Did you ever read the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in its original Aramaic?
If you did you know that God destroyed the cities because of how they treated strangers and the poor. But for some reason over the years and through the retelling the reasons for God destroying the cities were changed from xenophobia and greed to sex and the part about Lot’s wife was added to demean women.
One can only wonder if the GOP would be so into religion if the story and lessons of Sodom and Gomorrah were about the evils of greed.
I assume that is in reference to Thomas Jefferson, and especially James Madison, wanting a hermetic separation between church and state.
But even more interesting was their categorizing Christians in to two groups. Group one included both of them, Jefferson and Madison, who they referred to as “real Christians”, people who followed the morality of Christ and did not give a damn about the divinity of Christ.
The second group, who they called fake Christians, were the opposite in that they only professed caring about the divinity of Christ.
I wonder which group they would say the GOP belongs to?
I was raised on the KJV: and early started comparing it to the Revised Standard or the New International version: that fix many of the KJV’s mistranslations, or archaic language.
I didn’t start seeing the Bible as text, and not some kind of weird scripture poetry until I encountered the scholarly Reader’s Edition of the Jerusalem Bible (itself a translation of the Vulgate Bible). It broke it into chapters, as paragraph, and the verses were noted with superscript numbers. It also gave heading where the text broke from a narrative to interpolations.
Suddenly the redacted nature of the text became clear.
And folks don’t seem to know that the chapters and verses are relatively recent:
People have been dividing the Bible into manageable sections for millennia. For example, in the fifth century, the theologian and biblical translator Jerome divided the Bible into shorter passages called pericopes, a predecessor to chapters.
The chapter divisions we use today are usually credited to Stephen Langton, who was the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1207-1228. His chapter divisions were used in the Wycliffe English Bible of 1382 and have been used in nearly all versions since.
Verse divisions, or predecessors thereof, go back the longest for the Old Testament, thanks to Jewish scholars. The Ben Asher family divided the Old Testament into verses around AD 900, though other divisions came after that.
Verse divisions for the New Testament took a bit longer. The verse divisions we use today originated with Robert Estienne (or Stephanus), who included them in the printing of his Greek New Testament in 1551.
The first full Bible to be published with verse and chapter divisions was Estienne’s edition of the Latin Vulgate in 1555. He seems to have used the Old Testament verse divisions created by a Jewish rabbi named Nathan in 1448.
The first English version to have full chapter and verse divisions for the entire Bible was the Geneva Bible of 1560. These divisions have been used in almost all versions since.
Nothing added to my soft atheism/agnosticism (besides the behavior of alleged Bible Believers) like sustained a serious Bible study over many years.
They conveniently ignore Matthew 6:5 by parading their so-called piety:
“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.
I’ve said that knowing these words are attributed to the itinerant First Cent. Reform Rabbi (with Hellenizing and syncretic tendencies) Yeshua bin Yusef, what he would make of praying over the modern Gladiatorial contests, cheered by scantily clad “virgins”, and played with a pigskin(!), is something to consider.
Folks also don’t seem to know how much of the Bible was lifted from prior sources, like the Noah flood story appropriated (probably) from the Epic of Gilgamesh. And that myth was a re-worked version of an earlier Atrahasis flood myth.
It goes on and on. Myths built on other myths for as far back as humans have had language to make up stories to tell each other. The modern Bible sits on top of a pile of prior sources that the God-bothering literalists would prefer not to know about.
Clearly, if it had been given to the people from on high by Yahweh, capturing the king would not have been sufficient to win. Only total eradication of the inhabitants of Canaan opponent would have sufficed.
Not directly related to the Bible, but there’s a video game called The Lost City which plays on this. You find yourself transported through time to a “lost” Roman city ruled over by an unknown god in a temple on high. It’s a mystery adventure game where you are trying to find a way to avert an impending catastrophe. One potential strategy is to find a way to confront the god, but to open the temple, you have to find four plaques to place on a defaced obelisk in front of it.
Each plaque turns out to be from a different era, one from the Romans, one from the Greeks, one from the Egyptians and finally one from the Sumerians. As you hunt for the plaques, you find the Romans built on top of a Greek city, who built on an Egyptian one, who in turn built on a Sumerian one. So you can clearly see the progression of the customs and beliefs of each civilization, built from the one that came before.
They’re the same ones who take another fortune cookie when the fortune in the first one doesn’t match their expectations. Some of you may have noticed that many faux-Christians also have a weight problem.
I was raised in an atheist household in the 60s and 70s, so I naturally gravitated towards the study of religion. I took courses in the Western religions and wrote exhaustive papers on the Psalms, but ultimately got an engineering degree due to laziness.
Like most people here, actually reading the entire KJV was quite enough to dispel any notions that this document should be used as a guide for anything like truth or life. It’s a fascinating read primarily because it has had such an effect on history, not because of the content itself.
There is a book I am reading, “MIRRORS”, (Stories of almost everyone) that covers a lot of my beliefs and religion.
“Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship the same divinity, the god of the Bible who answers to three names, Yahweh, God, and Allah, depending on who happens to be calling. Jews, Christians, and Muslims kill one another on His orders, they say.”
My belief is most religions, if not all, are for control and money.
I’ve been reading a bit of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason and he had exactly the same complaints. Further, some of the “authors” also discuss many things which had occurred years before their births.
I just finished “Index, a History of the” and that was one of the points the author made. After all, until the last few centuries, the common form of the book was a scroll, not a codex, so it wasn’t easy to refer back and forth to particular verses or chapters.
Also, I can recall from my bar mitzvah just how different the Torah looked in real life vs. the book I practiced my portion with. The yad is a huge help!
