Saturday 31 August 2024

The Word Of God You Say?

More than eight hundred times the Bible uses the phrase: 'The LORD says …' so we are on pretty safe ground to assume that the believers consider the book to be the word of God but a quick look at the timeline shows that it is more the word of whoever decided it was the word of God.
The early Christians were actually a offshoot of the Jewish faith but as their movement gained followers, they thought that they could 'break away' and form their own separate religion and began making changes from the Jewish text to differentiate themselves and began circulating stories about Jesus, many of which were borrowed from other religions at the time by enthusiastic followers but nothing was written down until around 150ad when Marcion of Sinope puts in an appearance.
He set about gathering together all the stories going around about Jesus and his gang and chose the stories he liked and rejected or edited the ones which he never and put them all together to create the first Bible, or Testament.
By the 2nd Century, the Christian Church was beginning to get itself in order and wasn't keen on all the stories Marcion chose which were mostly of a 'Feel God's wrath' type so decided to keep most of them but create a 'New Testament' which showed their Gods more cuddly side and set about picking which stories to include in its new edition.
The Bishop of Antioch, Serapion, was pivotal in choosing what went into the New Testament and after weeding out texts that did not align with his idea of the newfound concepts of God, they settled on four anonymous texts to which were assigned the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and edited them to fit their new peaceful and loving God.
By the 3rd Century, Clement of Alexandria thought their Holy book was looking a bit thin so added a few more Gospels and Tertullian and Origen chipped in a few more .
By the 4th Century, the New Testament was coming together but there was disagreements over whether the Book of Revelations should be included with its prophesy of Apocalypse and all manner of things the bishop of Alexandria, Dionysus, called 'barbarous'  but was finally included by the synods of Hippo and Carthage at the end of the Century where it was decided that this with its 27 Books was now the final edit and nobody may add or take away from it.
They also threw in the decision that anyone owning anything else was 'heretical' and would be arrested but some versions still omitted some stories and put in their own until 692ad when the Holy Sees of Constantinople and Antioch told them to fall into line and by the way OUR version is the only one you can use.
In the 16th century, Martin Luther  tried to get some chapters removed as they had 'nothing of the nature of the Gospel about them' but the Catholic Church at the The Ecumenical Council of Trent in 1546 stamped all over the idea saying the 27 books in the New testament were going to stay and anyone who doesn't like it could always be excommunicated.
Not bad then for a book which started out as a collection of made up stories about other Gods and other deities with their own Christian God copied and pasted in as a replacement and then heavily edited to show him in the best possible light but no so much the Word of God, more the Word of whoever had editing privileges that particular day.

3 comments:

Not really a blog said...

duh, you just figured this out?

Falling on a bruise said...

Nope, been saying and posting about how religion is a con played on the gullible since i can remember

Not really a blog said...

just the latest version of the ancient Mesopotamian myth