Amongst my collection of books read and yet to be read are some number by Professor Dr. Bart D. Ehrman, who currently chairs the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a recognised authority on the early Church.
Too bad his books are not required reading for the faithful: they just might learn something about the book they revere so much.
Here is my take on his text: "Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew." He delves into most of the major texts that circulated during the first century of the current era, and the various sects of Christian belief that these both engendered and supported. There are 'forged' gospels by Simon Peter, Jesus' closest disciple, and Judas Thomas, Jesus' alleged twin brother, the texts recently found at Nag Hammadi, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the epistles attributed to Paul but not written by him (some found in the New Testament), and numerous others. The sects that battled for supremacy included the Jewish-Christian Ebionites, the anti-Jewish Marcionites, and various 'Gnostic' sects, amongst others.
All of these groups had an unshakable faith in their version of the events in the life of Jesus; but all were at odds with one another. Could they all be right? Not hardly. Could they all be wrong? Quite possibly.
The battles Dr. Ehrman discusses show the ebb and flow of doctrine up through the fourth century C.E. until the twenty-seven books of the New Testament were codified. The story that these books - out of the hundreds that circulated up through that time frame - tell us today is a carefully formulated doctrine meant to shut out all other faiths, creeds and sects who had called themselves Christian, in order to capitalize on the symbiotic relationship with the Roman emperor and government.
The story of these battles, the lies told about and aspersions cast upon the various competing sects, makes one distrust all writings we have today, turn one's back on all forms for Christian faith as we might know it today, and disbelieve all the stories told from Sunday School to Wednesday evening Bible study.
For they are concocted, contrived and compiled from erroneous forgeries from nearly day one of the Christian era.
Were believers to read how their Bible came to be codified, how their creeds came to be formulated, how their most sacred stories came to be manipulated - they would sure shun Christianity as we who have studied these histories have done.
The religion is a sham, a contrivance, less than a shadow of what we can estimate the original intents and meanings to be. And they are provided in order to control the illiterate masses - just like those who first heard the word and believed: the most illiterate, the most gullible, the least critical of all who lived in those times and in the places.
For a believer to say, today, that he knows the word of God as written in His Book, the Bible, must make scholars of religion and the Bible laugh; the book they cherish today is a fraud. Pure and simple.
g
No comments:
Post a Comment