Misquoting Jesus

[Immortal4life]

Misquoting Jesus

Textual critics have proven many parts of the modern bible were not originally a part of it. One example is the story of the woman who was about to be stoned to death but Jesus saved her by saying "let he who is without sin cast the first stone." It's been proven that this was added in hundreds of years after the NT texts were first written down, and the original texts didn't have this story.

Koester notes:

 

The narrative about Jesus and the woman taken in adultery (John 7:53-8:11) is certainly a later interpolation, since it is missing in the papyri and in most of the uncials, and the Ferrar group of miniscules places this story after Luke 21:38 (Koester).

Someone arguing that it was originally in there has to explain why it does not appear in the most early accounts--why would they all delete? Why would it appear in the wrong gospel?

Bart Ehrman Interview on "Misquoting Jesus"
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-march-14-2006/bart-ehrman

Bart Ehrman's 'Misquoting Jesus', with audio interview-
Bart Ehrman's 'Misquoting Jesus' : NPR

The book of Bart-
The Book of Bart

 

 

Scholar Bart Ehrman's new book explores how scribes -- through both omission and intention -- changed the Bible. Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why is the result of years of reading the texts in their original languages.

Ehrman says the modern Bible was shaped by mistakes and intentional alterations that were made by early scribes who copied the texts. In the introduction to Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman writes that when he came to understand this process 30 years ago, it shifted his way of thinking about the Bible. He had been raised as an Evangelical Christian.

Ehrman is also the author of Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, which chronicles the period before Christianity as we know it, when conflicting ideas about the religion were fighting for prominence in the second and third centuries.

The chairman of the religious studies department at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, Ehrman also edited a collection of the early non-canonical texts from the first centuries after Christ, called Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament.

 

 

Bart Ehrman is a sermon, a parable, but of what? He's a best-selling author, a New Testament expert and perhaps a cautionary tale: the fundamentalist scholar who peered so hard into the origins of Christianity that he lost his faith altogether.

Once he was a seminarian and graduate of the Moody Bible Institute, a pillar of conservative Christianity. Its doctrine states that the Bible "is a divine revelation, the original autographs of which were verbally inspired by the Holy Spirit."

But after three decades of research into that divine revelation, Ehrman became an agnostic. What he found in the ancient papyri of the scriptorium was not the greatest story ever told, but the crumbling dust of his own faith.

"Sometimes Christian apologists say there are only three options to who Jesus was: a liar, a lunatic or the Lord," he tells a packed auditorium here at the University of North Carolina, where he chairs the department of religious studies. "But there could be a fourth option -- legend."

Ehrman's latest book, "Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why," has become one of the unlikeliest bestsellers of the year. A slender book of textual criticism, currently at No. 16 on the New York Times bestseller list, it casts doubt on any number of New Testament episodes that most Christians take as, well, gospel.

Example: A crowd readies itself to stone an adulterous woman to death. Jesus leans down, doodles in the dust. Says, let the one without sin cast the first stone. The crowd melts away. It's one of the most famous stories in the Bible.

And it's most likely fiction, says Ehrman, seconding other scholars who say scribes added the episode to the biblical canon centuries after the life of Christ.

There are dozens of other examples in "Misquoting Jesus," things that go to the heart of the faith, things that have puzzled scholars for centuries. What actually happened to Jesus of Nazareth, there on the sands of Judea? Was he a small-time Jewish revolutionary or the Son of God? Both? Neither?

These ancient questions have been the guideposts to Ehrman's life. His take on them -- first as devout believer in biblical inerrancy, then as a skeptic who rejects it all -- suggests a demand for black and white in an arena where others see faith, mystery and the far traces of the unknowable.

 

 

On a recent afternoon, Ehrman, 50, pulls off his fedora at the front of an auditorium. Some 350 students are filing in for Religion 22, one of the most popular classes on campus.

His text for today is the Gospel of John.

