I mean I read a book (when I was a questioning Christian losing my faith) by a Jewish author giving a very harsh "review" of the New Testament as part of a biography of Paul Saying that as a work of literature it was obvious that it was the garbage testament
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Vokaalit and
That to put it on the same plane as the Tanakh and reduce the latter to "the Old Testament" was part of the violence of Christianity The Tanakh being filled with truly ancient poetic language passed down through a complex oral tradition, guarded by an educated priestly class
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Vokaalit and
And was assembled over the course of centuries through an evolutionary process Meanwhile the much shorter "New Testament" is this collection of, basically, letters and essays by a small handful of guys
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Vokaalit and
That feel much more "modern" (if 2000 years ago can be said to be modern) Like we know a lot about the historical context in which they were written and in that context, the great writers of the Roman Empire wouldn't have given them the time of day
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Vokaalit and
They're written in "newspaper-level" vocabulary, not "college-level" vocabulary The argumentation really isn't nearly as involved as something you'd see from, say, Rabbi Hillel around the same time period They're not *books*, they're *blog posts*
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Vokaalit and
And I mean yeah I get that, despite my lack of knowledge of koine Greek -- the *kind of writing* the NT is shows all over it It's very very clunky and practical writing Paul's letters, the foundation of the faith, really read like someone blogging
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Vokaalit and
And most of the writers weren't even native speakers of Greek. It was the common language of communication and trade. A lot of it is horribly written. Everyone in my Greek classes want to translate Revelations, but the prof said the Greek was so bad as to be useless for learning.
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Replying to @CTLafollette @arthur_affect and
My favourite thing about Revelation is the star named Wormwood that makes the waters bitter Because there are two primary species of wormwood, and for one of them, the Ukrainian word is "chernobyl"
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Replying to @epistemophagy @CTLafollette and
If I had been around in 1986 I would absolutely have immediately become a false prophet of nuclear apocalypse. That's just too fucking good to pass up
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Replying to @epistemophagy @CTLafollette and
There is nothing as inherently funny as seeing a big stack of remaindered copies of "88 Reasons the World Will End in 1988" in a Christian bookstore
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In the year like 1992
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Replying to @arthur_affect @CTLafollette and
I wish I could have been around to see this, but UNFORTUNATELY I was born in nineteen ninety fucking FOUR, after all the fucking hilarious bait shit happened
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