Reply #29: In all seriousness (long post warning)

[cgrindley]

Only a very narrow stream of Christianity actually believes that the OT and the NT represent either the word of God or the actual history and sayings of Jesus. The world's one billion Catholics, for example, and although the laity might not understand or fully appreciate the situation, see the philosophies of the Church Fathers and Doctors as being valid expressions of their religion, and fully accede to the concept that the Bible is a human document.

The OT--in particular the Pentateuch, those first five books that used to be attributed to a Mosaic authorship--were the very human works of a at least four groups of competing philosophical schools separated by tremendous antipathy and, for that matter, geography. The JEDP authorial schools--split into what we'd call Southern and Northern Israel, divided into sources before and after the sack of Northern and, eventually, Southern Israel... pre to post exilic... it's all very complex and none of it can be trusted as being anything other than the word of one group of priests attempting to circumvent the political power of another group... nothing more than the defenders of David's reign taking on all comers. This Documentary Hypothesis is NOT a fringe belief, and its application to the study of the OT is endorsed by this Pope and the previous ones. It's not even a little controversial.

The text, for what it matters, wasn't even set until some semi-mythical council of Jemnia in the early years of the second century CE.

Take a look at this:



If the chart is confusing, good. It should be. The OT is a complex document, pretty much randomly pieced together out of a dizzying number of competing and mutually antagonistic traditions. EG is Job really just a descendant of the the Ugaritic epic of keret? is the song of songs really just a half assed collection of Persian love poems written from the context of an entirely different religion? what impact did the antecedents of manichaeism have on the refashioning of the Satan figure? does the term Elohim point to a distant, polytheistic past for Judaism? and so on. It's a fucked up situation and only an utter idiot would claim the types of authorship that utter idiots routinely claim.

I recommend Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible and Friedman's The Bible with Sources Revealed. Both are awesome books.

I teach the Bible. I used to do so at a world famous Divinity School. For all my silly blustering against religion, I actually know it pretty well. I'm a practicing high church Episcopalian (but only from a cultural perspective as I really am an atheist). I just dislike people who believe that it's really true as opposed to being periodically and metaphorically true. The stories are awesome, archetypal, true in the way that Jack and the Beanstalk is true. And the text has a fascinating history.

The NT presents the theological residue of a confrontation between several different schools of thought on the teachings of Jesus. Personally, I think that the kernel of truth is probably found in the Babylonian Talmud, that Christ lived about 100 years before his usual dates, raised a bit of a ruckus and was put to death for it. His legacy is that his teachings spread in the form of codified kerygma, collections of aphorisms, some stories (mostly made up) about his death, and some increasingly silly "signs" of his divinity. His followers split into antagonistic camps--the Thomas crowd who saw Christ as a sort of wise/fool Rabbi... the John crowd who saw Christ as part of God... the Markan author who didn't really know what he thought but suspected that Christ was the Messiah and so on... by the second century, there were dozens and dozens and dozens of texts floating around... lately, some of these have received some press.... the gospel of Judas, the gospel of Thomas... and so on. Most of these fringe texts were too much influenced by more eastern philosophies and so were quickly discarded by the fourth century AD (in my opinion, other than that first temptation in the wilderness, every single passage referring to Satan should have been cut as being clearly indicative of manichaeist textual pollution). But for Christ's sake... people were still seriously debating Arianism in the sixth century.

It's not like Christianity actually makes any logical sense even in its own intellectual confines.

A truly systematic theology is an impossibility. Theodicy is an insolvable mess. Eschatology is an absurd hodge podge of nonsense--only a crackhead would take Daniel seriously, let alone Revelations.

We know enough about the OT and NT to dissect them pretty well. Any religion that actually thinks that Leviticus 18:22 represents the word of God as dictated to Moses and not the ramblings of some Priest attempting to grab as much power as he could, is an idiot. The Pope, the Anglican Bishops, the Lutherans... all educated MDiv holding priests know this shit as the fact that it is.

It just makes me so frustrated.

There is a lot to like in the study of religion. It just sucks ass when people start to live their lives by it. Jesus, it's like living your life based on the teachings of Yossarian.