Thought to be the last written of the four Gospels that form the narrative of Christ's life, death and resurrection, it forms a cornerstone of the Christian faith. The problem is that it is distinctly different from the other three Gospels.

Ehrman looks the professorial part -- a not-too-tall man with a receding hairline, dressed in casual slacks and sport coat over a sweater. His shoes are scuffed. He is energetic and possessed of a gregarious personality that endears him to the student body. (He holds informal office hours on Wednesday nights in a local bar/restaurant.)

But as he paces back and forth across the stage, Ehrman ruthlessly pounces on the anomalies -- in this Gospel, Jesus isn't born in Bethlehem, he doesn't tell any parables, he never casts out a demon, there's no last supper. "None of that is found in John!" The crucifixion stories are different -- in Mark, Jesus is terrified on the cross; in John, he's perfectly composed. Key dates are different. The resurrection stories are different. Ehrman reels them off, rapid-fire, shell bursts against the bulwark of tradition.

"In Matthew, Mark and Luke, you find no trace of Jesus being divine," he says, his voice urgent. "In John, you do." He points out that in the other three books, it takes the disciples nearly half of Christ's ministry to learn who he is. John says no, no, everyone knew it from the beginning. "You shouldn't think something just because you believe it. You need reasons. That applies to religion. That applies to politics . . . just because your parents believe something isn't good enough."

The class files out a few minutes later.

"Most of the students have never heard anything like this in their lives," says Ben White, a graduate student. "For a lot of them, it's very threatening."

Ehrman doesn't mind this. He's often on CNN, the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, a scholar amused by "taking something really complicated and getting a sound bite out of it."

"Misquoting Jesus" is just that to some extent, a book of pop history about biblical misconceptions. The first of his 19 books to be a bestseller, it reads like one of his lectures -- an exploration into how the 27 books of the New Testament came to be cobbled together, a history rich with ecclesiastical politics, incompetent scribes and the difficulties of rendering oral traditions into a written text.

To get an idea of how complicated this can be, consider: Greek, the lingua franca of the day, was written without capitalization or punctuation.

Here, you play biblical translator. Look at this, an example in English, from Ehrman's book:

godisnowhere

Does it say: God is now here.

Or: God is nowhere.

Sorting out these mysteries is the life Ehrman saw for himself since he was an uncertain teenager in Lawrence, Kan. He attended Trinity Episcopal on Vermont Street in Lawrence, but he and his family were casual in their faith. Lost in the middle of the pack in school, Ehrman felt an emptiness settle over him, something that lingered at nights after the lights were out, when the house was quiet.

One afternoon he went to a party at the house of a popular kid. It turned out to be a meeting of a Christian outreach youth group from a nearby college. In private talks, the charismatic young leader of the group told the 15-year-old Ehrman that the emptiness he felt inside was nothing less than his soul crying out for God. He quoted Scripture to prove it.

"Given my reverence for, but ignorance of, the Bible, it all sounded completely convincing," Ehrman writes.

One Saturday morning after having breakfast with the man, Ehrman went home, walked into his room and closed the door. He knelt by his bed and asked the Lord to come into his life.

He rose, and felt better, stronger. "It was your bona fide born-again experience."

The void in his heart was filled. The more he read the Bible, he says, the closer he felt to God.

His devotion soon engulfed him. "I told my friends, family, everyone about Christ," he remembers now. "The study of the Bible was a religious experience. The more you studied the Bible, the more spiritual you were. I memorized large parts of it. It was a spiritual exercise, like meditation."

He soon became a gung-ho Christian, a fundamentalist who believed the Bible contained no mistakes. He converted his family to his new faith. Schoolmates went off to the University of Kansas, but he enrolled in the Moody Bible Institute, an austere interdenominational institution in Chicago that forbade students to go to movies, play cards, dance, or have physical contact with the opposite sex.

It was spiritually thrilling.

For the next 12 years, he studied at Moody, at Wheaton College (another Christian institution in Illinois) and finally at Princeton Theological Seminary. He found he had a gift for languages. His specialty was the ancient texts that tried to explain what actually happened to Jesus Christ, and how the world's largest religion grew into being after his execution.

