What bible?

How can anyone today claim to be a Christian with the "bible" in such a fragmented state?I'm sure there are some who have found lost books and have a more complete view of what many claim to practice, but this is a minority hardly worth mentioning, and who knows what books were lost forever.From what I've read of the "lost" books I've found, true Christianity is a lot more mystical than modern Christians like to believe. It is remeniscent of Hinduism and other Eastern religions, supporting the idea that there is really only One religion, interpreted differently by different cultures. From this perspective its easy to see why the priests/dictators of the day felt the need to remove entire books from the bible. After all Christianity is supposed to be the one and only way. Also, these books promote the idea self-empowerment, that Jesus was not THE Christ, but A Christ, and that he was not born so, but became so, and that We can too if We so choose. Detrimental to regime that wants you to believe that you need them as a medium to God, when really God is inside us all, for "Ye are Gods" and "These wonders that I (Jesus) have done, you may also do, and more."

 

When your brought up christian and your whole social environment is based on christian values anyone can believe any manner of nonsense and fear based belief regardless of obvious evidence.

 

This is a great point and I've not seen many Christians brave enough to address it with an open mind.

 

Of course we are missing some books, like Paul's other letter to Corinth (there are apparently upwards of 6)...


This is a big topic, and I do not have much time, but I just want to address the issue of dating these texts. Many, likely the majority, were written long after what some conservative Protestants (mostly who I've seen) refer to as the Apostolic Period or the New Testament Period to describe the time between roughly AD 30 to AD 100. I say Protestant because through Apostolic Succession the Catholic and Orthodox Churches have sustained the Apostolic Authority until this very day.

Texts are generally mentioned by either Irenaus (2nd Century) or Jerome (4th Century), well after the dates of authorship for Mark, say around the mid-60s (no mention of the Temple Destruction). A compelling argument is that Luke-Acts and Marcion were contemporaries and that Luke-Acts postdates Marcion.

as you state, the theology differs significantly from orthodox canon, but if we see Christianity as a fulfillment of Old Testament promises and Law then there is an even greater disconnect (if there even exists one between the OT and NT now) between the Gnostics and Gospels as we have them (for example, Old Testamanet God is the demiurge, the Jews are often essentially evil for following demiurge, only some males have souls and do not even ask about women, the world is essentially evil contrary to what the Creation stories tell us about god's view of Creation).

I was never that interested in late early Christianity when I was in school, moreso in the earliest texts. Wouldn't it be great if we found the letter to Paul? I think that is a far more interesting proposition than Gnostics written in the 3rd Century.

 

we are trippy , we are free

 

Yes, so far it appears RambleON won't touch it. I brought it up in his "strengthen your faith in the bible thread" and was told it was not the place for debates and to open my own thread and he would discuss it. Valid point until he avoided this thread, but continued to debate with others in his thread.

 

Others have

 

If only I could find those others. The only answer I've gotten is "they were clarifying thier religion" , 'cause everyone knows the best way to clarify something is to hide large portions of it, and surely that's not an oxymoron.

 

If you read my post, that is definetly not my point.

To reiterate

 

You didn't really make one clear position, other than that you are more concerned with the earlier missing texts; and that this or that missing text could be pretty cool to have.

I swore I heard about more crazy and more early texts but I haven't had the will to research; to debate.

Was kind've hoping a more stirring post would come about.

Though I must admit, you seem to know the subject well

 

Sorry for the confusion; I'm not used to the Kindle's web navigation and missed your first post. I was referring to an answer from somebody I knew.

As to your post, I would rather go by earlier texts as well, but I would have to ask the question, are We sure these texts aren't copies of earlier writings? It seems logical that if an oligarchal priesthood did attempt to make these writings disappear, as a Rosicrucian or even a Hindu yogi might say, it would have been much easier to destroy the few originals than an untrackable number of copies.

 

Yeah, going back and reading my first post, is is a little rambly and incoherent. This is why I also do not have a Masters

I could probably succinctly sum up my three points.
1) The texts were written long after the Apostlic Period refers tot he time when the Apostles, or those who knew Jesus personally, were still alive. It is from this time that it is generally agreed upon even by secular scholars, out New Testament comes. The other Gospels to which you refer were, gernerally, written much later and would likely contain have very little historical merit, in terms of authentic sayings of Jesus (the historical merit of the current 4 gospels is another issue).

2) Reading back, I think I will recind my second point.

3) Lastly, I use the idea of radical different theologies as an argument against them. If we are willing to accept the supernatural, which is needed to accept the validity of the later Gospels, their theology is a sexist, exclusive, Greek mystery religion by which specialised knowledge wil allow you to become a purely spiritual being.
Again, if we accept the supernatural, and these two sets of theologies existes, the orthodox and the gnostic, wouldn't said deity preserve the authentic message?

If we do not accept the supernatural, then a bunch of people supressed a certain group of theologies and it is no real skin of your back. How come no one gets bent out of shape over the Upanishads changing the meaning of the Vedas?

 

I thought he was referring to my confused post from earlier. Did you see my last post?

