If God, Jesus, the devil, angels, and demons were all real, we still couldn’t rely on the Christian Bible as gospal (pun intended) — it was written by humans, specifically men, who could have misunderstood or invented things. Think of it like the Snyderverse in Man of Steel: Superman is portrayed as a brooding, violent character — but that’s not his true nature. In Batman v Superman, Batman is straight-up killing people — also not his normal characterization.
So even if much of the Bible reflects real events or real beings, parts of it could still be distorted, exaggerated, or entirely made up by the people who wrote it down.
That makes a lot of sense; I’m curious now what are some of the big differences between the Orthodox and Catholic versions of the Bible. I agree that the Bible can be viewed as a living document. Personally I believe more books could have been added on over the past 2,000 years.
That makes sense as well. Take the King James Version for example which removed references of criticism about the monarchy and papal authority. Although surprisingly was still centered on presenting the Bible without a religious or political lean one way or another.
If you’re interested, there is actually a sequal to the bible called the quran. I haven’t examined it enough to give some examples unfortunately, but I know they share some same characters and stories. What I can’t stand about the bible is Paul’s writings and I wish they would be under more scrutiny.
The book of enoch is also worth a read. Imo its the most interesting part of christian mythos.
Thanks for the tip!
I think it could be worth doing a class on the text of the Quran at some point. I’m aware of some small things such as a deeper focus on the rituals of prayer and worship, but I’m not aware of the specifics of the text.
They really should be, those writings attributed to Paul really go off base from what Jesus was teaching.
Surah 3 (chapter of quran) discusses the birth if Jesus and the the prophets before, who were given Torah and the other revelations. As I’ve understood they are considered true and from the same divine source, however have been muddied over time and hence the last and complete revelation is needed and given via the prophet Mohammed.
Then after his death, people were divided between whether to follow his divine bloodline (Shia) or his way of life (Sunnah) and they tried to capture all information about his life and teachings which were not in Quran (Hadith). The 5 daily prayers for example are not explicitly mentioned in the quran.