What he found there began to frighten him.

The Bible simply wasn't error-free. The mistakes grew exponentially as he traced translations through the centuries. There are some 5,700 ancient Greek manuscripts that are the basis of the modern versions of the New Testament, and scholars have uncovered more than 200,000 differences in those texts.

"Put it this way: There are more variances among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament," Ehrman summarizes.

Most of these are inconsequential errors in grammar or metaphor. But others are profound. The last 12 verses of the Gospel of Mark appear to have been added to the text years later -- and these are the only verses in that book that show Christ reappearing after his death.

Another critical passage is in 1 John, which explicitly sets out the Holy Trinity (the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit). It is a cornerstone of Christian theology, and this is the only place where it is spelled out in the entire Bible -- but it appears to have been added to the text centuries later, by an unknown scribe.

For a man who believed the Bible was the inspired Word of God, Ehrman sought the true originals to shore up his faith. The problem: There are no original manuscripts of the Gospels, of any of the New Testament.

He wrote a tortured paper at Princeton that sought to explain how an episode in Mark might be true, despite clear evidence to the contrary. A professor wrote in the margin:

"Maybe Mark just made a mistake."

As simple as it was, it struck him to the core.

"The evidence for the belief is that if you look closely at the Bible, at the resurrection, you'll find the evidence for it," he says. "For me, that was the seed of its own destruction. It wasn't there. It isn't there."

Doubt about the events in the life of Christ are hardly new. There was never clear agreement in the most ancient texts as to the meaning of Christ's death. But for many Christians, the virgin birth, the passion of Christ, the resurrection on the third day -- these simply have to be facts, or there is no basis for the religion.

"The fundamental truth claims of the biblical record were historical things that were believed to have happened, not 'once upon a time' in a fairy tale or somewhere outside of time and space, but at specific times and places that belonged to the total history of the human race and that could be located on a map," writes Jaroslav Pelikan, one of the field's most respected scholars. "If the history of the resurrection of Christ had not really happened, the message . . . according to the authority of the apostle Paul, had to be 'null and void.' "

Ehrman slowly came to a horrifying realization: There was no real historical record. It was, he felt, all incense and myth, told by illiterate men and not set down in writing for decades.

It is a difficult thing to chart the loss of faith.

Where does it go, this belief in things not seen?

Let's look at "In the Beauty of the Lilies." This is John Updike's novel of the fictional Rev. Clarence Arthur Wilmot, a Presbyterian minister, and his loss of faith. Wilmot, beset by doubt one afternoon in the rectory, "felt the last particles of his faith leave him. The sensation was distinct -- a visceral surrender, a set of dark sparkling bubbles escaping upward . . . there was no God, nor should there be."

For Ehrman, the dark sparkling bubbles cascaded out of him while teaching a class at Rutgers University on "The Problem of Suffering in Biblical Traditions." It was the mid-1980s, the Ethiopian famine was in full swing. Starving infants, mass death. Ehrman came to believe that not only was there no evidence of Jesus being divine, but neither was there a God paying attention.

"I just began to lose it," Ehrman says now, in a conversation that stretches from late afternoon into the evening. "It wasn't for lack of trying. But I just couldn't believe there was a God in charge of this mess . . . It was so emotionally charged. This whole business of 'the Bible is your life, and anyone who doesn't believe it is going to roast in hell.' "

He kept teaching, moving to Chapel Hill, kept hanging on to the shreds of belief, but the dark bubbles fled upward. He was a successful author, voted one of the most popular professors on campus, but he awoke one morning seven years ago and found the remnants of faith gone. No bubbles at all. He was soon to marry for the second time and his kids were grown. He stopped going to church.

"I would love for him to be there with me, and sometimes wish it was something we share," says Ehrman's wife, Sarah Beckwith, a professor of medieval literature at Duke University, and an Episcopalian. "But I respect the integrity of decisions he's made, even if I reject the logic by which he reached them."

