your'e too kind! thanks! thinking about taking some seminary courses, actually. THINKING...haven't committed to anything in regard to that, yet.
She was an amazing woman. Just the sweetest person you could imagine. She never learned how to drive a car. I remember riding to Foley's Downtown with her on the bus, as a kid, the Blacks sitting in the back. She remembered the 1900 storm, which floated their woodframe house in the Heights off it's blocks and down the street. She said she sat on the bed, the water swirling around on the floor, and the wind just howling. My grandmother was like a walking piece of history. Keep D&D Civil.
You were fortunate. I love history and I really like to hear from that generation. I miss my own grandparents in that respect. Thanks for sharing that about her.
Well I guess I can't blame you for not playing along with my little tangent, but I thought it could be fun. Incidentally, God is truth but is interpretation? Would you submit that all interpretations of God are truth? If not, at what line do you draw your boundary? This is not at all to be challenging, by the way, and I am not saying there is no truth. I simply got on the interpretion bent and now I am silly with blinders. I also think you run into trouble when you say that the Church got Christ wrong because their actions have dictated your beliefs as well. Also, I should agree with you but also say that the Church did not become political but by its inception was political. You may not like it but that is why it won and our current version of the Bible won against the literally hundreds of other Christianities that were battling (themselves, pagans, and Jews) to win over a region (and eventually world).
rimbaud - it seems to me the early church got it right. they lived to serve others and each other. read the last verses of Acts 2. that's "getting it right," in my mind. the inception of that early church was hardly political. or at least not significantly political. when the church becomes more concerned with serving itself than the world, then i think it's lost its way. that it's lost the central message of Christ. all of this is interpretation. there is no plain reading of the Bible, to be sure. i look at a passage today and i realize there's an entirely new or different meaning from the same verse than what i considered when i previously read it. Jewish scholars used to say that scripture was like a 70-sided jewel, that refracted light differently by just turning it a bit. I find that to be true. certainly church has been influential on my view of God. but it hasn't dictated it. because of my story, i grew up engaging God long before there I had any real strong concepts of religion or doctrine. i'm very thankful for that. God exists outside of my interpretations. It's entirely possible I'm wrong in my interpretations. I certainly feel like I've been wrong about Him before. But, again, for me this is experential. It's not merely shaking the dust off a book and studying something. As I encounter truth in the world, I see it as God's.
Peter's apocolypse Nicodemus The gospel of Mary The Gospel of Thomas All left out of the bible for political reasons. DD
im familiar with all of those except nicodemus. there is a story about a man named nicodemus in the Gospel of John. he was a Jewish teacher who sought Jesus out at night so he could ask him questions in secret. Jesus explains to him the concept of being born again. can you point me to a link or something that explains what you're talking about? political reasons? how familiar are you with the decision making process of the council of nicea, da da??? by the way... the council of nicea came about in the 4th century. i'm not calling that the early church. Acts is dated to about 75 AD. have you read these books you're talking about?? does the story change significantly. i've read the Gospel of Thomas on tons of occassions. have you read it?
Sorry, Max, I wasn't clear and I guess we were talking past each other a little. I used a capital "C" for Church because I was referring to the founding of the Catholic Church. Without it nobody would be Christian today (most likely). That is what I was talking about being political from inception. As for the "early church" that is really impossible to discuss outside of the writings in the Bible because there are no records of any kind of organized practice until roughly 265 or so. Even in the mid third century, though, there were hundreds of different Christian sects that believed vastly different things. Obviously there wasn't any kind of singular understanding of who, what, if, when Christ was and the sects were copnstantly denouncing each other (as Paul does in his writings much earlier). Some of the beliefs about Christ were downright crazy.
The Gospel of Nicodemus Yes, I have read it, and read the Thomas and the entire bible etc. And, I am familiar with the Nicean council in the 4th century and the earlier banning of the Gnostic Christian texts and being told to destroy them and that they were denounced as heretics. (The Majority rules you know). This is part of the hypocrisy of the Christian faith...why not let people read all of the accounts of Jesus and decide for themselves? For instance, the Gospel of Mary Magdaline shows that she was closer to Jesus than any of the disciples, but in a man's world (just like the Muslims of today) it didn't fit. Ancient tribal politics have shaped all the current religions and bastardized them into a form that is far removed from actual events that it makes it difficult, dang near impossible, to discern the true meaning. When one reads these texts it is impossible to completely get the meaning because our thoughts are shaped by our current realities, whereas the books of the Bible, the Koran, the Torah etc, are all shaped by the realities of their time period, thus limiting their usefulness today. IMHO, of course. DD
i'm reading a book right now called Desire of the Everlasting Hills. it's primarily about the impact of Christ on history with particular emphasis on the early church. i'll let you know what i learn. there are certainly allusions to creeds in the writings of Paul. creeds that pre-exist the epistles. we have Peter's writings...who was obviously close to Jesus. we have "secular" writings between roman governors discussing these new believers and how best to deal with them. as i said, i'll let you know if i learn something new from this book, assuming my kids will ever let me finish it! you're right about the Church. thank God for the Irish!
