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Comment on Not to get all religiony but why in the old testament God was all fire and brimstone and fatal consequences? But the new testament God is all about forgiveness and such??

PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

If you want an honest answer, only my own theory for it but supported by actually having read and learned academically about small chunks of the bible which I think is more than a lot of people who have opinions on this topic, your answer is:

The people who wrote the old testament lived in a world that was almost unfathomably dangerous and difficult compared to today’s first world. Death, disease, starvation, natural disasters, the collapse of whole towns and settlements, unexplained daily suffering for which there is not even an explanation let alone a cure, were constantly present. If you’re in that place, and you believe there’s a God who’s in charge of it all, there is absolutely no conclusion to come to other than he’s a real son of a bitch.
I definitely believe that Jesus had some kind of genuine religious inspiration, that a lot of what he was teaching was for-real insight about life. The stuff about forgiving your enemies, living for good works through action and how it really doesn’t matter what you say or what team you’re on, trying to build a better life by caring about people around you, taking care of the sick and injured, even if they are beggars or prostitutes or foreigners or otherwise “bad” people in your mind simply because of their circumstances, seems pretty spot on to me. It was 100% at odds with the religion of the day, pretty much as much as it is with modern religion. What Jesus actually said does obviously have “spiritual” and supernatural elements also, but it is also focused to a huge extent on what you as an individual can do, and a sort of alignment towards the greater good and a calling for humanity, as opposed to this wild half-Pagan mythology about a capricious and bad-tempered God who might kill you at any instant.

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JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I like this reasoning a lot, however:

#2. In terms of there being a real-life Y’shua, AFAIK it’s hard to know if such a person ever really existed in the first place, or if they were in fact more of an amalgamated ‘King Arthur’ / ‘Robin Hood’ type, very much inspired by earlier legends & mythology, and greatly elaborated upon in later years, via oral traditions, before finally being documented hither & tither by various writers scattered around the region.

AFAIK there is no archeological evidence whatsoever for that exact person’s existence, and no contemporaneous writing from the time, describing his life.

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- PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  
  In a 2011 review of the state of modern scholarship, Bart D. Ehrman wrote, “He certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees."[13] Richard A. Burridge states: “There are those who argue that Jesus is a figment of the Church’s imagination, that there never was a Jesus at all. I have to say that I do not know any respectable critical scholar who says that any more."[14] Robert M. Price does not believe that Jesus existed but agrees that this perspective runs against the views of the majority of scholars.[15] James D. G. Dunn calls the theories of Jesus’s non-existence “a thoroughly dead thesis”.[16] Michael Grant (a classicist), “In recent years, ’no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non historicity of Jesus’ or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary."[17] Robert E. Van Voorst states that biblical scholars and classical historians regard theories of non-existence of Jesus as effectively refuted.[18] Writing on The Daily Beast, Candida Moss and Joel Baden state that, “there is nigh universal consensus among biblical scholars – the authentic ones, at least – that Jesus was, in fact, a real guy."[19]
  
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  - JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
    Which is fine as far as it goes, yet does very little if anything to address the body of the above concerns.
    
    While “Jesus” likely had something with an actual person who once lived, nailing down the details of his life and history seems highly problematic from a scholarly & historical POV, and as for embellishment, amalgamation and distortion… all such things are highly possible, and even highly likely, AFAIK.
    
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  - JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
    Whoops; apologies.
    I borked up my last reply-comment, and so deleted that, and re-created from scratch.
    
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  - JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    [deleted]
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    PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
    
    Which is fine as far as it goes, yet does very little if anything to address the body of the above concerns.
    
    What? Of course it does. A near-unanimous consensus by experts in the field is worth more than whatever you are bringing up in your Lemmy comment.
    
    I mean, it would be possible to lay out logic so compelling that even if experts in the field felt one particular way about it you could make a case otherwise, but weird strawmen like wanting archaeological evidence of Jesus’s specific skeleton or something is not that.
    
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