"Bart was, like a lot of people who were converted to fundamental evangelicalism, converted to the certainty of it all, of having all the answers," says Dale Martin, Woolsey Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University, and a friend of three decades. "When he found out they were lying to him, he just didn't want anything to do with it.

"His wife and I go to Mass sometimes. He never comes with us anymore."

 

Historians don't consider the KJV to be historically as authentic or original as some other versions

Most modern versions like the NASB, NIV, ESV (the 2001 English Standard Version) are based on the Westcott-Hort Greek text, which there are differences of some 5000 words and many whole verses from the New Testament Greek text that the King James Bible is derived from.

The W-H text is based primarily on two manuscripts called Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. These two texts disagree significantly with each other, let alone with the vast majority of all other texts, in over 3000 places in the gospels alone, and over 1000 times in the rest of the New Testament. Yet they form the textual basis of most modern bible versions.

Sinaiticus and Vaticanus were not found until after the KJV was already written, so they are older and more original. They are considered to be examples showing just how much a bible can change over time.

The Masocretic texts that the modern bible is based on are obviously historically inferior to Sinaticus and Vatinicus which are far older.


Here are 5, out of hundreds, of modern interpretations of scripture that can objectively be proven false-

1. The story of the woman who was to be stoned but was saved by Jesus, never happened and was not originally in the bible

2. The Trinity did not exist in the original texts

3. Nazareth didn't exist at the time of Jesus- Jesus the Nazarene means Jesus the Essene, not Jesus of Nazareth

4. Mary Magdalene being a prostitute rather than the head disciple of Jesus

5. The Resurrection as people today understand it was not in the oldest texts

If you've played the "telephone game" as a kid where you whisper a phrase into someone's ear who then whispers it to the next kid and so on down a whole line up of kids. The phrase ends up something unrecognizable to the original.

Now add that with whole texts that are supposed to come together as a complete story, different languages being translated, and different people doing different parts.

I don't know that we can examine each change individually, but if you think about what the odds are....the odds are there are significant changes

The bible of today is still a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, and obscure teachings and often originally oral traditions

 

 

Edited January 18, 2013 by Immortal4life

[thelerner]

Yawnn, hardly startling. My kids are studying the Scopes trial of 1925. Even then it was getting to be old. Finding holes and insulting other people's religion is so easy that I consider Fundamentalists to have more moral high ground then the debunkers because there's is a harder path.

 

You can throw stones at any religion, but in the end you're just a stone thrower. The internet doesn't even make debunking an intellectual pursuit, its too easy and there's too much egoistic pretension wrapped up in it. Its the secularists who come off as more bigoted then fundamentalists. Get too intellectual and you suck the mystery and fun out of life. Let some things be, keep some things sacred. In the end the person with the most sacred things wins.

 

To me life is a game of live and let live. You got your beliefs, I got mine. Act nicely and I got no problem with you. Matter of fact rubbing mud on the belly, dancing around a camp fire, and chanting at the moon is a hell of a lot of fun. Good camaraderie too. But so is lighting candles, breaking bread, saying prayers.

[Mokona]

I'm hoping to find God through meditation and chi kung. If my crown chakra doesn't do it before I awaken Kundalini, hopefully it will after. I have heard religion can help open to God and the divine, but I prefer religious feelings in my chi kung.

[Aetherous]

[innerspace_cadet]

Yawnn, hardly startling. My kids are studying the Scopes trial of 1925. Even then it was getting to be old. Finding holes and insulting other people's religion is so easy that I consider Fundamentalists to have more moral high ground then the debunkers because there's is a harder path.

 

You can throw stones at any religion, but in the end you're just a stone thrower. The internet doesn't even make debunking an intellectual pursuit, its too easy and there's too much egoistic pretension wrapped up in it. Its the secularists who come off as more bigoted then fundamentalists. Get too intellectual and you suck the mystery and fun out of life. Let some things be, keep some things sacred. In the end the person with the most sacred things wins.