Other books left out of the Bible - many for political reasons The book of Adam and Eve Book of Jubilees Book of Enoch Infancy Gospel of Thomas - Did Jesus push a child off a roof? Gospel of James The Gnostic scriptures of Nag Hamadi Gospel of Mary Gospel of Nicodemus The Apocolypse of Peter The 2nd Apocoloypse of Peter DD
We have these to read today. Do you get the idea from these that it's all different??? That Jesus wasn't the Christ??? Hmmm...I agree with you ENTIRELY ENTIRELY ENTIRELY regarding context. I think so much of the beauty of the story of Christ is missed by those that never seek to understand the contexts he lived in; particularly the Hebrew context with all of its metaphors and understandings of God. But a story with a pointful meaning is timeless. Aesop's fables are no less interesting today than they were then. The Bible from cover to cover tells the story of a Creator who redeems...a Creator who loves mankind. I don't see that as useless today. I read the Sermon on the Mount and those truths are no less impactful today than they were then. Most of the NT was written very close to the events it describes. In addition, we have loads of copies that are 99% identical. Far more than any other ancient document. For a long time people thought that the stuff pre-shadowing the Christ in Isaiah must have been written after the fact..it must have been added in by Christians later. But, oops...we discover the dead sea scrolls and find that well before his birth, Essne Jews were reading those very texts. That the Book of Isaiah reads identical to the Bible you would find in the pews of a church today. The Bible isn't the end of the story. It points to a God who is authoritative. The text itself isn't magic.
these aren't all political reasons. some were written nearly 300 years after Christ's death and resurrection. others weren't widely circulated and used by the churches. the idea was for the church to have some universality. to be a shared body. and fine...read those. i've read those. they do not subtract from my idea of who Christ was and is. there is this quest for the magic bullet to prove a 2000 year old faith "wrong." if it's coming, it isn't coming from those books. at least not as far as i can see.
I used to argue about the Bible with Christians... I was a skeptic. I found out that you can't be open to the Bible if you are not open to the God of the Bible. The Bible doesn't reveal God unless God reveals the Bible. That paradox stumped me for 26 yrs. If you read it with the right heart you will find more than you expect- not just a message but a Person.
I don't think it proves anything is right or wrong, it is just information to allow people to make an informed decision or choice in the matter. I think Christ was a great man, who started a peaceful religion. However, no one was around to write Adam and Eve's story, yet it is in the Bible, or Noah's story etc, all of those can be traced back to Summarian/Babylonian/Egyptian religious mythos. I am saying that politics of the 4th century shaped the modern day Bible based upon the current living conditions of that time. And that the Majority - meaning the Orthodox - made the rules, and denounced the rest as Heretical. And, it seems strange to me that people take something so religously today, when it was hardly one concerted text back in Jesus time or right after. DD
I think the bible is a valuable morality lesson, and is an interesting - but skewed - history of Jesus and the mythos that came before him. DD
You have a much higher view of the Bible than I did before I encountered Jesus Christ. I am guilty of being biased by Christ. And I agree with the value of Biblical morals. I have lost focus as far as the history of Jesus and the mythos holds little meaning to my own personal experience. I can only speak like the blind man in the Bible who Jesus healed. The Pharisees asked him to explain what this Jesus fellow was up to- I can only say what he said- I was blind, now I see. I can identify with your view of the Bible, but I don't know how to identify my life with Christ to you. I can only report to you that my relationship with Christ has changed the Bible for me. Like Paul the apostle once said, " I only wish others were as I am, except for being in chains"
as to the last paragraph in your post...it was composed right after Jesus' time the OT was certainly intact. Cultural context certainly shaped the composition of the Bible. I agree. So read it all. And read the stuff left out. And you're still left with the assertion that Jesus Christ was crucified and resurrected. That he healed people. That he loved without condition. That he asserted that he was God. That he asserted that there was a way of life that led to the Kingdom of God, both in the present and the ever-after. I get this from Gospel of Matthew, Gospel of Thomas...and what I've skimmed so far in Nicodemus (thanks for the link!!!). I am not a literalist with the Genesis story, though I'm not completely closed to the idea that's exactly how it went down. I'm open to the idea it's akin to a parable. Either way, there is a Creator...there is a broken relationship between us and that Creator...and God rescues us from the effects of that broken relationship. That's what I get. I see Christianity as not a set of rules but rather a way of being. It's very different from other religions in that respect, in my view...to the point of not being what I would call a religion. God's story isn't over. Our story with him isn't over. We're living out the rest of the story. You might wanna write it down as we go!
