.
It's definitely related to the fall of Rome. I believe the historical understanding is that early Christianity was expecting the end times to come either within their lifetimes or relatively soon after. They didn't reform it into a more long term religion until the Council of Nicaea
Yeah it was apparent that as the first generation of Christians began dying off they were like what the fuck. 1st century Christianity is fascinating to me, a bunch of free love apocalyptic doomsayers running around the levant.
I believe the historical understanding is that early Christianity was expecting the end times to come either within their lifetimes or relatively soon after
Sounds like what Christians were saying when I went to church as a kid
m'lord the holy book doth blowth open to an ominous page from the super storm. - sent from iPhone.that ball of mashed-up soggy paper kinda reminds me of someone
tired: Jesus toast
wired: Trump trash
I don't get it.
Doesn't this symbolize the hurricane's power over the Bible? It's destroyed! What's this supposed to mean to anyone?
No, because, see, if all your reading and other interpretation of thevworld is motivated by trying to confirm your existing beliefs, anything remotely contrary is thrown out, and everything you do is wildly contorted to that end with no regard for material reality or whether thats a war crime, it makes perfect sense.
Whereas our cucked soy commie brains just see this as the storm symbolically making their holy relics its bitch, yes. But we aren't very smart at confirming their beliefs, are we?
the hurricane is god, so he blew the book away into a pole just to the right page open. Turns out, we all gotta burn while the righteous go to heaven. how bout that.
Who you gunna worship? Some old codger or the divine winds that hurl trees like spears through your window?
I was never raised religious so coming at it from the outside i always wondered why people stopped worshipping the things that actually materially affect things. The Sun, the wind, animals, water etc
in short? alienation from labor+concerns about the afterlife. Basically, people who didn't have to worry about the harvest coming through next season started to worry about long term things, so the purpose of religion switched more and more to afterlife focus over time. You can see this generally, with Greek mystery cults such as the Eleusinian mysteries, cult of Orpheus and Dionysius, the great gods at Samothrace, and the Korybantes cult down in Crete, as well as the cult of Isis and Serapis coming out of Egypt, the cult of Mithras from Persia, and various levantine revivals around the time of Jesus. No big cults came from further north in Europe, due to the fact that those places were full of simple farmers for the most part until Roman conquest. Worship of animals tends to die out really fast, it's very easily made to look silly, it can only stay sustained in hunter gatherer groups, sometimes nomads. Solar worship is also more open to fluctuation than you might think, the Greek sun god was mostly worshiped for prophecy, poetry, medicine, laws, and poems, and the Romans didn't have a major cult for the sun until they imported it from Greece(potentially a minor one but it's obscure), and the other Italic people's didn't have one(the Etruscans do, but he's connected with the whole of the sky). The sun does it's job day in day out a lot better than other parts of the world, so why bother propitiating it? Several solar cults kind of catch on in the late empire, but more among the wealthy than the common people. Wind gods get very rarely worshiped, there job is usually subsumed into a weather god's work, potentially sea god or others. Water gods tend to be a bit of a hold out, as are gods directly tied to land and farming, but push comes to shove they eventually get folded as eschatological concerns overwhelm them. As for why Christianity, unlike the others somehow throws all prior religions out even for those who still work the soil, that's because Christ is King. But in a more objective tack, it's the only one of this cults that wasn't henotheistic, allowing for other gods but centered on one, but strictly monotheistic. And if the old gods get thrown out but the functions they governed keep moving, then either Jesus is the true god or it doesn't really matter.
WITNESS, MEN OF MAIZE, HURACAN WHO IS HEART OF SKY
YOUR BOWLS OF CLAY ARE SHATTERED, THE THATCH IS STOLEN FROM YOUR ROOFS