 

To me life is a game of live and let live. You got your beliefs, I got mine. Act nicely and I got no problem with you. Matter of fact rubbing mud on the belly, dancing around a camp fire, and chanting at the moon is a hell of a lot of fun. Good camaraderie too. But so is lighting candles, breaking bread, saying prayers.

 

Bullshit. It's the fundamentalists who are throwing stones at the theory of evolution and at women's contraception. It is they who are throwing stones at Muslim immigrants, at people who don't worship the "One True God." And please define "sacred" for me. Because according to your logic, I need to have "the most sacred things" to "win" at the end of life. You sound like a Baby Boomer, because you think I need things to "win" something at the end of life. (Except in your case it isn't "toys" but sacred things.) I agree with your contention that living and let living is a good way to go, but that has its limits. If I sincerely believed that God wanted me to kill infidels and I had in my possession a nuclear weapon, somebody out there in the world would be perfectly justified in debunking my beliefs. If I believed that the earth was flat, do you think I would pass high school physics? I'm sorry but when I see b.s. I call it what it is.

[Mandrake]

Misquoting Jesus

 

 

3. Nazareth didn't exist at the time of Jesus- Jesus the Nazarene means Jesus the Essene, not Jesus of Nazareth

 

4. Mary Magdalene being a prostitute rather than the head disciple of Jesus

 

 

 

I4L,

I would be interested in material about these two. Do you have any good resources on them?

 

 

M

[Vmarco]

Edited January 17, 2012 by Vmarco

[Aaron]

[Aetherous]

Aaron,

 

I'm actually quite fascinated with the earliest gnostic sects.

 

How come?

[Vmarco]

Edited January 17, 2012 by Vmarco

[paulno]

Can anyone truly say ANY of the Sacred Texts of the major religions (and I'd say most of the minor ones) are 100% accurate from the first day they were originally penned?

 

You know I really dig this forum even though I really don't post that much. There's incredible wisdom and some genuinely great folks hanging here. But, something I've learned from coming here is Fundamentalist Christians do not have the market cornered on hatred and bigotry. Call it being naive. <shrugs>

[Jetsun]

Can anyone truly say ANY of the Sacred Texts of the major religions (and I'd say most of the minor ones) are 100% accurate from the first day they were originally penned?

 

You know I really dig this forum even though I really don't post that much. There's incredible wisdom and some genuinely great folks hanging here. But, something I've learned from coming here is Fundamentalist Christians do not have the market cornered on hatred and bigotry. Call it being naive. <shrugs>

 

None of them are completely accurate, there are always issues with translation plus to really understand them you would need to study the consciousness and mind set of the people they are aimed at and the time in which they are written. It's a mistake to assume the people of another culture thousands of years ago even thought like us let alone wrote in the same way.

Plus many of the scriptures especially ones like Buddhist sutas are usually forms of advice for one particular person in their own unique situation, so to assume the advice given to someone in a different time and place is best for your own unique circumstances is just foolishness, yet many people take any word spoken by their prophet as law.

[Mokona]

I haven't seen anything negetive yet. I have seen alot of research and time put togther in a readable fashion for the general reader of the forum.

 

Vmarco,

 

Informative, but crazy. This really changes what i've heard in everday conversation with a Christian friend of mine, why do you think, with this sort of information being available, the Christian church doesn't simply change their teachings to reflect it?

[Vmarco]

I haven't seen anything negetive yet. I have seen alot of research and time put togther in a readable fashion for the general reader of the forum.

 

Vmarco,

 

Informative, but crazy. This really changes what i've heard in everday conversation with a Christian friend of mine, why do you think, with this sort of information being available, the Christian church doesn't simply change their teachings to reflect it?

 

Most men would kill the truth if truth would kill their religion. --Lemuel K. Washburn

 

Imagine you spend your life identified with sometime, say Economics, and all of a sudden Economics becomes obsolete (check out minute 11:00 - 17:43 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCWNgSa7GvA ).

