Without Paul there is no Christianity. The James community got wiped out. What’s more without Paul there is no Bible either.
27 books and 13 attributed to him alone. Of the remaining only 5 are popularly referenced. Of those five 1 is Jesus recast in the mold of Paul (Mark) and the other is about the merry adventures of Paul. Since John copied Luke, Luke copied Matthew, and Matthew copied Mark even the parts about Jesus aren’t really about him.
You don’t know what Jesus really said, you can’t even confirm the man existed.
Here is the truth and I am sorry it hurts. Your god is made in your image. The Jesus you like tells us a lot about you and nothing about what really happened. If you are a SJW type then Jesus is one, if you are an authority type than Jesus is one as well, revolutionary, closeted homosexual, enlightened being who knows about aliens, into peace, into diversity, into charity, into institution building… There are as many Jesus’ as there are people who worship him. The greatest Rorschach test ever made.
you can’t even confirm the man existed.
Well, that’s going a bit overboard. Unless you have someone’s mummy, you can’t confirm that any ancient person existed. Obviously some people existed, otherwise we wouldn’t exist.
The Bible is the most printed book in history. There’s more surviving written evidence that Jesus existed than some Roman Emperors. It’s just an atheist belief that Jesus “probably didn’t exist”.
Whether you believe he was a divine figure is different. But there’s more written evidence about him and what he believed than most people in history.
Hey, do you have any suggestions on where i can read more on your first two paragraphs please?
Bart Erhman. He wrote a series of popular books on the NT and pretty much is the guy everyone is going to recommend to get started with. He also has a podcast.
In terms of the book attributions Wikipedia has a list I am sure.
In terms of what happened to James community I am not sure the best place to get started would be. Maybe start by learning about the purposed authors of the Gospel of John.
In terms of my assertions that Mark was recasting Jesus as Paul well you are just going to have to look around. Start by finding a basic textual criticism class on Mark. If you would like to know why I said that I can give you a breakdown of my arguments but a real historian could do a better job.
In terms of me saying that they all copied from each other again Bart. Me and him disagree about John but he he agrees with the rest. You also might want to read up on the Synoptic problem and Q, M, and L sources.
Let me know.
Point of order regarding the hostility here - I am not a Christian. Closest spiritual philosophy I ascribe to is Shinto. I dislike Paul in a general sense because I am a trans non-binary person and I grew up in a town where Christian kids were awful to me mostly based off the sex negative nature of Pauline doctrine where I intuit the man was a sex repulsed asexual who really was fond of telling other people what to do and setting that up as the default state of Christianity is very good at creating situations of sexual/religious trauma.
I study the bible and the origins of dogma for historical purpose to help make greater sense of the complex nature of how individual schisms of the church impacted the world. I am aware Jesus has the same situation going as Aristotle and Confucius where what we have of his philosophy was written down by his students or his students students. It’s at best a warped lens.
Still the picture painted that remains of Jesus, or this idea of Jesus… does have some identifiable philosophies. Mostly comparable to the classical stoics.
But at least part of the situation in figuring out the formation of the early church and the development of is to look at the early adopters. The bible is not meant to be be read through as a full endorsement of every rule. Leviticus for instance is “the rules of the tribe of Levi” and are essentially a snapshot of the sort of rules created by the priesthood of that particular time. It gives context of where dogma comes from potentially so that one can extrapolate what is God’s law and what is cultural. There is no divorcing Paul from the modern church due to him being the core around which the whole thing aelf legitimizes… But a Church, any church or the conception of an organized church is not Christianity. As movements go using the document as a historical document (more or less in the same way we would use Monmont or Herodotus) you can recontextualize a very different conception of the religion and there is nothing really to stop you from following it.
Still the picture painted that remains of Jesus, or this idea of Jesus… does have some identifiable philosophies. Mostly comparable to the classical stoics.
Yes when you ignore data that doesn’t agree with you, you can find data that does. There is no universal agreed upon method of verifying that the oral tradition
- Existed
- Accurately reported what really happen
- Self-correcting so it could remove what didn’t happen
Besides which we really do not have a reason to believe that a country bumpkin illiterate preacher in that culture and place would know and invoke Greek philosophy. The very word we have for a person going against God Apostate comes from Epicureanism by means of Aramaic.
But at least part of the situation in figuring out the formation of the early church and the development of is to look at the early adopters. The bible is not meant to be be read through as a full endorsement of every rule. Leviticus for instance is “the rules of the tribe of Levi” and are essentially a snapshot of the sort of rules created by the priesthood of that particular time. It gives context of where dogma comes from potentially so that one can extrapolate what is God’s law and what is cultural. There is no divorcing Paul from the modern church due to him being the core around which the whole thing aelf legitimizes… But a Church, any church or the conception of an organized church is not Christianity. As movements go using the document as a historical document (more or less in the same way we would use Monmont or Herodotus) you can recontextualize a very different conception of the religion and there is nothing really to stop you from following it.
Cool. Are you trying to convince me or Christians? Your argument is that Christianity doesn’t have to be terrible it just is. It is a fixable problem. Which might be true since hey as I said it is all a Rorschach test. There is no historical Jesus so anyone can make him say whatever they want. Now where does this get you? In theory if multiple things happen in a very specific sequence something awful could be good, for a small amount of time.
Why don’t we just cut out the stalling and middleman and just all become atheists humanists? No? Fine go retrocon the Bible and pretend you have some means of detecting what can’t be detected.
My general issue with atheists is that they are generally complete asshats about people who do believe in anything and even the suggestion that any belief system other than their own should be taken seriously as a potential core function of identity causes them to go on a massive hostile tirade where they treat everyone else in the room as an idiot.
If you are as big an asshole about any belief than your own functionally you are basically just Christianity 2.0 as far as trying to flatten the spiritual landscape. When people become hostile towards you with that behavior you earn it. I don’t know what religious trauma got you where you are but taking it back to the drawing board for a hard think about how you are turning it around and inflicting it on others.
No I don’t think Jesus was particularly up on Greek philosophy but it’s not actually all that hard a philosophy to hit upon. Most of the stoics did so in isolation because essentially it is a trauma response. Sometimes someone randomly pops up out of the landscape with a similar idea call it the convergent evolution of ideas.
And Yes, convincing Christians is in part my deal because I am queer and as a whole we need to fight these beliefs just to stay alive but Christians aren’t going to become athiests. You do not fight belief with disbelief, they spit that back in your face because that’s not how faith works.
But by all means act a complete social paraiah that makes the work harder by making them believe that people are trying to rip away what’s precious to them. Drive them to believe they are persecuted and call them idiots so they dive back into their book and their churches with a self righteous relief at having dodged the devil once again. Ask yourself what that ego hit of proselytizing your atheism with vicious slow burn rage looks like from the outside and then look at the men on the street corners telling us how we’re all going to burn in hell waving their holy book and ask yourself if your behaviour towards others is all that different.