 

From a man's viewpoint, what you say seems true.

But for those who believe God had a hand in it, if the Bible is as it says it is, the Word of God, then surely God would be able to direct what is in the Bible and what is not.

 

Sorry, i was refering to my original post when I said it was rambley.

 

Rambley? Wasn't he an English footballer?

 

I have to disagree on some of what you say. Some scholars think that some of the "other gospels" are contemporaneous with those that made it into the canon. For example, Q, which, of course, partially did make it into the canon in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke; the Gospel of the Nazerenes and the Gospel of the Ebionites, which were used by the Jerusalem church and are hardly products of Greek mystery religion; the Gospel of Peter, widely used in its day, with its talking cross, giant Jesus, and virulent anti-Semitism (I think we can understand why the Church left that out); but in particular, the Gospel of Thomas. Fragments of the Greek version seem to date from around 140 to 150 CE. Analysis of the language indicates that at least part of Thomas was composed between 75 and 100 CE.--the Jesus Seminar thinks 70s or 80s, The fact that it appeals to the authority of James the Just, head of the Jerusalem Church, soon eclipsed by Peter and Paul, convinces some scholars that the Gospel actually predates the Gospels of the canon. It has 47 parallels to Mark and 40 to Q, but 65 are unique to Thomas. Some doubt the stability of the text, and the possibility or likelihood of Gnostic contamination, but the gnosticism is primitive--not the ridiculously elaborate version you criticize. Few scholars believe that any of the texts, canonical or otherwise, enjoyed complete stability. Some of the sayings in Thomas are admittedly obtuse. The Jesus Seminar, which accepts it as a Fifth Gospel, thinks only 37 of the sayings contain possibly authentic words of Jesus, and of those, only 2 are not paralleled in the canon. Consider saying 28: "I took my stand in the midst of the world, and in the flesh I appeared to them. I found them all drunk, and I did not find any of them thirsty. My soul ached for the children of humanity, for they are blind in their hearts and do not see. For they came into the world empty, and they also seek to depart from the world empty. But meanwhile they are drunk. When they shake off their wine, then they will repent. " I've also have been influenced by saying 113, like Luke with a twist :"Rather, the Father's kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don't see it."

I'd also like to qualify the characterization of the gnostic materials as "sexist". The gospels of Thomas, Mary, and Philip portray women, particularly Mary Magdalene and Salome, as being part of Jesus' inner circle, much to the dismay of Peter and the male apostles. It is arguable that the Catholic version, with its all male apostolic hierarchy, is more sexist; and that the exclusion of women from ordination based on this supposed biblical tradition might be questionable.

 

You know what, thanks for that. Although I studied at a secular university under mainly secular professors--their treatment of the so-called gnostic texts (I guess non-canonical is a better taxon to use) was fairly sparse, often needing to be brought up briefly in nearly every course due to a lack of pre-requisites.

Rightly so, the extreme Gnosticism came much later than the first and second centuries and was based more on Greek philosophical thought than it was ancient Hebraic theology where I see orthodox and proto-orthodox Christianity coming from. This is my bias.

Re: The Jesus Seminar
As much as I accept the idea of "voting" on canon, Popes, etc I could argue from the stubborn Catholic perspective that this is Holy Spirit guided democracy rather than Jesus Seminar which is scholarly voting and based on the oft mentioned (from both sides of the Christianity argument) "opinions of men". While interesting, I do not take it to heart. From my understanding, two of the categories contradict one another: the one of multiple attestation (a saying found across the 4 or 5 gospels) or ones of uniqueness (a saying out of no where that simply appears to be authentic).

 

Yes, I have problems with the Jesus' Seminar's methodology--particularly the subjective "Sounds like Jesus" criterion. But, lacking a sense that Holy Spirit guided democracy is different from the "opinions of men" I take their contributions as one perspective on a multi-faceted question.

As for Thomas, some of it is strange, especially saying 114: "Simon Peter said to them: Let Mary go out from among us, for women are not worthy of the life. Jesus said: Look, I will lead her that I may make her male, in order that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who makes herself male will enter into the kingdom of heaven." Saying 22 says the Father's domain is open to those who "make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female". What the heh? So was Jesus into androgeny or mysogeny? Some say this is what you get when you translate Aramaic into Greek, then Greek into Coptic, and Coptic into English. But Stephen Patterson sees Thomas as reflecting the early stages of gnosticism, with its counter-cultural wisdom and emphasis on insight as our key to salvation in a cold, cruel world.

 

Well this has all served to prove once more that no organized religion has the full story or is devoid of at least a few wtf's. The beauty of not being a dogmatist is that I can see the different things that do or don't make sense within each religion. And if gnosticism was part of early Christianity, then all this only further proves what a confused religion it is. Of course, that can be explained by God not allowing these things to enter the "final copy", but then why did it take a thousand and a half of years, and why were they there in the first place? How could his words have been "misinterpreted" so drastically as to say completely different , even opposite things? It seems God should have the power to speak directly without talking backwards. And what of the things in today's Bible that don't make sense? If God directed it, or steered the way, why did he veer all over the place?