 

People don't want to know what they thought was meaningful may be meaningless.

 

For the most part, my two posts above are indesputable.

 

V

[Aetherous]

For the most part, my two posts above are indesputable.

 

I'd be more likely to believe you if you could spell the word, indisputable.

 

Not saying I would...it would just increase your chances of appearing intelligent.

 

[Immortal4life]

I4L,

I would be interested in material about these two. Do you have any good resources on them?

 

 

M

 

Here is an article which talks a little bit about the real meaning of the title Jesus the Nazarene-

http://jesusneverexisted.com/nazareth.html

 

Also look up the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. In it she is one of Jesus' top disciples, it says he favoured her more than all the other disciples and would often kiss her on her......and then the text cuts off and the rest is missing. Many people have interpreted this to most likely be referring to lips. It was the Catholic church and their claims of a lineage going to Peter, and their claims that Peter was the true lineage holder under Jesus, who would slander Mary Magdalene as a prostitute.

Edited January 19, 2012 by Immortal4life

[doc benway]

Very nice posts Vmarco.

A nice and accessible source of some of this info is the movie "The God Who Wasn't There."

You go into considerably more detail.

Thanks for that.

[paulno]

Most men would kill the truth if truth would kill their religion. --Lemuel K. Washburn

 

Imagine you spend your life identified with sometime, say Economics, and all of a sudden Economics becomes obsolete (check out minute 11:00 - 17:43 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCWNgSa7GvA ).

 

People don't want to know what they thought was meaningful may be meaningless.

 

For the most part, my two posts above are indesputable.

 

V

 

Indisputable? No, they are very disputable. Also, I'm not a Christian.

[Vmarco]

[Vmarco]

Edited January 20, 2012 by Vmarco

[paulno]

[Vmarco]

So, all Christians have blood on their hands due to conflicts in the past involving governments spreading their ideology and politics across the world? Men and women who are in places like Africa and Central America, giving up everyday American comfort you can imagine to help the needy, are nothing but common felons?

 

Okay, so let's forget about Josephus and Tacitus and Paul who talked to close confidantes first hand. Forget all of that. There's recorded history involving 11 of the 12 Apostles being murdered. So, 11 uneducated men came together and made up a Messiah based on ancient archetypes borrowed from other religions/cultures? Then decided to go on suicidal missions to spread this made up dogma in areas of the world that they knew were hostile? Its totally illogical.

 

OK,...I'll play along,...where are these 11 historical documents discussing the murder of apostles?

 

Allow me to repeat,...Considering a set of all knowledge for that period, not a single Jewish, Roman, or Greek historian, scribe, or writer mentions before 95 CE, the Jesus Christ depicted in the gospels. There are no artifacts, no works of carpentry, and no physical evidence that a Jesus Christ ever existed. For such a famous person, professed to have been known far and wide, it is notable that there is not a single word of him from Pliny the Elder, Seneca, Gaius Petronius, the Syrian Mara, Philo Judaeus, Pausanias (who traveled throughout Syria), Theon of Smyrna, Thallus of Samaria, Silius (Consul of Asia Minor), or the Syrian-born Lucianus.

 

In addition to the influences of Eastern and the Greco-Egyptian Sarapic philosophies, neo-Christianity integrated other cults into its new myth as well, just as Romans meshed the beliefs of those they subjugated. The Christmas story, for instance, is closely related to Mithraism, which Plutarch said was practiced in Asia Minor during the first century BCE. Mithras, who was also called Chrestos, was born of a virgin in a cave at the winter solstice, and his birth was celebrated during the festival of Dies Natalis Solis Invictos. The tradition of giving Christmas gifts appears to have been partially adapted from the Pasque Epiphany, the goddess cult of Bari. On the other hand, Easter and the resurrection story are another neo-Christian modification, in this case an appropriation of the spring Eostar celebration of the death of Attis, who, three days following Black Friday, was resurrected. Attis, the savior, was often represented with a shepherds staff. One traditional theme of the Attis cult is said to have been as our Lord was saved, so we shall be saved. Salvation is, ironically, a belief that leads to disempowerment because it places the idea of redemption outside the self.

 

The cult of Attis, whose priests were called Gallaens, strongly influenced the invention of modern Christianity. In fact, the Vatican, named for mons vaticanus or Vatican Hill, which antedates Christianity, was the place of worship of Cybele, and her fertility rites with her youthful lover Attis were performed on Vatican Hill. In other words, Vatican City sits atop the most sacred place of the Phrygian religion.

 

Todays Christianity, the Christianity founded in the second century CE, did not arise from the teachings of an historic Jesus/Yeshua. In fact, many contemporary scholars suggest that the majority of the words attributed to Jesus/Yeshua in the gospels could not possibly have been said by him, even if he did exist. Neo-Christianity was formed through the schemes of Roman aristocrats, along with the ante-Nicene and latter Church fathers, who rejected gnowledge, Gnothi Seauton, that is, to gnow thyself. Instead, they opted for a conditional cerebral process dependent upon, and serving, the human ego, that is, to know thyself. The salvation cults that make up neo-Christianity, whose hideous cross became their symbol in the third century CE, was designed to perpetuate control of the masses. Christianity is a religion that separates us from our direct experience with the source of who we are. Christianity is a religion contrary to gnosis and understanding through sapience, in that it neither contains, nor points to authentic love, through which our true mystery is understood.

 

Most of todays Christians believe that their religion is one of love. Nevertheless, their scripture says that Jesus came with a sword to bring dissension, as in Matthew 10:34 and Luke 14:26. Their scripture says, Abandon your family (Matthew 19:24; Luke 14:26). Their Jesus not only promotes slavery, but also instructs how slaves should be punished, as in Luke 12:4748. In fact, the idea that their God is love was not introduced until the late second century apology of 1 John, specifically 4:8 and 4:16. However, neo-Christians do aspire to agape love, a love described in the first letter to the Corinthians. For example, Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things (1 Cor. 13:7). However, the love depicted in that description is not authentic love. Bearing, believing, hoping and enduring are not love. Those are conditions based on object-ive indoctrination, not on unconditional love. In other words, Christendoms great chapter on love is merely a discourse on past limitations and future hopes, a love that strives to sustain conditions of conflict, separation, and limitation. Conditional love is born of belief, and as such, it can only be experienced through the conditions of those beliefs. If we ponder that, it is rather amusing. Their god, as other gods, is clearly a conditional god.

 

Yes, Christianity was spread through violence and now propagates its faith through the fortune raised from that violence. In the United States that is a serious felony, and their propagators are nothing less than accessory felons.

 

What has kept neo-Christians ignorant of their complicity during two millennia of treachery and crimes against humanity and nature? What is the expected value that they hope to realize by the acceptance of this unquestioning belief through faith in their scripture? Is it because of their fear of death? Is it because of hope and the anticipation of heaven? Perhaps their fear and insecurity is perceived to be reduced through the hope that the meek will inherit the earth. Maybe their fear of not being good enough is tranquilized by the hope of salvation. The truth is that todays Christianity offers no wisdom about reality or how to trigger direct, authentic experiences with the source of who we are. Christianity only desires to feed and sustain faith in its beliefs, a faith that steps between both individual and collective, and their direct experience, so that what is false continues to perpetuate itself.

 

No truly compassionate person is tolerent of the Christian meme.

http://www.christianitymeme.org/

 

"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." Thomas Jefferson

Edited January 20, 2012 by Vmarco

[doc benway]

[Apech]

Vmarco,

 

What is this word Krst? Is it Ancient Egyptian ... all I can find is 'khr' which means tomb and also the word for anoint with oil is 'gs'.

 

Your ideas are interesting but I like to look for the origins of anything Egyptian.

 

Late representations of Serapis do look very Christ-like BTW.

 

Thanks

 

A.

[paulno]